Yesterday’s Chinatown in Today’s New York
No one in Manhattan’s Chinatown restaurant Mee Sum Cafe can predict the exact arrival time of their owner, Donald Moy, on a particular day — not the employees, not the regular customers. This is an old trick that Moy has learned from his half a century of experience in the restaurant business. When asked how he starts his routine each day, he scribbles the numbers 9, 7, and 11 on a napkin in front of him, representing nine, seven and eleven o ’clock, gives me a sly grin, and says, “So they’ll never know when I’m coming.” For 54 years, Mee Sum Cafe has been a restaurant that thrives on many of these old and effective practices. While the fortunes of other restaurants have risen and fallen with Chinatown’s, or closed during the pandemic, Mee Sum has drawn a steady stream of customers with its nostalgic tastes, prices and service.
Mee Sum Cafe is located at 26 Pell Street in the center of Manhattan’s Chinatown area which dates back to the 1960s. It is not on crowded Mott Street, but on a relatively deserted and narrow side road. Walking along Pell, you find the restaurant standing out among a bunch of dusty restaurants — as the one in worst-repair. Customers who live nearby come in and out. Most of them are grey-haired.
Mee Sum’s menu consists of two rows of small wooden boards on the wall with the names and prices of dishes written in Chinese, with no English in sight. Most of them are Cha chaan teng (Hong Kong cafe-style) dishes, sold at surprisingly low prices for pricey Manhattan.
Shrimp Dim Sum (5 pcs) $3.75
Roast Pork Rice Rolls $2.75
Preserved Egg Porridge $4.25
Beef Stew on Rice $4.75
Elderly customers clog the narrow aisle in front of the counter, slowly pulling crumpled small bills out of their shopping carts. The waitress does not hurry them, but patiently asks: “Tea or water?” On a table against the wall are several handmade wooden animal toys. The innermost round table is covered with green leaves. A female employee is making sticky rice wraps.
Undoubtedly, low prices are a key factor in winning in this community full of residents who have lived their lives pinching pennies. When asked about the secret of the longevity of Mee Sum, Moy smiled his sly, good-natured smile again, and said, “We always wait until the other restaurants raise their prices first.”
In addition to the low prices, tipping is not mandatory at Mee Sum. It’s up to the customers. Most customers, who treat Mee Sum as their daily dining hall, are happy to save this expense. For those who want to tip, they’d better give the tip directly to the waitress. Mee Sum has an unannounced rule that only tips handed to employees go to them. If it’s left on the table, then it belongs to the restaurant.
Antoinette Chau, an old lady who’s always wearing the same faded clothes, lives alone in the same building as Mee Sum and comes to Mee Sum every other day, says some staff at Mee Sum have been “very rude” to her. Sometimes she would come to Mee Sum and sit for a whole afternoon, asking for a cup of free boiling water and not ordering anything, just to look at those familiar faces and have a little contact with society. Moy has known her for many years. He never drives her away.
Though the timing of Moy’s morning appearance is erratic, he is always in Mee Sum in the daytime. Most afternoons, he finds a desk in the restaurant, puts on his silver-framed glasses, and sits with the newspaper. Every day he receives a Sing Tao Daily and a World Journal, both of which are Chinese newspapers printed in Chinatown, for a total of $1.10. They are full of ads for local businesses as well as news from back home. Although Moy hasn’t been back to Hong Kong or the mainland since 1963, he keeps an eye on Hong Kong, China and Taiwan. After reading the newspaper, he passes the long afternoons by taking out a stack of white paper and copying the newspaper articles to practice his handwriting, both from top to bottom and in traditional Chinese.
For 54 years, Mee Sum’s landlord has been the same person. His relationship with the Moy family over the years makes him willing to charge Mee Sum extremely low rent. “I am very grateful to him,” Moy says, over and over again. “He never raised the rent.” The landlord is now in his 90s and soon his son will be Mee Sum’s landlord. Will the new generation of landlord keep the low rents? Moy doesn’t know.
Moy is happiest when talking about his children, a son and a daughter, both middle-aged. They are successful and happy. “They will not come back and inherit Mee Sum,” he tells me. But, like most Asian fathers, he has never talked about it with his children.
