I first learnt about New York’s Fuzhounese community upstate. On a road trip to view the autumn foliage of Lake George, my Indonesian friends were curious about American Chinese food (American serving as that pejorative adjective, I suppose), and a quick search online reveals a handful of takeout restaurants in Albany. None of them look particularly appealing, announcing themselves through the same tired menu pictures of soggy lo mein, beef with unnaturally green broccoli, and some dishes I’ve only come across in sitcoms like the Simpsons, such that I assumed General Tso was a parody of Americanized cuisine rather than a semi-mythical figure that now adorns menus. Placing my order with the proprietor, a man with an impossibly tall haircut, I immediately hear the telltale sound of an accent I know well: the ‘h’ being dropped from retroflex consonant ‘sh’ such that 食物 (food; romanized as shí wù becomes something like sí wù), and I guess he hears mine too. He pegs me for a Malaysian, or Taiwanese, where big diasporas from Fujian province settled more than a century ago, but when he learns I’m from Singapore, he gives me a big smile.
“There are lots of Teochew people in Singapore right?” (I nod.) “Don’t you think their language sounds the ugliest?” (I politely smile.) I’d forgotten about these old coastal city rivalries, with the Teochew hailing from modern-day Chaozhou in neighboring Guangdong province. The Singaporean education system’s insistence on teaching only Mandarin Chinese while relegating other Chinese languages to ‘dialects’ unworthy even of radio stations or vernacular newspapers has forged a Chinese Singaporean identity as synthetic as the spelling reforms to simplify the script, such that individual ethnic Chinese genealogies are relevant only in the kitchen and in vague references to our inability to converse with grandparents. Perhaps the restaurant’s owner – I never did get his name – mistakes my hesitance for indecision over a menu with 70 different items. “Try the Crab Rangoon (this he names in English, the printed translation of 炸蟹角, lit. fried crab horn presumably an extinct term). It’s the only thing the Americans invented that we actually eat too, it’s quite nice.” I order ten with a side of General Tso’s chicken, which I am disappointed to learn is just sweet and sour chicken but sweeter and stickier.
Some weeks later I am in Manhattan, unable to really discern between quality barbers. Hair is a delicate, personal thing, and I decide that if Afro hair or Latino haircuts must be intimately worked by ethnic practitioners, why should I not be entitled to the gentle, rhythmic treatment of sculpting my body? I let myself be tugged along streets and storefronts, before one calls out to me, behind MS 131, or Sun Yat Sen Middle School. It’s funny that on this side of Chinatown, the Fuzhounese businesses sit next to a school named for Sun Yat Sen. Closer to East Broadway, a statue of Lin Zexu stands, perhaps Fujian’s most famous denizen: not so much a founding father of modern China, but the Qing era’s most stalwart opposition of opium, and by extension, the imperializing excesses of the Occident.
Anyway, at Mei Shing Barbershop, for $14 (before tip) one can get a haircut and a head massage. In fact, I later suspect that this one barbershop implanted itself in my subconscious years ago, when I fell for a clickbait video from a polyglot YouTuber plying his trade in New York City’s ethnic enclaves, clumsily but confidently serenading takeout restaurants, bodyworkers and little aunties on the sidewalk with broken Mandarin/Afghan/”Rare Tibetan language”/Creole etc. to the point where commerce gives way to good-natured friendship. I suspect he first learnt Mandarin from abundant online resources, therefore naturally selecting for Mandarin-speaking businesses in Chinatown such that I – and perhaps my friend, who you may remember from an earlier entry – were surprised by the Cantonese presence in Chinatown.
The barber is from my mum’s hometown, the smaller city of Fuqing (next to the capital Fuzhou), although the next time I return, my hair is cut by a lady from nearby Changle (similar accent, but full of gangsters, my mum tells me). The male barber reminds me a little of my mum’s brother: it’s hard to explain, although I could probably contrive something about facial structures and the thinning black hair that every man from this region seems to acquire in their 50s. We bond over being ex-conscripts: him a former artilleryman, myself serving in the military police. Manhattan, for all its struggles, paid in a month nearly what a professional officer would make in a year, and so he arrived in the mid-90s. When I ask how, he falls silent.
In Bonnie Tsui’s history of Chinatowns across America, the arrival of the Fujianese is described as an addition, rather than enlargement of Chinatown in the 1980s, one along “the neighborhood’s eastern frontier, creating a Chinatown along East Broadway that is largely self-contained and independent of the traditional Cantonese-dominant population clustered around Mott Street.”1 Patrick Radden Keefe’s investigative journalism in The Snakehead provides a far more vivid juxtaposition of the two:
“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.”2
Today, this still seems true. The loudest part of New York I’ve ever been to is a tiny shopping arcade under Manhattan Bridge, where the rumble of the elevated trains acoustically snowballs into a near-constant deafening thrum. I cannot believe this is a zone fit for human habitation, but nearby there is a hotel, two or three apartments directly facing the subway, and of course the small businesses beneath. In the shadow of the passing B/D/N/Q trains you can buy dried scallops, mobile phone cases, or get your hair cut for a far more cutthroat price.
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