From 9/11 to the Pandemic — The Ghosts in Chinatown Won’t Leave
Auntie Moy still remembers that it was nine o’clock when she was asked to leave the subway.
As a garment worker, Moy’s destination was always the factory in Chinatown. After the Chinese Exclusion Act had been abolished in 1965, new immigrants flocked to Chinatown and entered garment, restaurant and retail industries. The 1990s saw the peak of Chinatown’s dynamism, as more than a total of 3,855 businesses then were Chinese-owned and -operated in Chinatown, and the permanent resident population also reached 80,000.
The new millennium had only just begun. With the largest economic growth since 1990, everything seemed to be going in a good direction.
The subway, however, never went forward as people expected. To be precise, all plans were changed when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m., even before Moy’s train came to a halt.
That day was September 11, 2001. The following day, Lower Manhattan, including Chinatown, had become the complete opposite of its normal chaotic pace. It was gloomy and quiet. Over the next three months, Chinatown, which is located only a few blocks away from the scene, became a ghost town.
In 2020, twenty years after the terrorist attack, the scene is all too familiar. From March to June, Chinatown was again the “ghost town” that survivors of 9/11 lived in 20 years ago.
The causes are different, but the result is the same — lockdowns with a sense of quietness that could hardly be described as calm.
And the situation today is worse. Alongside the COVID-19 outbreak, Chinatown also now deals with biases and hate crimes against Asians. For local residents, this has become physically and emotionally exhausting.
This time, the ghost won’t leave easily — at least not as quickly as it did after 9/11.
The Fall
“A loud ‘boom’ it was,” after twenty years, Justin Yu still hears the echo of that crash. As the president of the Chinese Community Center, he was busy helping with the New York mayoral primary at Confucius Plaza that day.
“At first I thought it was just the paddles of the helicopter rubbing against the building,” Yu said, “No one thought of a terrorist attack. How could it be?”
Seventeen minutes later, at 9:03 a.m., people heard another “boom.” Because the situation was unclear, officials suspended the election and evacuated the plaza. Following the flow of people, Yu was asked to go to Chatham Square, where the view of the Twin Towers was clear.
“I began to see people there running into Chinatown, and they were covered in dust and ashes,” said Yu. On that particular day, the word “fortune” came into the mind of those selling things in the somewhat enclosed district in Lower Manhattan, as office ladies wearing high heels bought plastic thongs from local vendors.
The fortune didn’t last long, though. After an hour of fire and smoke that were visible even from space, the World Trade Center Towers collapsed. “The tower was like a fountain. When the electricity is gone, the flow of water drops to the ground. That was exactly how the building collapsed — not to the left or to the right, just vertically.” said Yu. Then he realized that something big had happened.
Chinatown was too close to the site to avoid being permanently affected. After the 9/11 attacks, businesses there were shut down due to the imposition of a frozen zone that covered all areas south of Canal Street, where Chinatown is mainly located. In the first two weeks after 9/11, public access to the entire area was restricted, subway and bus services were stopped, and major entryways in and out of Chinatown were closed.
“The streets were suddenly empty,” said the craft vendor Yueheng Zhang, who began his business on Canal Street more than 20 years ago. “The community was almost dead,” he added.
Garment workers like Moy couldn’t go back to work for the next two weeks due to the traffic control, and their clothing orders were transferred to other factories, even other countries.
Without orders, some garment factories died. A 2002 Asian American Federation report showed that a total of 40 garment factories shut down during the first three months after September 11th. In the year following, Chinatown’s garment industry lost nearly $500 million.
Tourists couldn’t come to Chinatown either. AAF’s report suggested that revenue that restaurants and jewelry stores generated from tourists was on average 40% lower by the next summer as compared with summer 2001.
Still, when they compare it to 2020’s pandemic lockdown, many locals noted in chorus: the first lockdown didn’t last long. “The community itself was much more made of Chinese Americans, and they were ready to fight together,” said May Chen, then the Manager of International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.
Indeed — Chinese residents established the Chinatown Partnership, a local development corporation, to help revitalize the community. They also invited then the New York Governor George Pataki and the U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao to pay a visit to Chinatown in November 2001 to make sure Chinatown was no longer a ghost town.
