Description of a gong si fong

The place, originally a one-bedroom apartment, was dark and close smelling.  A twenty-foot-long corridor that ended in a grimy window ran along one side of it.  The left wall of the corridor, made of rough, unpainted plywood, enclosed what used to be the living room.  It had been subdivided by more thin plywood partitions into three bedrooms, for six people.  The bedrooms had sliding plywood doors, each secured with a tiny padlock, like cabins on a ship.  The landlady... had put up the partitions and then moved on, and she now charged her sublessees a total of $850 a month for a $317 rent-subsidized apartment.

Lin showed me his bedroom, the compartment nearest the windows.  It was seven feet by six--smaller than many closets in New York City apartments.  A bunk bed took up most of the space.  The bottom bunk was Lin's.  Two people could not pass in the space.  A bare light bulb hung from a hook on the wall.

Lin forgoes any privacy or comfort not because he is poor but to save money.  He earns $360 a week peddling vegetables and fruit.  Selling umbrellas is even more lucrative, bringing in from $80 to $100 a day.  He has saved some $18,000 of his annual $22,000 income in each of the last four years.

From Chinatown by Gwen Kinkead (1992)