Long before I had an image of New York City, or even of the rest of the US, I had a strong, vivid impression of its Chinatowns. My grandparents were not walkers. My parents were not walkers. They were migrants, sometimes sojourners, and it was during the year that my parents shared in South Bend, Indiana at Indiana University. Each of them were the only one of their families to attend college (my father had ten siblings, my mother two), with the university experience less formative of their personalities than one might expect. I suspect their own relationship was rocky then, the quality of classes uneven especially for international students now thrust into curricula centering a distinctly American experience of business or public administration far at odds with the state capitalism or hypertrophied corporatism of Hong Kong and Singapore alike, and Indiana’s sheer whiteness hard to navigate in the early 1990s.
Chicago’s Chinatown was therefore an escape for them, a largely Cantonese landscape where menus hovered between reasonable facsimiles of Hong Kong’s own buzzing restaurants, and American Chinese classics. In my head I can picture the weekend drives into Illinois, my dad already blasting Tom Jones’ Green, Green Grass of Home – one of the only musicians I recall him ever playing,, even after he’d returned home – my mum in the side seat. The crackling skin of roast duck, fried shrimp, vermicelli. Bizarre encounters with Singapore noodles, resembling nothing one would find in Singapore. (I learnt about this dish when at ten years old, my mother picked up a menu at a restaurant near our apartment and laughed, seeing a familiar name – the dish had travelled back home, at least in name). The first time I went to Chicago, scouting out a city where I might spend years of further study, she implored me over text to seek out a restaurant, named “King of Kings” back in her day.
I locate it within Chinatown, still a gated compound, in a city still incredibly segregated. It smells like a restaurant I know, sandwiched between a bubble tea shop and a grocery store. Roast geese, ducks, and slabs of rich, fatty pork hanging off hooks; wet towelettes that I’d know in Singapore and Hong Kong to refuse to avoid paying a token fee for cleaning grease off my hands that I’m safe to keep and use in this city. I snap pictures of the bald, bespectacled restauranteurs’ portraits, posing with beautifully plated dishes of crab, posing with Obama. Later on my mum recognizes him, although he had more hair. She didn’t know his name was Sam. The food is delicious. In Manhattan’s Chinatown I’ve sought out food I could not find easily in Singapore, but here there is grated ginger, a rich plum sauce, chili scooped carefully out of a jar lest it mark the white shirt I’ve foolishly chosen to wear today with its characteristic oily stain. The waitress politely asks if the food is good, and my parents’ stories tumble out before I know it. No one pretends to remember these once-repeat customers from decades ago, but they’re amused enough. “We’re just a restaurant, and Chinatown will always be around.”
I also knew about Chinatown’s New York City. Sometimes my mum would tell me, matter-of-fact, about her life in the US. I’ve never seen her type messages on Whatsapp this long, so I’ll let you hear it from her yourself. I asked her if she knew about stories of Fuzhounese migration, and she did, from a friend, Kenny.
“He came to HK for Changle or Fuzhou around 1977. Study in my primary school. Holy Mary Primary Sch. He is born I believe in 1964/5 so he is older than us. His study is good. His dad migrated to NY and has restaurant in china town and make him and his sister to go to USA too He went there in P6. And since then we lost contact. Then after few years he asked his gugu to paste a poster at my old place 4/f building. That day my dad same the poster got a shock. Then I contacted him through letter. He then started sending gift ( limited edition USA coins) and letters to me) He visited me in HK after he married. He told me his dad forced him to married a girl also fr fujian. If he refused , his dad will become a monk.
He told me: he has been living in New York for the past ten years ( at that time) he never got chance to visit Statue of liberty. Besides run a restaurant. He will sell the restaurant for those who want to take over and he make a profit. Then he will start another restaurant again and again. There was once he basement was flooded ,he risked his life to go in to retrieve his food. He told me it is very dangerous. One of his daughters was gifted. He is proud of him. Chinatown always got robbery. So he has to install grill at the window to prevent break in. He said he has a tough life there. Missed the days in HK.
I went to visit him before I go back HK or before go to south bend. He treated me to eat a very big giant alblone. He treated me very well. P4 I and ranking 2nd in class. Then he come in p5 .I because thirrd in the class. That time I hate him so much. But he said he love me. Haha . We travel together for HK to New York once became the timing. It was so coincidence He told me that during deplaned 😊 That time in primary school. We all started this kind of thing: like I know who like who’s and speak behind their back.”
There’s a running joke in the Singaporean literature scene which I suppose exists in some form in every diasporic community around the world. A Chinese Singaporean travels overseas, and only then feels more Chinese, more Singaporean, more indignantly minoritized. Returning to Singapore, their third cultureness – epistemologically unassailable, yet ubiquitous as a trope – continues to blind them to racial and socioeconomic relations within a hierarchy they at least occupied the upper-middle rung of. Their poems transform accordingly, culturally self-reflexive but politically impotent. I started off wanting to write a journal about Harlem and Morningside Heights, but am tugged towards Chinatowns. Sojourn(er)s collide, and my journal has been a partial effort to pinning down these spaces in the city, dishes on trays, smells and sounds intersecting on streets that vanish as quickly as they are reinvented.
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