The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe Page A
Authors: Patrick Radden Keefe
Tags: General, Social Science
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your dialect. Even in Brooklyn, I cannot get the herbs I want at a reasonable price. Chinatown, New York, is really the starting place. You’ll always come here first for herbs, advice, jobs. People come here, they make it, then they move on. The next wave of immigrants say, where can I go? Where will they speak my language? Where can I find a job? Where can I buy bok choy and roast duck?”
As soon as she had arrived in Chinatown and established herself, Sister Ping sent for Yick Tak and the children, and within a year the family was together again. In 1982 the great Fujianese influx was just beginning, and the family settled on Chinatown’s grubby eastern frontier. They moved into a four-room subsidized apartment at 14 Monroe Street, in a sprawling housing compound encompassing two city blocks that sat wedged between the Brooklyn Bridge and the ManhattanBridge on the banks of the East River. The complex was known as Knickerbocker Village. When it was constructed in the thirties, it was the first housing project in New York City to receive federal funding. It had been home to ethnic strivers of many stripes, but mainly Eastern European Jews and Italians. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had occupied an eleventh-floor apartment in the 1940s. Half of New York’s Bonnano crime family had lived there at one point or another, and a few were still resident when Sister Ping and Yick Tak moved in.
Sister Ping liked New York City immediately. It was so much bigger than Fujian and Hong Kong, and so full of opportunity. She did not take a job as a maid, as she had said she would in her interview at the U.S. consulate. Instead, she and her husband obtained a lease on the tiny storefront at 145B Hester, a cramped, narrow retail space on the street level of a fading tenement. The rent was $1,000 a month, and they opened the Tak Shun Variety Store. When they applied for a business certificate for the shop, they translated Tak Shun as “reliable.” The shop next door was owned by a family from Shengmei village, and Sister Ping and Yick Tak stocked the place with clothing and simple goods that would appeal to the local Chinese community but particularly to the homesick Fujianese, more and more of whom seemed to turn up in the neighborhood each day. When the shop opened, some kids from a local gang dropped by and demanded a red envelope full of protection money. Sister Ping gave them $100, but that night they came by the store anyway and vandalized the place, tearing down the sign she had carefully erected above the front door.
The nascent Fujianese neighborhood was in every way at odds with the entrenched Cantonese Chinatown, a ghetto within a ghetto. The Cantonese end of town was clean and full of tourists at lunchtime and on weekends, a thicket of garish billboards arrayed vertically over the street in the Hong Kong style, the glitzy storefronts festooned with gilt calligraphy, the restaurant windows lined with showcase fishtanks. The dividing line was the Bowery, the traditional eastern frontier of Chinatown, and the Fujianese settled in the warren of streets beyond it—Eldridge and Allen, East Broadway, Henry, and Division, in the shadow of the gray slab masonry of the on-ramp to the Manhattan Bridge. The businesses in this end of Chinatown didn’t cater to tourists so much as to fellow Chinese. The aesthetic of the restaurants was more utilitarian.
The Fujianese who arrived in those days went to work immediately, doing difficult jobs: working as seamstresses in garment sweatshops in Chinatown or Queens; washing dishes in restaurant kitchens because they didn’t speak the requisite increment of English to work as waiters; doing bicycle delivery in rough neighborhoods in the Bronx, where Fujianese cooks prepared Cantonese specialties in claustrophobic kitchens behind thick panes of bulletproof Plexiglas. During the slow daytime hours, restaurant workers were dispatched throughout the city to slide takeout menus under the doors of
As soon as she had arrived in Chinatown and established herself, Sister Ping sent for Yick Tak and the children, and within a year the family was together again. In 1982 the great Fujianese influx was just beginning, and the family settled on Chinatown’s grubby eastern frontier. They moved into a four-room subsidized apartment at 14 Monroe Street, in a sprawling housing compound encompassing two city blocks that sat wedged between the Brooklyn Bridge and the ManhattanBridge on the banks of the East River. The complex was known as Knickerbocker Village. When it was constructed in the thirties, it was the first housing project in New York City to receive federal funding. It had been home to ethnic strivers of many stripes, but mainly Eastern European Jews and Italians. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had occupied an eleventh-floor apartment in the 1940s. Half of New York’s Bonnano crime family had lived there at one point or another, and a few were still resident when Sister Ping and Yick Tak moved in.
Sister Ping liked New York City immediately. It was so much bigger than Fujian and Hong Kong, and so full of opportunity. She did not take a job as a maid, as she had said she would in her interview at the U.S. consulate. Instead, she and her husband obtained a lease on the tiny storefront at 145B Hester, a cramped, narrow retail space on the street level of a fading tenement. The rent was $1,000 a month, and they opened the Tak Shun Variety Store. When they applied for a business certificate for the shop, they translated Tak Shun as “reliable.” The shop next door was owned by a family from Shengmei village, and Sister Ping and Yick Tak stocked the place with clothing and simple goods that would appeal to the local Chinese community but particularly to the homesick Fujianese, more and more of whom seemed to turn up in the neighborhood each day. When the shop opened, some kids from a local gang dropped by and demanded a red envelope full of protection money. Sister Ping gave them $100, but that night they came by the store anyway and vandalized the place, tearing down the sign she had carefully erected above the front door.
The nascent Fujianese neighborhood was in every way at odds with the entrenched Cantonese Chinatown, a ghetto within a ghetto. The Cantonese end of town was clean and full of tourists at lunchtime and on weekends, a thicket of garish billboards arrayed vertically over the street in the Hong Kong style, the glitzy storefronts festooned with gilt calligraphy, the restaurant windows lined with showcase fishtanks. The dividing line was the Bowery, the traditional eastern frontier of Chinatown, and the Fujianese settled in the warren of streets beyond it—Eldridge and Allen, East Broadway, Henry, and Division, in the shadow of the gray slab masonry of the on-ramp to the Manhattan Bridge. The businesses in this end of Chinatown didn’t cater to tourists so much as to fellow Chinese. The aesthetic of the restaurants was more utilitarian.
The Fujianese who arrived in those days went to work immediately, doing difficult jobs: working as seamstresses in garment sweatshops in Chinatown or Queens; washing dishes in restaurant kitchens because they didn’t speak the requisite increment of English to work as waiters; doing bicycle delivery in rough neighborhoods in the Bronx, where Fujianese cooks prepared Cantonese specialties in claustrophobic kitchens behind thick panes of bulletproof Plexiglas. During the slow daytime hours, restaurant workers were dispatched throughout the city to slide takeout menus under the doors of
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