Page 2 of 2
THERE IS USUALLY A STEADY STREAM OF CUSTOMERS asking for those chicken wings (that and chicken with broccoli are the most requested dishes). Lok Hin also sells French fries for a dollar, a price that reflects the competitive market created by the number of Chinese food stores in the area. A lot of the customers are in a hurry, ordering their food, then asking impatiently where their order is, again and again.
At one point, late at night, a few young teenagers came to eat in. After they got their food one of them, a boy, maybe 16, decked out in street-preppy fashion, stationed himself at the slot in the bulletproof window, so that he could repeatedly complain to Nancy that she made his fries too crispy. He finally ended with a casual, natural, “Alright, baby.” He didn't mean it affectionately.
I talked to one teenage couple eating at Lok Hin who told me it was “mellow here,” but there are shootings and gangs nearby, especially in the projects and, the girl said, around her school.
The family was short-handed the night I was there. One of Nancy’s sisters was out, and Lynn didn’t make deliveries after dark, so it was just Mr. Lin making deliveries by himself. It was busy and I was right there, it just seemed natural to offer to help. So I did. I walked some deliveries, then I started to use the bike, then I started riding with Mr. Lin, and wound up working all night.
One of the deliveries was to an apartment in a project building on Brook Avenue. I went in, got on the elevator with the food. There were some teenagers behind me and I held the door so it didn’t close on them and they thanked me.
I went up to the 14th floor and rang the bell. A middle-age African-American woman opened it and I told her I had her Chinese-food order. She was noticeably shocked and concerned. “They don’t come up here for deliveries,” she said.
She asked me if I knew how dangerous it was there.
I asked how dangerous it could possibly be.
Really dangerous, she said.
When I left, I casually told her to take care and she said urgently, seriously, No, you take care. She was petrified for me, and petrified of the building she was living in. She gave me a two-dollar tip.
In some buildings the stairwells smelled of urine. Outside one building there were three teenage boys screaming at the top of their lungs, almost Tourettes-like, explicit vulgarities, over and over again.
Mr. Lin and I rode our street-modified mountain bikes (wood and tape)—and Mr. Lin bikes fast—through housing-project parking lots and plazas, under scaffolding, up on sidewalks, bags flying from the handlebars. We got some odd looks when we hopped off our bikes to drop off the orders.
At one place two guys on the street just looked at us said, “What the fuck.” They were smiling when they said it. It was as if we somehow topped the usual absurdity they see in the ghetto—now it was some Batman-and-Robin routine with an older Chinese man who doesn’t speak English with a NEW YORK ball cap and his skinny white-dude sidekick zipping around Bronx streets late at night with packages of chicken wings.
One of them said to Mr. Lin, “So now you got a partner, huh?” and he smiled back, nodded and laughed with them, having no idea what the guy said.
Again and again, we’d drop our food off and collect our money, then ride back to the restaurant together side-by-side, in the middle of deserted streets.
“Nothing,” he’d say to me about his delivery, “No tip.” And he would laugh.
NANCY TOLD ME SHE WORKED PART-TIME in restaurants when she first came to America. When she told me she dropped out of high school I found myself a little too surprised. She’s smart, hard-working and curious and open enough to have let me into her restaurant. She said she was too tired from working to do well in school.
I asked whether a teacher or a guidance counselor had said anything to her when she was dropping out, figuring there must have been some good person in the system, somewhere, who would have recognized and attempted to stop an exceptionally bright 16-year-old who’d just immigrated from quitting her education. She said no, no teacher or counselor cared, American or Chinese.
Jian, her 25-year-old brother, told me later that that was a shame. He talked about his sister when she was out of earshot, and said that Nancy really liked school, and loved reading, but that she simply had to work.
“That’s the reality of what happens to teenagers when they work in family restaurants,” he said.
He said he wished he could have gone to college but he said he didn’t really have good grades and he’s not really bookish. But Nancy was, he said.
Nancy told me at one point during the night-shift that her dream, what she would love to be doing more than anything else, is to be an elementary school teacher.
Jian told me he knew another Chinese girl who got really good grades and did well in school. She did two years in college and her parents opened up another restaurant and forced her to work and she had to drop out.
“When you’re 17, 18, you’re working, you have money in your pocket, you’re thinking about money not school, school becomes just a waste of time,” Jian said, explaining the mindset.
He came to America when he was seven and he talked about the kids bringing book bags to restaurants to work after school.
Jian is hard-working, but he also said, “America has changed me—I don’t have that Chinese way of thinking anymore,” referring to the constant sacrifice of working in the restaurant, not having a chance to do anything else.
“I don’t want to be stuck here my whole life,” he said.
Jian was on a delivery two years ago and a teenager pulled a gun and stole everything: his food, his cell phone, his money. He went to the precinct to look at the mug-shots book and that was it, nothing happened. Nothing has happened when he and his family have given the police the phone numbers from some of the other robbery calls they’ve gotten.