Obviously, this is not the first time Moy has been asked about the future of Mee Sum. But if his children don’t take over the restaurant, then who will?
Manhattan’s Chinatown functioned as a refuge for Chinese immigrants when it was born over a hundred years ago. Lured by the illusion of America’s golden hills, young men from coastal provinces in southern China voluntarily signed contracts to be shipped to the United States. These Chinese laborers who were willing to do long hours of hard work for little pay took jobs away from local Caucasian workers led to growing anti-China sentiment. In consequence, the “yellow peril” retreated from mainstream society and clustered together into urban enclaves represented by San Francisco’s Chinatown and New York City’s Chinatown.
First established on Mott Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, NYC’s Chinatown was a bachelor society mainly composed of men who came to perform hard labor in the hope of earning a quick buck and returning to China. It remained a ghetto until the U.S. government enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and lowered the barriers to non-European immigrants. Shortly after that, the number of Chinese immigrants surged. The newcomers assumed the hostility of society persisted and they had to stay at the lower end of the occupational ladder if they looked for jobs outside of their community. As a result, Manhattan’s Chinatown expanded at a startling speed.
The trend of expansion continued. The new immigrants arriving in Chinatown in this period were richer and better educated than their predecessors. Mainland Chinese people weary of continuous political movements, like the Land Reform Movement, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, emigrated to seek certainty for both property and future. Hong Kong’s best-educated people, who felt insecure before the imminent 1997 handover, also left the island in large numbers. Their arrival brought capital and rich human resources to this former slum. In addition to traditional Chinatown businesses such as restaurants and laundries, Chinatown developed job opportunities for all professions like lawyers and doctors. Residents were no longer sojourners. They came here with all their possessions and relatives, hoping to put down roots.
Manhattan’s Chinatown had its heyday in the 1990s. Chinese immigrants, who liked the sense of stability that real estate investment offered, flooded in from East Asia to buy properties in and around Chinatown. As a result, nearby Little Italy shrank, just as the Italians had taken over streets that were once homes to Jews. Chinatown expanded from the original ten-block area to an enclave containing the largest ethnic Chinese population outside Asia.
As sociologist Min Zhou recounts in Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave, the majority of the Chinese immigrants often started working immediately upon arrival because, culturally, they would feel ashamed not to work while accepting welfare and public assistance. They typically started from washing dishes at the restaurants and gradually gained experience and capital over the years, hoping to realize their dream of becoming self-employed entrepreneurs. These first-generation immigrants were so occupied with work that they hardly had any time or energy to learn new skills and English. Yet, they believed their children, second-generation immigrants who were U.S. born or grew up in the U.S., could make that progress. They invested in their children’s education at all costs to ensure that they excelled at school. The belief that sustained them in their hard work was to watch their children eventually surpass them, integrate into the larger economy, and bring the whole family up in the socioeconomic ladder. The younger generation has mostly managed to get out the way their parents wanted, ideally, by entering high-income professions like a doctor or a banker on Wall Street. As a result, Chinatown is aging. In the 2020s, it is still the foreign-born Chinese immigrants who arrived decades ago sustaining Chinatown. They are in their twilight years.
With money pouring into Chinatown from East Asia and the high demand for housing, the housing prices in Chinatown continued to rise in the last two decades of the 20th century. Rents in Manhattan’s Chinatown were once higher than Wall Street and the most desirable commercial locations in Manhattan’s Central Business District. New immigrants had to crowd into small rooms. The over exuberant market also left real estate agents and speculators looking to flip houses as quickly as possible, with little incentive to renovate or repair. As Min Zhou recounts, buildings in Chinatown were full of “leaky ceilings, peeling plaster.” Waking up at 2am to call someone to fix the heating was the norm. At the same time, most tenants had to suffer excessive rent increases. The only exception was those who lived in apartment units that were rent controlled where the landlords could not substantially raise the rent unless they drove the tenants out. Since then, Chinatown has been losing its appeal to new immigrants. Newcomers have been gradually drawn to satellite Chinatowns like Flushing in Queens and the Eighth Avenue area in Brooklyn by the spacious and cheap living conditions. In the last twenty years, Flushing overtook Manhattan’s Chinatown as the largest Chinatown in New York and its center of Chinese culture.
