The Pandemic Hurt Chinatown Badly. Here’s What Millennials Are Doing to Help.
As the pandemic began to snake across the United States, Anna Huang and Chloe Chan noticed a wave of xenophobia and hate towards the New York City Asian community. As the severity of the pandemic progressed and many small businesses suffered, Huang and Chan envisioned rebuilding Chinatown’s economy through spotlighting local businesses and teaching people more about Chinese culture. This led them to found Mott Street Girls, a New York City business that hosts walking history tours of Chinatown and helps fundraise for local businesses.
“Even before the coronavirus officially hit American soil, people stopped going to Chinatown due to fear of the virus, misinformation, and xenophobia,” said Chan.
While the physical effects of the COVID-19 pandemic didn’t reach the United States until March 2020, xenophobia and racism began to affect the Asian community almost as soon as the disease began to spread in Wuhan, China, in late 2019.
As the coronavirus made its way over to the United States and across the globe from Wuhan, former U.S. President Donald Trump made it a point to blame the spread of the virus on China, dubbing it the “China Virus” and refusing to call it by its scientific name.
His targeted comments exacerbated an already rising tide of hate crimes towards Asians and Asian businesses, such as the March 2020 spree killings at Asian owned spas in Atlanta, Georgia. In Portland, Oregon, within two months of the spread of the pandemic, at least 13 Asian owned businesses had their windows smashed. According to Womply, a service that uses credit and debit card transactions to provide insights to small business owners, by April 2020, more than half of Chinese restaurants in the United States had closed completely. Surviving businesses saw revenue drop by over 80%.
Now, two years later, Asian owned businesses in New York City continue to grapple with the pandemic’s effects. Through the area’s financial struggle, second and third generation Asian-Americans have realized that Chinatown will fall without their continued generational support and are helping rebuild Manhattan’s Chinatown in the wake of the devastating pandemic.
Lucy Yu, the owner of Yu and Me Books, the first female Asian-owned bookstore in New York City, is one of the millennials spearheading this front. “In the rise of Anti-Asian hate crimes, building out a business that tended to the growing needs of people who looked like me was vital,” said Yu. “So many Asian-Americans… have come to support [me] an incredible amount.”
Yu and Me Books is just one of many businesses that has been created by a more tech-savvy generation in order to serve the Asian community.
These newer businesses were born out of a cry for help from Chinatown small businesses, who struggled greatly due to language and tech-related barriers, Chan said. Those barriers prevented business owners from accessing COVID-19 related or financial resources, and a zip code issue — parts of Chinatown are bridged into higher-income zip code areas that didn’t qualify for assistance — prevented many Chinatown businesses from taking advantage of federal resources like the Paycheck Protection Program loan.
“Walking around Manhattan’s Chinatown, it’s hard not to notice the empty storefronts and ‘For Rent’ signs,” Chan said.
In 2022, some businesses continue to operate at reduced capacity, and some, including two of Chan’s most beloved childhood eateries, shut down completely. Chan also noted that many Chinatown businesses suffered as they faced labor shortages. “Dim sum parlors are often staffed by elderly employees,” she said. “They fear the COVID virus and anti-Asian hate crimes.”
Concern for the elderly was a feeling that echoed through all of Chinatown, whether residents worked at local businesses or not. Kar-ho Leung, the director of culture at 12-Pell, a hair-care and lifestyle store in the heart of Chinatown that caters to locals, believes the family-oriented culture of Asian-Americans was also a contributor to the suffering of Asian-owned businesses in New York City.
“A lot of the challenge in the Asian community is that a lot of people actually live at home with the elderly and their parents,” said Leung. “It was really tough to take on the risk to get people to go outside.”
In Chinatown, where many local businesses are supported by the majority Asian local population, the reluctance of many to go outside due to the fear of exposing their older family members to the virus certainly hasn’t helped the area rebound economically.
“A lot of businesses aren’t even on Yelp. Nonprofits formed out of COVID were formed by the younger generation,” said Leung. “They were able to connect the dots and provide the older generational businesses with resources.”
12-Pell, a Millennial run service with considerable social media and online presence, fared much better than surrounding generational businesses in the wake of the pandemic. But new non-profits, like Welcome to Chinatown, help older businesses that don’t have an online presence by helping them with marketing, social media, and fundraising.
“We announced one day that if you go out and spend $45, we’ll give you a free haircut,” said Leung. The objective encouraged many people to support Chinatown businesses, and a video of the endeavor even went viral. “We just wanted to cheer everybody up.”
Mott Street Girls has now raised over $12,800 for their community and continues to partner with community organizations in order to support and uplift local businesses who are still recovering from the pandemic. Their current walking tours teach tour members about the Chinese Exclusion Act and retracing Chinatown’s culinary history through food tastings. By destigmatizing Chinese foods and cultural practices and visiting small, hidden-away Chinatown businesses, they continually bring attention to the small businesses affected by the pandemic and help bring business and crowds back to Chinatown.