Jian told me last year he and his father got a big order called in. They went together to the address on 146th Street. Jian went inside and buzzed up to say that the food had arrived. Jian noticed some guys sitting nearby with their faces covered (it was winter). Jian told his father they needed to go.
Suddenly one of the guys punched his father in the head. Mr. Lin fell and Jian went after the guy, using his bike chain. A gun was pulled, and while they were all struggling it fell to the floor. Jian had seen a police officer on 145th Street, so as he was fighting, repeatedly striking one robber on the back with his bike chain while the robber was on top of his father, he was screaming for help from the officer. He said it took about 20 minutes for the police officer to come.
Two years ago, Jian’s sister and his mother were together on a delivery on the 15th floor of a building when two young men confronted them. One pointed a gun at them and the other had a baseball bat. They said, “Give me the food,” and the two women handed it over.
They saw that the robbers went to the 10th floor with the food and they called the police. The police found the baseball bat, the gun, and the food in the apartment. Jian told me the parents of one of the young men came into the restaurant insisting to the family that their son didn’t do it, that it wasn’t him. The sister testified at trial and the man went to jail. I delivered food to that same building.
Jian said, “If you don’t fight back they think you’re weak.”
He has had a lifetime of being taunted for being Asian, being disrespected by young children, watching people throw bones on his floor as they’re eating. He says he’s thought many times about buying a gun but that his father doesn’t want him to.
Jian also told me about the surprise visits by the Health Department, where they’ll always find something and it’s $500 or $1,000 every time they come. A violation for Mr. Lin eating food in the kitchen, for instance. Jian asked whether his father was supposed to eat at one of the two tables they have, outside the bulletproof glass, with the customers. His question was rhetorical, and disbelieving.
When I was at No.1 Wok, a female sanitation-enforcement officer came by and wrote them a ticket for some garbage that was in the middle of the street in front of their restaurant. A restaurant worker was trying to argue with her but there was a language barrier. I stepped in and told the enforcement officer that actually they were in the process of cleaning it up before she came, and that it wasn’t even their garbage. She said she didn’t care, and that at the exact moment she came it wasn’t being cleaned up. I told her I was a journalist. She just covered up her badge and her name with her hand and left. Hundred-dollar fine, $300 if it’s late.
I talked to a group of teenagers hanging out in the park one day in Mott Haven. They were cutting school, hiding from truant officers who were looking for them. (“They can’t do anything to us after 12,” one told me). I asked them about the Chinese takeout restaurants in their neighborhood. One boy said he knew some guys who robbed them—the guys did a “prank call,” and when the deliveryman came they went downstairs, hit him, grabbed the food and took all his money.
As to why they think this happens, they talked about trauma, and about wreaking havoc. One of the teens said, “Chinese people don’t know how to speak to you,” meaning respectfully. Another said, “We poor, they’re poor.”
This teenager, a girl, said later on that some of the kids did it “just to bully another race.”
I stayed at Lok Hin until 1 a.m. that Saturday night. I drank some of their mother’s homemade rice wine as we all sat around in the back of the kitchen on those MSG barrels and ate a family dinner.
Before I left I asked Nancy about names, how should I identify her in the article. I told her I wanted people to really know her and remember her.
At Good Choice restaurant, also in Mott Haven, the very nice woman I talked to, obviously not American-born Chinese, said her name was Jenny. At No.1 Wok in Mott Haven, where I helped them clean up the garbage on the street, the man who took me behind the counter said he was Chan, “You know, like Jackie Chan,” and I was told the boss’s name was “Number One.”
Nancy’s Chinese name, her birth name, her government name, the name she had or was given when she was born in Fujian Province 30 years ago, does hang on the wall in Lok Hin on a certificate for some New York City food-protection course she took years ago, and she hangs on to a piece of that name in her email address. But for this article she said she wanted to be identified as Nancy Lin. She’s earned that name here in America.
This is exactly how America was designed. Ordinary citizens are supposed to become representatives for short periods of time. They then return to their job and someone else takes over as a representative. Career politicians are destructive to America. I wish Joe well!briquetting machinery
Fantastic article.
It's always an interesting read when a New Yorker gets out and actually sees, you know, New York----which, contrary to prevailing opinion among the well-born ivy leaguers who make up journalism in the city, is not bounded by Columbia to the north and the East and Hudson Rivers from the sides. The black guys you'll meet in places like Mott Haven aren't named "Thorpe," and you don't know them from Wesleyan. They're real people, stuck paying the price for a half-century of plutocratic depredation. Jobs get sent overseas to enhance executive compensation; rich white guys hire illegals to staff their $125-prix-fixe restaurants in TriBeCa; the banks commit the most pervasive fraud in modern American history; and they all get away with it. They sweep the poor out of town and leave them to fend for themselves in a fetid ghetto like Mott Haven, comfortably out of sight from the corner of 57th and Fifth. Then, every once in a long while, some Dartmouth kid will have the bright idea to venture into the outer boroughs on a de facto safari (Oooh, scary!) to get a glimpse of what his people have wrought for the unwashed masses who never had private SAT tutors. And of course, the liberal takeaway is all about how terrible it is. But will they do a fucking thing to change it? Of course not, because, in the end, the bleeding-heart NYC liberals are cut from the same lace cloth as the let-them-eat-cake conservatives. Changing the system is all well and good, but let's not go too nuts. Daddy has to keep his job at Morgan Stanley, after all.