As time goes by, Manhattan’s Chinatown has gradually changed from a habitat for Chinese immigrants to a renowned tourist attraction. As of 2016, it covered a total of 0.768 square miles, an area nearly two-thirds the size of Central Park, with more than 300 restaurants catering to the appetite for Chinese food of both residents and tourists. Tourists from all over the world fill the streets of Chinatown. Those second-generation and third-generation Chinese immigrants who have settled down in the larger economy also occasionally return to visit their parents and grandparents. But the tribulations continue. The September 11, 2001 attacks adversely affected the businesses and tourism in Chinatown, especially after the NYPD closed two of the main roads linking Chinatown to the outside for the sake of security. The current COVID-19 pandemic has been an even greater ordeal. Even if, after several years, Chinatown does recover from the pandemic, the problem of the aging of Chinatown will not go away.
Moy has lived a life filled with migrations. In 1955, when he was 10, in order to escape the persecution of the Communist Party, Moy’s mother took him and his younger three siblings on a wooden boat down the Pearl River from Guangzhou, the largest city in southern China, to Hong Kong, a then-British colony that was outside the control of the Chinese Communist Party. Unlike the rest of the family, who had legal visas, Moy’s father had to pay HK$350 (slightly more than a clerk’s monthly salary in Hong Kong) to sneak from Macau on a fishing boat because of his stigmatized family background as a landlord. More than half a year later, shortly before the Mid-Autumn Festival, the family finally reunited in Hong Kong. Soon after, they learned that Moy’s paternal grandfather, who had stayed on the mainland, was executed for being a “class enemy.”
Hong Kong in the 1950s was far from the international metropolis it is today; the streets were full of refugees from the north who couldn’t even afford to sleep on double-deck beds. The family lived on the handouts of Moy’s maternal grandfather. They crammed into a 100-foot room in Mongkok, Kowloon, sharing a kitchen and a bathroom with three other families. “We had a hard time finding jobs,” Moy said. Poverty, narrowness and dampness defined Moy’s childhood memories.
The family’s next opportunity to emigrate came in 1962, when the U.S. initiated the Hong Kong Parole Program, under which approximately 15,000 Chinese refugees who had fled from communist China to Hong Kong were admitted to the U.S. between 1962 and 1965. The Moy family found a relative living in the United States, submitted proof of financial support, and first set foot in the city of New York in 1963. Donald Moy was 18 years old.
Upon arrival in Manhattan’s Chinatown, the family, like other new Chinese immigrants, were badly in need of a living. They had no desire to explore the world-famous megacity, but to set to work at once. Thankfully, in a vigorously growing Chinatown, jobs were everywhere. The four family members who reached the minimum age to work immediately found jobs in Chinatown’s three pillar industries at the time. Over the next four years, Donald Moy’s mother and a sister worked in a garment factory. As the eldest of four children, Donald Moy became a laundryman and washed clothes by hand day by day. His father learned to be a chef in a Chinese restaurant. Every week all the family members gave their cash wages to Donald’s mother, who controlled the family finances. After deducting enough daily expenses to support six people, Donald’s mother would save the rest of the money for a future family business. In just four years, the hard work paid off. Mee Sum Cafe welcomed its first customer on July the eleventh, 1967, a Tuesday.
Moy’s father’s experience of working in a restaurant gave the family everything they needed to know to run a restaurant in Chinatown. Mee Sum’s tradition of opening at half past five in the morning started from the very beginning to cater to the gamblers who had just spent the night at the gambling house, mostly bachelors, and the laborers, like greengrocers and freight drivers, who started work early. The birth of Mee Sum coincided with the rapid growth of Chinatown. There was an influx of young faces from all the Chinese-speaking areas in East Asia, all trying to make a living in this booming community. Relying on the low-price menu (coffee $0.10, steamed bun $0.50, pork dim sum $0.40) designed for the busy and poor immigrants, the family made their $20,000 investment back within six months.
