New York City’s Chinatown Looks Ahead to the Future

My mother cried when I got a job in Chinatown. “Twenty years we worked there so you wouldn't have to,” she said, sobbing. She shopped there, she worshipped there, she ate there, but for her, the point was to get out of there: To be somewhere else meant you'd made it. Eventually she calmed down enough to say, “Fine. But if you hear gunshots, don't be a hero.”

It was 1999, and Chinatown had become plenty safe. It had always been always delicious. And even though I never told her this, it had always felt like home. Not in a comforting way, in a place-of-loving-obligation way. You see, I'm the son of immigrants from Hong Kong, and I spent my entire youth blowing off my parents' every attempt to assimilate me into their culture. Now I can never feel Chinese enough.

For years I would take visitors to Chinatown and play tour guide with expert, practiced lines. I'd tell them that Mott Street General Store opened in the 1800s to sell groceries to Chinese men forced to cook for themselves because America forbade them to bring their wives. I'd take them to Fong Inn Too, a fresh tofu shop, where, standing on the always-wet floors and eating over a garbage can, we'd devour warm bowls of silky soy pudding, barely set, quivering on our spoons under a veil of brown sugar syrup. I'd see them stop and stare when they turned the corner of Doyers Street to glimpse the picture-perfect, movie-set Chinatown view, and I'd know it was the right moment to drop the bit about how this used to be called the Bloody Angle because of all the triad killings on This. Very. Spot. (No, Mom, really, that hasn't happened in decades.) If I couldn't grow up in Hong Kong like my mother did, then at least I could feel like I had a place in Chinatown.

Chinatown has always occupied an uneasy spot in the life of New York City. Starting in the 1870s, Chinese men who'd been harassed out of California by that era's anti-Chinese movement started settling into a corner of the infamous Five Points slum and turned to work that wouldn't threaten white men, like cooking and laundry. Soon after, the restaurants they opened began attracting bohemians; today, of course, every Chinatown in America is basically a playground for foodies. But because it is situated next door to SoHo and Nolita, the inexorable creep of gentrification makes New York's Chinatown a precarious home to dumplings that go five for a dollar. And the neighborhood faces other crises, most recently the anti-Asian attacks brought on by the pandemic. Even so, Chinatown today, just as it was a century and a half ago when it got its start as a refuge from racism, is no less driven by its will to live.

A few months ago, I turned that corner on Doyers Street and got a cup of steaming ginger-lemon tea at Mee Sum Cafe with Grace Young, an unassuming titan of Chinese food writing. “Hop Shing, 47 years old, gone,” Grace said, beginning to list the old-line businesses that didn't make it through the pandemic, each utterance a paying of respects. “69 Bayard Restaurant, 61 years. Hoy Wong, 42 years. Lung Moon Bakery, over 50 years.” We sat in the middle of a street empty but for a row of dining tables set with tablecloths, waiting for soup-dumpling eaters to emerge. “I don't want a Chinatown that's all trendy stuff, like bouncy cheesecakes and mochi doughnuts,” she said. “If you lose the classics, they will go away forever.” (I agree, but for the record, bouncy cheesecake and mochi doughnuts are phenomenal.)

That afternoon, I walked around the neighborhood for hours, my first visit after a COVID-19 year away. I saw the rolled-down security shutters that break Grace's heart: one for every three or four doors, it seemed. But this, also, has been a fact of life in this neighborhood, even before the pandemic and the hate crimes bared their teeth. That tofu shop I brought chefs to? Opened in 1933, it closed four years ago. The Mott Street General Store shut its doors in 2003. I don't remember when the roast duck at Big Wong started to taste different to me, but that flavor, too, is gone. And I remembered September 11, standing on these blocks, looking up in the sky and seeing an attack on America whose aftermath shut down lower Manhattan for months and bled so many of Chinatown's businesses dry. I remember getting back here for the first time after the smell of smoke started to finally go away and seeing American flags in the windows of the businesses that made it.

As I ambled these once-again quiet streets, my memory filled in the sights I used to see: vendors grilling cumin-dusted kebabs like they do in western China; a woman with skin like leather selling 100 spears of sugarcane. I didn't have to rely on memory, though, to see the familiar lady who could have been my auntie coming down the block in a red tracksuit, carrying a bag of leafy greens the size of her torso.

And then, in the shadow of the roaring overpass of the Manhattan Bridge, I spotted a curious sign: “Fong On, Family Tofu Shop, Established 1933.” Could it be? The floors and walls were immaculate white subway tile, the ceiling festooned with highly Instagrammable red lanterns. I ordered a bowl of the tofu pudding and asked for a spoon; there is nothing quite like eating it fresh and warm—tasting the bean as it slides down the back of your tongue. As I left, a group of 20-somethings came in and said, I swear, “Look at this aesthetic,” the word sounding like an award.