Manufacturers, however, didn’t survive even the short shutdown. Before 9/11, Chen’s union used to have thousands of workers, and now they disbanded the union. “The garment factories disappeared, the printing factories also,” said Yu. “It is fair to say that 9/11 is a landmark in Chinatown’s history. The community changed from an industrial zone to a mostly tourist area.”
“It Is Not Comparable”
Until the pandemic hit the city, both Chinatown and its residents had been working hard to heal and find hope over the past 20 years. Yu remembered well that hustle and bustle on Mott Street during midsummer nights in the year of 2019.
In the post-pandemic era, however, one of the top rated Chinese restaurants in Yelp, Andy Yang’s Taiwan Pork Chop House, is quiet again as it weathers the pandemic.
At the time of 9/11, his business was just taking off. With a knack for cooking, the young man had just come to the U.S. and was ambitious to succeed.
Twenty years later, however, the pandemic made him feel helpless and hopeless.
“That is not comparable,” laughed Yang grudgingly. “Most of the 9/11’s influence was on New York, or America, but the pandemic was another thing. It went international.”
Even before the NYC shutdown, the number of visitors in Yang’s diner had already dropped. Since coronavirus was first discovered in Wuhan, China, people quickly associated the virus with Chinatown, regardless of the fact that most residents in Chinatown had lived in America for many years.
“I started to feel strange,” said Yang. “We used to close at 9 p.m., but because no one was there, I closed at 6 p.m.”
Another reason for closing so early was that he was afraid of being attacked. This time, in addition to the economic impact, the community had to face serious mental distress, discrimination and hate crimes against Asians.
Chinatown was a ghost town again — not because the city required it; but because the community volunteered to shut down their businesses.
“By this time, the residents of this community are pretty elderly and really afraid to get sick,” said Chen. A geographic profile from AAF’s Census Information Center confirmed that — the median age for Asians in Chinatown rose from 40.0 years old in 2010 to 49.8 years old in 2019.
President Trump didn’t help either. During the pandemic, TV cameras captured how he crossed out the word “corona virus” and replaced it with “China virus” for a speech. The president had also been fanning the flames on social media platforms, indicating China should be blamed.
A study conducted by California State University San Bernardino said that compared to 2019, anti-Asian hate crimes surged 145% in 2020, while overall hate crime dropped 6% in 2020.
Almost a year after the reopening, Chinatown was still very desolate; plenty of small businesses didn’t survive. From Canal Street to Mott Street, many stores in Chinatown closed their doors. There were fewer tourists willing to come back. In its research Small Business, Big Loss, AAF pointed out that over half the business-owners in Chinatown have reported losses of 75 percent or more in revenue in 2020.
“The flow of people in Chinatown now is at most half of the level before 9/11,” said Yang. He said he misses Chinatown before the pandemic, when it was full of tourists. Perhaps most missed is the Chinatown of 20 years ago, when 9/11 hadn’t happened yet, when the community was not neat, but thriving, and Wall Street types would fill the tables on weekdays, when stores were hard to rent, and when all businesses were profitable.
One year after the pandemic, its ghosts are still everywhere in Chinatown. “We just don’t have golden times anymore,” sighed Yu, the community center’s president.
A Controversial Transition
Yet, Chinatown still strives despite the “ghosts.” Though most factories closed after 9/11, some garment factories did upgrades and became sample makers.
Out of the garment industry, the whole community is going through a transition that started 20 years ago. Factories closed, and some tenants refurbished their tenements and leased out to people who could pay higher rents. New immigrants started moving to Queens and Brooklyn, establishing new neighborhoods in Flushing and Sunset Park. Of course, such diaspora also makes it difficult for people to unite against challenges when a crisis arises — the pandemic, for example.
“We are more spread out now,” said Yang. “Of course, people want to live well and affordably at the same time, but in the past, the community ties were stronger.”
The lasting repercussions made things worse. After the famous Jing Fong restaurant closed its door in March this year, people started marching in the community against the gentrification of Chinatown.
“There is indeed too much fighting within the Chinese community,” Chen added. “I think it’s mainly because people are very frustrated after the pandemic. The community has changed so much in the past 20 years. I wish we could find a better way to reunite and find solidarity within our community.”
Twenty years later, the rebuilding will take a longer time than the previous one. “We have to grit our teeth,” said Yu, “A more difficult time is still waiting for us.”