As the eldest of four children, Moy never had a chance to receive a proper education after arriving in the United States. The only exception was a few poor English classes he took as an adult. “The teacher just read the newspaper to us in class,” Moy said. He was the only child in his family who didn’t go to college. When his three younger siblings left for college and later became pharmacist, accountant and civil servant, Moy spent his days at the family restaurant as his father’s sidekick.
Not long after Mee Sum opened, Moy’s life in Chinatown turned a new page when he got married and welcomed a son and a daughter, Marvin and his younger sister, in 1970 and 1974. (Moy’s daughter doesn’t want her name to be used in the article.)
Chinatown in the 70s was far more dangerous than it is today. Gangs made of teenagers who dropped out of school early ran riot on the streets and made a living selling drugs. Mee Sum was burglarized several times until a group of Italians, who asked Mee Sum for five dollars a week for protection, began to patrol the streets after it grew dark. “We were happy to give them money,” Moy said. “The police were unreliable in those days.” The payments continued until the New York Mafia families were devastated by federal prosecutions under future mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Little Marvin and his sister attended an elementary school which was “almost across the street from the restaurant,” according to the sister. But they were never allowed to go home by themselves, even if it was only ten minutes away. However, the hustle and bustle of the restaurant, sometimes as much as 60 hours a week, kept the adults in the Moy family busy. Young Marvin and his sister had to hang around at Mee Sum Cafe after school until one of the adults was free to walk them home. Like many Chinatown kids whose parents ran their own businesses, the two children used to stay at their “daycare” for two to five hours every day. During these endless afternoons, they did homework and sat spinning in chairs at the bar as fast as they could.
In early 1980, Moy and his wife divorced, an event that changed the family forever. Today, when asked about the most difficult time in his life, Moy immediately says: “The divorce.” The previously lean Moy first developed a round beer belly during that time, which lingers a little till this day. The topic of the divorce seemed to be the only thing that could shake the disposition of this calm, gentle old man. “She said she had no feeling for me,” he tells me. Moy, who described his early life and struggles with easy grace, weeps as he recalled the end of his first marriage.
Marvin Moy describes his parents’ divorce as a childhood trauma to which he responded by acting out in school and refusing to do his homework. “I just wasn’t interested in things,” he tells me. Marvin continued to be a problem child until one day he tried washing dishes at Mee Sum. He realized how hard the work was and wanted to escape from it, which prompted him to study hard. He ended up doing well at school. Marvin went to Medical School at the State University of New York.
In contrast to his father, Marvin identifies himself as a “100 percent American.” He still keeps in touch with many of the Chinatown friends he grew up with and drops by Chinatown sometimes to say hi to his father. But for the rest of his time, he is a physiatrist with four clinics, in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Long Island, and 20 staff.
For Marvin, Chinatown is more like a nostalgic place that he wants to keep in his memory. The barstools in Mee Sum are still the same as they were in 1967. If one day Mee Sum is really gone, Marvin hopes that he can take the stool chairs with him. He wants to keep them in his kitchen, for his kids, or whoever, to sit down and eat breakfasts and dinners.
Unlike Marvin, Moy’s daughter’s life has taken her even further from Mee Sum, all the way to California. Before the pandemic, Moy’s daughter’s work as an advertising producer brought her back to Chinatown about twice a year. Sometimes, she even came with her team to shoot commercials at her family’s old-school restaurant. In the 1990s, Moy was in his 50s, but Mee Sum was still her grandpa’s kingdom. New York City banned smoking in most restaurants in 1995, but Moy’s daughter would come home and find her grandpa and his pals smoking in the restaurant, just below the no-smoking sign her father had posted. Moy describes his relationship with his father as a very traditional one in which “Dad was right, whatever he said was right.”
Since the outbreak, Moy’s daughter hasn’t been able to come back to Chinatown. Marvin believes his parents’ divorce has been a constant influence on his sister’s life. “My sister was the good one, but she had different mechanisms of dealing with this trauma. She just ran away.” But, though the divorce may have changed their lives forever, Moy seemed visibly flustered when confronted with his son’s words. “They said it didn’t matter,” Moy said. But, to this day, the three have never sat down and talked about it.
