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On Sundays, half a million people descend on Chinatown. Most
are Chinese, but tourists invade, too, and all nationalities and cultures
drift down Mott Street. Sunlight sparkles off red heads and blond
heads in the river of black-haired Chinese. Trendy young Chinese
women with pipe-cleaner legs in cutoffs walk by with white guys; other
decked out in leggings and puffy skirts, are on the arms of Chinese
men. Prosperous, beautifully dressed Chinese, in from Hong Kong
or Europe, stroll through the streets, speaking English.
Above, leaning out of tenement windows, old men watch the drifting
carnival. One lights a joss stick and, with a hairless, sagging
arm, puts it on the fire escape to burn. Behind him, other old
men in their undershirts move like ghosts in the dimness of a gong si
fong.
On Sundays, no one toils except waiters and cooks and gambling house
dealers. A burden lifts from this desperate community, strangled
by miserable wages and organized crime. All over Chinatown, families
stroll, shop, gather for the noonday dim sum. In the huge, noisy
Triple Eight Palace, they yum cha--sip tea and gossip.
The OTB is mobbed, as it is every Sunday.
The Buddhist temples are also full. People pray to Kuan Yin, the
goddess of mercy, for male children and for wealth.
Barbershops hum with business. Sundays are propitious days for
haircuts.
Herbalists and acupuncturists are run off their feet. Their shops
overflow with workers who have waited all week to spare time to see
a doctor.
In the Kong soybean shop, Mrs. Kong cuts rice bean cake and taro pudding.
Chinese from the outer boroughs and New Jersey and Connecticut make
matches, celebrate birthdays at banquets, visit family associations.
Students buy books from the People's Republic.
Hundreds push into the CCBA to see the Shanghai opera. Upstairs,
in classrooms, children laboriously copy Chinese characters.
In the old Mee Heung Chow Main factory, four elders play mah-jongg,
wedged between boxes of noodles.
Along Canal, vendors with steel pushcarts display fish balls, intestines,
chicken feet, peanut cakes, curried squid, deep-fried peppers and eggplants,
and chewy fish skins stewed with turnips. All around Chinatown,
vendors fry chong yow bing--thick, tasty scallion pancakes.
Mr. Lin, the Fujianese peddler, sells firecrackers at a corner.
Children hawk blocks of frozen shrimp from Asia. The blocks drip
on the sidewalk. Shoppers trample newspapers, mud, fishtails,
betel nuts. The litter blows around their ankles.
On Pell Street, German tourists scramble out of a
bus to videotape the vertical restaurant signs. Teenage gang members
in Hong Kong suits pace outside Number 11 and watch indifferently.
A car with New Jersey plates pulls up. "Oh, wow! Look! Chinese
Dumpling House!" a girl inside shouts.
"You finally made it to Chinatown!" her date says, kissing her.
From Chinatown by Gwen Kinkead (1992)
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