My Chinatown: A New York Sketchbook

The crowded and noisome fish markets, the vendors sitting in crude shanties filled with counterfeit handbags, the language and lettering: all transported me to a different city that I didn’t understand. ‘I’m not in Manhattan anymore,’ I thought when I first moved into Chinatown two years ago. I felt like an outsider in my own neighborhood. Because I was an outsider.

At first I took solace in a line from Roman Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown, “Forget it [Will], it’s Chinatown…” But after I started reporting on Chinatown, the veils of ignorance that divided me from my new neighbors, and they from me, began to part. I became captivated by the neighborhood’s layered history, cultural heritage and ancient traditions. I kept in mind, “nothing is what it seems in Chinatown.” I didn’t take the spitting personally; I didn’t let the pushing and shoving get to me. I didn’t forget, but I observed. I embraced it all.

Now, as I walk Chinatown, I feel I’m at home. Here are some of the people and their places in my neighborhood.

I. Columbus Park

At the Mulberry Street entrance to Columbus Park, two Chinese shoemakers sit on crates, briskly sawing off the worn heels of shoes and nailing on replacements they’ve cut from sheets of rubber. The morning air is filled with the chirps of songbirds in wooden cages, hung in the trees surrounding the entrance.

Lugging his overstuffed backpack, Belgian tourist Dirk Bosraams surveys the groups of men playing Chinese chess, the women playing cards, the chorale wailing Chinese opera. Fresh from a three-week sojourn in Southeast Asia, Bosraams came downtown to visit the park because a friend told him it was a microcosm of Chinese culture in New York. “This park, right now,” he says, tugging at his scruffy traveler’s beard, “is more authentic than some places in Vietnam.”

The small patch of green in the heart of Chinatown was finally restored and reopened after 30 years of neglect on October 25, 2007 as an homage to traditional Chinese architecture. Its pavilion echoes the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, with its slanted slate roof, concrete columns and exposed wooden rafters. Here in my neighborhood, bamboo trees sprout everywhere and the gardens are accented with large jagged rocks. The nights are illuminated by big iron lamps with decorative dragonheads. The park is alive with people tying together the mind, body and soul through cultural activities. Beyond the pavilion, there are even basketball courts for youngsters dreaming of becoming the new Yao Ming.

Columbus Park wasn’t always influenced by Eastern thought. During the mid-1800s it was the heart of the Five Points. This was the most notorious slum in the United States, the subject of Herbert Asbury’s 1927 classic “The Gangs of New York”, and the Martin Scorsese 2002 film loosely based on the book. The dangerous and desperate intersection of Baxter, Worth, Bayard, Mosco and Mulberry, and its surrounding streets from Broadway to the Bowery, was riddled with club-toting, hobnail-boot-wearing gangs like the 40 Thieves, Dead Rabbits and the Plug Uglies, most of them Irish. But after the almost three-acre park was built in 1890, the turf was reclaimed for family activities, public gatherings and a tentative, emerging Chinese culture. Today, people of all ages and nationalities mix there, enjoying – some as observers, some as participants – the sounds of the World War II era Chinese arias, the languid yet disciplined motions of Tai-Chi, the spirited Chinese chess matches, the strolling herbalists and acupuncturists whose storefronts dot the surrounding neighborhood.

Dirk Bosraams is duly impressed. “Some places are designed to attract tourists,” he says. “But Columbus Park is not. It is designed for people to enjoy themselves.”