Moy finally took over Mee Sum from his father in 2005. According to Marvin, “When they’re 60 years old, most people think about retirement. But for my dad, it was just the beginning.” Moy had remarried, to a woman he met at the restaurant. Moy is grateful to his current wife, “She’s a very nice lady, I’m very lucky to meet her.” Just like his mother did sixty years ago, Moy’s wife now manages the restaurant and the small family’s finances.
The children are not coming back; in their place are the newer immigrants, like 50-year-old Anthony Wen, who works at Mee Sum’s kitchen and lives a life full of dirty dishes and live chickens and ducks. Since immigrating to the United States in 1995, he has been living with his parents in Chinatown except for brief breaks when he took jobs in New Jersey and Connecticut. Of the children who leave home and don’t come back, he said, without emotion, “They are all like that.”
Distance isn’t the only thing separating children from Chinatown — language also separates them. Moy speaks Cantonese, a dialect of Chinese, but has poor English, just enough to communicate with customers and do restaurant business. His daughter, who grew up in a Cantonese-speaking Chinatown but attended English-language schools, barely speaks Cantonese. She describes the way she communicates with her father as, “I can understand when he speaks to me in Chinese, like basic Chinese, but we go back and forth, then I answer in English, and he understands me.”
Moy’s daughter still loves the “little rice dishes in the tin with the plastic lid” at Mee Sum, which haven’t changed since she was a child. But now, at nearly 50 years old, it takes her a moment to recall the Chinese name of her favorite dish.
Though many regard Manhattan’s Chinatown as a restaurant town, in fact, restaurants may not be Chinatown’s number one industry. Wellington Z. Chen, the executive director of Chinatown Business Improvement District and Chinatown Partnership says, “We have more doctor offices than we have restaurants.” He points to the numerous red crosses on the map of Chinatown, which represent pharmacies and medical centers, and says, “Chinatown is actually a major medical center, because we are aging, we have a lot of healthcare needs.”
The medical facilities that can be seen everywhere on Chinatown’s streets are a testament to the fact that the community is aging. “That is natural,” Chen says, “Just like life cycles, you have multiple phases of a community.” From his perspective, Chinatown is a living, breathing organism, which was young and full of energy 50 years ago but has undoubtedly passed its peak today. Chen’s finger makes a circle in the center of the map and adds, “More than half of these households have no WIFI at home.”
At Mee Sum, the first generation of immigrants stayed behind to take care of their family business and the second generations have assimilated to the larger society and no longer come back. The Moy family is hardly the only one with this story in Chinatown — and Chinatown itself hasn’t always been Chinese.
Over the past several hundred years, Jews, Irish and Italians have used this same bit of land as their foothold in America. Their communities have all experienced the same kind of cycle of growth and decline. Now, somebody walking through Chinatown might be surprised to discover a tiny Jewish graveyard at St. James Triangle, and stunned by a nearby public school named after Irish American politician Al Smith. Italian immigrants were slightly luckier. Little Italy is still there but has shrunk to just a few blocks and is a dining district with few residents of Italian descent.
Manhattan’s Chinatown used to be the capital of all the east coast Chinatowns and Chinese-owned businesses. According to the New York Department of City Planning, up until 2009, at least 250 buses everyday would bring laborers to and from hundreds of cities along the east coast. Newly arrived Chinese immigrants who didn’t know a single word of English hopped on a bus, arrived at a Chinese restaurant in North Carolina and worked six days a week. During the holidays, they would hop on the buses again and come back to Manhattan’s Chinatown to get a haircut, eat a decent meal and send money home. “We used to be the main center,” Chen says. “The reason why Chinatown was so vibrant, was not because we had enough people here but because we brought in 5 to 6 million people every year.” However, in the past few years, the buses that had brought millions of people to Chinatown have been closed down by the city or moved out to satellite Chinatowns in order to improve traffic flow and public safety. As a result, Manhattan’s Chinatown is losing its vibrancy.
