Modern Chinatown is a vibrant and lively community, filled with bright colors and Chinese characters adorning buildings as far as the eye can see. Elderly Chinese wander the narrow, scruffy streets while children frolic from shop to shop with wide smiles, browsing toy shops as shop owners look on. Mothers run from shop to shop looking for the most tender meats to buy for dinner that evening or for lunch the following day. Tourists from the nearby downtown wander into the heart of Chinatown with large, expensive cameras, pose for photos with the lion head statues and continue on, purchasing cheap Chinatown products along the way. Everywhere there are signs of the sweat, labor and collective efforts made by Chinese immigrants over decades to create a safe haven for Asian acceptance and mutual cooperation. Bone by Fae Myenne Ng is an account of a Chinese immigrant family's struggle with the Asian-American experience in San Francisco's Chinatown from the 1960s to the 1990s. Bone depicts the struggle of Chinatown families to find acceptance within their community and within the family itself, depicting tensions resulting from both difficult economic circumstances and internal family conflict. Unlike Euro-American immigrants, Chinese immigrants were forced to live in dense concentrations of their own nationalities, isolating them from American social culture. The neighborhoods outside Chinatown were inhospitable, so their only solace could be found in Chinatown. First-generation Chinese in Chinatown worked among themselves and maintained strongly traditional attitudes and practices, learning little English because the dialects of their home country, Cantonese or Mandarin, were more than sufficient over the course... middle of paper ...which influenced his life in Chinatown. Bone portrays an aspect of Chinatown that no book or history lesson can accomplish. By allowing readers to read and live through the characters, readers viscerally grasp the tension and frustration of the characters as each of them strives to find acceptance among themselves and family members and to form an identity as Chinese or American. Through harsh economic circumstances that require a father to work overseas and a mother to work in sweatshops to provide for their children's education, the Leong family's experiences demonstrate the arduous life of immigrants. Additionally, the story of Ona and her subsequent suicide plays a key element in the Leong family story, allowing us to understand the social impact of her life as an Asian American and the ultimate complexities of life in Chinatown..