/lit/ - Literature

>>21247212
Well, see, that's the problem.
A Chinese dude walking around San Francisco isn't exciting.
That's why it isn't a story.
A story is goal, conflict, disaster.
You wrote goal, no conflict, no disaster.
That's not a story, that's a happening, or an incident.
And incidents are boring.
You needed to come up with a story.

At one point you cited Steinbeck as an influence.
Did you happen to notice that "Grapes Of Wrath" was full of conflict and disaster?
Right off the bat, a murderer gets paroled, he finds his family's farm abandoned, he finds them risking everything to go to California, he violates his parole to join them, the grandparents die on the way, etc.
Whereas your book's opening is repeated instances of "Oh, you're an unskilled, uneducated Chinese immigrant? How do you do, good sir?"
Why didn't you go for more of a story instead? Consider the following.
As soon as he gets off the boat, he finds no one gives a crap.
If he meets other Chinese immigrants, they lull him into a false sense of security, then beat him up and rob him blind.
He finds he has no option but to sleep in an unsafe, dingy alleyway, where he is harassed further. (Think of David's travails in "Kidnapped" by Robert Louis Stevenson.)
Perhaps he gets arrested for vagrancy, thrown into prison, and ends up in a hard-labor camp.
Not only is that much more of a story, but it gives your reader a reason to care about your character, and possibly even root for him.
I could go on.
In closing, I want to point out that I'm not trying to be mean here; this is merely meant to be a pointed critique, and any misemotion you pick up from it is my frustration that you don't seem to know basic story structure.