Even though Chinatown is on the decline, Chen remains confident about the future. When asked about what Chinatown would look like in 20 years, he replies without hesitancy, “Chinatown will still be here.” His confidence is based on the high proportion of rent-controlled apartments in Chinatown. Because of rent control, Chinatown has bedrooms that charge as little as $49 per month, a stark contrast to elsewhere in Lower Manhattan where the monthly rent can be as high as $2,000 to $3,000. Chinatown residents “are not going to give up a very nice affordable housing with a walking distance to the center,” Chen said. “They’re gonna pass it on to whoever they can pass it on to legally.”
Still, despite plans such as converting Chinatown into a popular destination for weddings, Chen hasn’t forgotten the area’s identity as a restaurant town. In 2018, Chen urged Hwa Yuan Szechuan, a restaurant from the 1960s with a background that is similar to Mee Sum, to reopen as a high-end restaurant which serves lobster and $65 Beijing Duck for the “good of the neighborhood.” The new Hwa Yuan succeeded and has brought new visitors to Chinatown. The success has been so great that its owner’s son, who used to work on Wall Street, has now taken charge of the restaurant’s social media accounts and becoming increasingly involved in the restaurant’s operations.
If Chen is correct, is Chinatown’s fate to become a town of high-end restaurants catering to customers from outside Chinatown? A quarter mile away, Donald Moy has also learned about Hwa Yuan’s success, but he plans to stick to Mee Sum’s path, “We have our image and if we change it, we’re finished,” Moy says. Anyway, in order to open a restaurant like that, “You need a lot of money.”
Chinatown’s biological clock is like an old man’s. Wakes up early in the morning and sleeps early at night.
Regular customers know Mee Sum doesn’t serve dinner. Elderly people who live alone always remember to buy food before they close so they don’t have to cook for themselves at night. At around 4 p.m., customers have all faded away except for the last two. They are two middle-aged Asian females, sitting across from each other in a leather booth, eating Club Sandwiches and chatting leisurely.
Moy is eating a plate of stir-fried rice noodles with beef with a lot of spicy oil bought from the restaurant next door, along with a bowl of sweet potato fries and a can of Diet Pepsi Coke. He has been eating in the same restaurant for fifty years and sometimes it’s good to have a change. Dinner at five o ‘clock doesn’t mean that Moy’s day is going to end early. Instead, the second half of his day is just beginning.
He walks out the front door of Mee Sum, comes down a cement staircase and enters the basement. This is a space the same size of Mee Sum upstairs, which the Moy family rented from their landlord along with the restaurant 54 years ago. Now, after decades, it has become Moy’s personal space, where he will stay until ten or eleven at late night before heading home through the empty Chinatown streets.
The basement is full of Moy’s toys. After a long day at Mee Sum, he comes back to his toy house to deal with paperwork, fix fishing rods, and make wooden toys. Time passes slowly in Mee Sum, and it stands still in this basement. The floor is covered with sawdust left by Moy when he uses a grinding machine to make small wooden animals like turtles and woodpeckers that can walk on slopes. He gives them to little girls and boys of friends and relatives.
Near the ceiling hangs a large bundle of fishing rods, about forty or fifty of them. As an enthusiast of fishing, Moy taught his son Marvin to fish when he was a boy. When the weather is warm, Moy likes to take a fast ferry from Montauk to Block Island Sound to fish. Marvin has his own yacht. But most of the time, “he goes with his friends, I have my friends,” Moy says. “They got a better education. We live in different worlds.”
Tomorrow, Moy will come back at an unpredictable time, just as he has always done. He plans to support Mee Sum and the ramshackle lifestyle of its patrons until the day he can’t do it anymore. Marvin described the restaurant as his father’s Ikigai, his reason for living, and it seems unlikely Moy would disagree. “Retirement is equivalent to waiting for death,” Moy told me.
Moy walks me back to the basement door. Looking out the narrow stair space is a small patch of sky. It is already dark and the neon lights in Chinatown are dimmed. The world outside is changing, barely perceptible in the basement.
In 20 years, the six-story buildings with pink brick walls will still be here, and people will still be climbing up and down along this same iron staircase. But there will be fewer Chinese faces on Mott Street, and many of today’s wrinkled faces may not be here anymore.
Moy stands among the toys he has saved over the decades and bids me farewell.
