Frozen Dim Sum
View of Doyers Street, 1909. (Library of Congress)1
Fire on Doyers Street, date unknown (NY Fire Department)2
View of Doyers Street (Author’s Photo).
Two friends from London are visiting. In my three years of undergraduate studies an hour away, I never did feel the urge to visit there; it seemed ridiculous to queue thirty minutes for a plate of roast duck knowing that the real deal was just minutes away from my house in Singapore when I’d return for the summer, far away from the cosmopolitan tourist throng of an amusement-like quarter, gates and all. Walking down Doyers Street, Nom Wah Tea Parlor catches their eye, the way it did mine too, and they share my assumption that the faded sign, the predominantly white queue, and the cheerful name all point to orientalist pastiche. I remember my first time eating there, finding it a serviceable late-night option: the chewy transparent skin and filling of their shrimp dumplings clearly indicating their frozen origin, the chicken feet well-spiced and chewy, and their tea surprisingly good. I was therefore struck when I encountered it in old postcards, before then learning from a 2011 New York Times review of the restaurant that it stands as Chinatown’s oldest restaurant.3 (Sometime later, also that it remained a family business all this while – did I learn this by word of mouth? From the restaurant’s autobiography? At MOCA? The details are fuzzy).
The Milstein librarian helpfully points out that Chinatown features greatly in the Gangs of New York too, one of the books behind a film everyone’s watched but no one seems to have read, certainly not a chapter on Chinatown. Curiously enough, the discussion on Chinatown arrives late as Chapter 14, amongst the last of the gang wars. The chapter opens with the “crooked little throughfare” of Doyers Street, exposition not of extreme violence but of etymology.4 Doyers appears “an orphan street, ignored by the handbooks and histories of early New York, with “no record of how and for whom it was named”. Asbury was already writing in past tense, “for there are now no gangs in New York, and no gangsters in the sense that the word has come into common use”, and even a hundred years ago his journalist account was thus an effort to “chronicle the more spectacular exploits of the refractory citizen who was a dangerous nuisance in New York for almost a hundred years, with a sufficient indication of his background of vice, poverty, and political corruption to make him understandable.”
I opened the book expecting tired, orientalist tropes about secret societies or Asiatic unscrupulousness, but was surprised by Asbury’s sketch of cultural, social and geographical life. The tongs are “as American as chop suey — the latter is said to have been invented by an American dishwasher in a San Francisco restaurant, while the first tong was organized in the Western gold fields about 1860.” Not a single citation appears in the book, which goes into precise detail about average bribes paid to policemen ($17.50), the growing population of Chinese, or the amount of rice wine downed by tong bosses at a peace treaty (107 mugs). For an audience enraptured by tales of gang savagery, Doyers Street was the epicentre of staggering violence – more precisely, the sharp crook of the ‘Bloody Angle’, where “the police believe, and can prove it so far as such proof is possible,more men have been murdered at the Bloody Angle than at any other place of like area in the world”. Nonetheless there are plenty of opportune reminders of the book’s age – still on the Doyers Street, “the turn is very abrupt, and not even a slant-eyed Chinaman can see around a corner. Armed with snickersnee and hatchet sharpened to a razor’s edge, the tong killer lay in wait for his victim, and cut him down as he came around the bend.”
This account generally hews close to Ava Chin’s own account of the Tong Wars, one she pieces together from her family’s stories and contemporary newspaper articles, one that also centers Doyers Street but with violence much closer to her own family: in the summer of 1905, violence erupted when Hip Sing gunmen shot up a neutral theater, or gun down well-wishers the subsequent Chinese New Year.
“In his oral history, my grandfather Lung casts these violent periods as fights over territory—who owned Mott Street, Pell, or Doyers, and the right to run a gambling outfit and control prostitution—but soon the violence escalated between the two factions, ratcheting up to such a level as to concern all of Chinatown. Tourists, whom Grandfather Lung deemed “rubberneckers,” ate up stories of tong violence like moviegoers going through bags of popcorn, but only from the safety of newspaper headlines. Actual gunshots and murders were another story, and now folks were afraid to come to Chinatown.”5
But even the killers of Herbert Asbury’s vivid, largely apocryphal Gangs of New York seem to have faded into the past. Right before I steer my two friends towards a place I’d actually go for dim sum, I slow down to catch snippets of a tour guide’s monologue, who has graciously perched herself her small herd of tourists onto the sidewalk to keep the rainbow-coloured road for throughfare. I doubt any of them spoke or read any form of Chinese, but rather than launching into tired tropes about gang warfare, she is explaining the commercial suffocation experienced in Chinatown and the Lower East Side in the wake of 9/11, a psychic violence begetting a strangulation of neighborhoods. But it is a sweltering day, the first day we truly see the sun this springtime, and the moment the guide pauses to catch her breath a man sticks his hand up, wanting to know if Joe’s Shanghai a few feet away is any good.
- Chinatown, N.Y.C. – Doyers St. 1909. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2001704347/. ↩︎
- New York (N.Y.). Fire Department. Fire on Doyers Street, Chinatown. 1960 1900. Photograph. REC0079_01_155. NYC Municipal Archives. https://nycrecords.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_11a17950-948d-403b-b8e0-fbe47a063896/. ↩︎
- Mishan, Ligaya. “Nom Wah Tea Parlor.” The New York Times, April 12, 2011, sec. Food. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/dining/reviews/13under.html. ↩︎
- Asbury, Herbert. The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld. 1st Vintage books ed. New York, 1928 (reis. 2008, Vintage Books), p. 300-1.
↩︎ - Mott Street, p.108-110. ↩︎
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