Paul Eng, the owner, laughed when I told him that. “When I was living in Russia, people told me that if my photography didn't work out, I should just come home to the family business and sell tofu to hipsters.” When Paul was a child, his father would tell him he would carry the shop on one day, so he did what any American kid raised on rock and roll would do—he got as far away as he could. He studied architecture, played in bands, became an artist, and moved to Moscow. Only after his father passed and the shop closed did he think about trying to run it, on his terms: making it younger, cooler, carrying on the recipes but presenting them to people who didn't grow up with them. “I'm grateful for those customers because that says there's a future,” he said.

A future. Maybe this is it? The answer to Grace Young's lament about losing the classics. What about all the classics that are being reborn? I started to ask around: Where else is there a new generation of old-school Chinatown businesses?

At 125 years old or so, the china shop Wing On Wo & Co. has never been younger, thanks to its 30-year-old fifth-generation owner, Mei Lum, who makes memes of her grandmother and educates customers on the craftwork of Chinese porcelain.

In the '80s, the legendary chef Shorty Tang was credited with introducing New York to cold sesame noodles, the dish that launched a thousand takeout ships. His son, chef Chen Lien Tang, and grandson, James Tierney Tang, resurrected the long-gone Hwa Yuan in 2017. It's probably the finest fine-dining restaurant in Chinatown. Even while customers ate on the street in an ersatz sidewalk dining room, a server presented the cold sesame noodles—the sauce more delicate than you'd expect, splitting the difference between rich and tart—by expertly coiling them out of a tureen and placing them, like a bird's nest, on my plate. The gesture was dignified, a symbol of pride.

And when strolling the aisles of Po Wing Hong, a 41-year-old grocery store, I felt a peculiar pang, a visitation from the ghost of bean curds past. There, past the jars of $1,400-per-pound dried abalone, the wall of ginseng, and the trillion flavors of instant ramen, I stared at jars of chili-fermented bean curd. It's something my mother always kept in our fridge, a condiment that my cousin once called Chinese cheese. Growing up I used to scoff at the glorious, yellow slices of salt-flavored soy cream. But there, in the store, I could taste in my mind their pungent, saline, familiar funk.

Sophia Ng Tsao grew up in this store, the little kid behind the counter who would get your cigarettes for you. She never thought she'd be at the helm alongside her parents one day. “Even though I was working at the shop, I didn't feel a connection to the products,” she told me. But after she went to business school, the customers of her parents' generation finally got to her. “They kept saying, ‘Please take the store over, or I won't have anywhere to buy my ginseng!’ ”

So she stayed, and learned about the products, and is now finding customers her age coming in to ask about them. “I think the younger generation is going through a major identity crisis, and missing out on Chinatown hits so close to home,” she said. “And they're compelled to do something about it.”

The thought made me smile, as did the fact that I had time for one last bite before going home. When I was a kid spending summers in Hong Kong, wonton mein—a bowl of wontons, noodles, and soup—was my ur-snack. I learned how to use the subway there so I could get to my favorite wonton noodle stall. For years, my brother had told me that the Chinatown restaurant Noodle Village has a good one. It's not self-referential enough to be either new school or old school. But you can taste what they care about.

I took my bowl across the street to an empty set of dining tents. You have to eat it right away, while the noodles still snap back, so springy they almost crunch. While the broth is still scalding hot, the steam carrying the aroma of the flecks of garlic chive on its surface. The smooth wontons earned their translation of “swallowed clouds,” with skins so smooth and soft, enveloping a filling that tasted of pork fat, sesame oil, and toasted shrimp roe.

I used to spend the longest time looking for wonton mein that would remind me of my time spent in Hong Kong. But eating this, in the strange, hopeful, liminal moment of a neighborhood reawakening after a pandemic, I found a bowl that will always remind me of Chinatown.

20 years later

Artist Andrew Kuo on Chinatown since 9/11

“I grew up in Westchester County, but my parents had ties to the Taiwanese community, so we spent a lot of time below Canal Street. I was crashing in a studio on Baxter on 9/11. The Chinese community is private, but 9/11 exposed them because Chinatown is an artery for everything else. The community delivered, and then, when enough time passed, the city forgot about it. Not unlike the beginning of COVID-19, the shops weren’t doing any business, they were just helping people—but rents were due. Many were doomed immediately, but they held on for a few months. When COVID hit, it felt like Chinatown had a better idea what to do because of 9/11 and SARS. Still, the neighborhood is so reliant on people coming down and having something nice to eat, to have that lifeline cut off was terrifying. But the community rallied. It’s standing. In quarantine the vibe was bleak; now, though, people are eating food and waiting for tables. I no longer have any connection to Westchester, so if anything happens to me, scatter my ashes on Mott Street.” 

Andrew Kuo is represented by Broadway Gallery. The Joy of Basketball, his new book with Ben Detrick, is out October 19. 

This article appeared in the September/October 2021 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.