This was a great article to read especially from the other side, chinese workers, and the narrative was great, but I couldn't help sense a snobby tone like you are the only reporter to ever venture into these parts, minus the occasional crime story. You will find community papers such as the Mott Haven Herald and The Hunts Point Express do cover these "hoods"
Thanks for the feedback Jessica, Jimmy, Giovanny. I didn't intend a snobby tone toward the community papers and the journalism school papers who I know do a good job on a regular basis of reporting in these parts of the city. It was an oversight, I should have given them the recognition they deserve, they are out there in neighborhoods doing stories. I'm definitely not about snob mentality and definitely not or try hard not to be about "look at them on a safari" mentality. These areas I'm reporting on are close to my world in real life.
And as far as things changing, anything being done -- I'm going to print out copies of the article and give to the local police precinct, local politicians, community groups, NGO like non-profits, Nancy and her family -- get the word out to whoever will listen and maybe things might improve -- maybe a spotlight, increased awareness for a little while.
Not expecting deep systemic change with an article, but I'll take some extra patrols in the area, cameras, community watch, meetings where it's at least on peoples' radar.
And -- it's not corny -- Nancy, her family got a voice -- that's worth something all by itself.
Best,
Kevin Heldman
No, we do not have a long-suffering-in-silence culture. And no, many poor immigrant Chinese do NOT believe that their suffering is a normal part of life. No offense to Jessica, but I hate these statements that make such broad cultural generalizations and cradle model minority stereotypes. They're not being closed mouth because they're Chinese. Would you mind if I kindly just say a "What the Fuck" to that?
There exists so much segregation within the Chinese community. Those that migrated to the States from different provinces will have different experiences, and the Fujianese one is new and oftentimes ignored. This is a good article in terms of putting a spotlight on a much shadowed topic, that of the forgotten murders of Chinese food delivery-persons, and subtle, perhaps not, tardiness of police towards mobilizing for these people. I am trying so hard not to speak for them, because that stifles their voice, and I am saddened when reminded that Nancy's situation occur too often in our community, of children who fall through the cracks. When I went to college, I'd be ecstatic to find a fellow Fujianese American on campus. There are so few on the ivy-league campuses, and perhaps most college campuses for that matter.
Great comment from Jimmy above that shows clearly how some of the biggest hypocrites and racists are white liberals who think they're above it all and smarter than everybody else while spending the majority of their time sitting in front of the computer doing nothing but wasting time and their parents' money.
Absolutely phenomenal article. Depressing as all hell, but an amazing read. Thank you!
Great piece. I really appreciated the up-front reporting process and details of the writer's relationships with the subjects and his talking to local kids. The line that I think cuts to the bottom of it all: “We poor, they’re poor.”
This is good stuff, refreshing to see this type of local and gritty narrative somewhere. Reminiscent--in style--of the best of old school NYO and VV.
Great article, but what will happen from here on? We read these kind of articles about Chinse Take Out restaurants all the time and each time it is just as disturbing. Where are our rights? Aren't we human too? How come it can repeat itself over and over again? Is there no race discrimination because we are Chinese? What has the government done for us? Imagine the same happened to another race, such as White or Black? What would really happen then? I wish more could come out of it than just wow, this is an amazing article. Why can't NYPD respond to us right away, as the article says the NYPD that saw and witnessed the crime took 20 minutes to respond? Where are our rights as Chinese immigrants working so hard to make ends meet? We work so hard to make it work, but at the end we get laughed, beat, shot, and killed? This is too sad.
Good story about the real New York all around us but too often invisible. Journalism at its best gives voices to the voiceless; this piece did that.
Another hipster impressed with himself to discover that NYC isn't as white-washed as Bloomberg told him. Can't help noticing that he couldn't bring himself to interview anyone from Lincoln Chicken on 149th or S&R Jamaican on Morris. Those places are filled with scary black people.
Go back to Westchester, kid.
We're gonna wait for YOUR article on those places, AhmadFreeman. Unless all you do is criticize....
I'm not holding my breath.
Fantastic article mate! Thank you for taking the initiative to write such an informative piece. I really do wish our cities would change. Growing up in an area where this happens, and then going off to college where almost none of the kids have had to experience any of this makes you think about the social disconnect that exists in this country. People don't understand what its like for the poor, in poor communities. I hope this gets picked up man, really so that more understand what its like for people like Nancy, and so that you can write more pieces like this. And this is the first time I'm making an account to comment, look at what you're making me do here haha.