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SUCCESS IN NEW YORK’S CHINATOWN HAS EBBED AND FLOWED OVER THE YEARS. LIFELONG VISITOR FRANCIS LAM MEETS THE YOUNG BUSINESS OWNERS CARVING OUT A BRIGHT FUTURE.

- FRANCIS LAM

My mother cried when I got a job in Chinatown. “Twenty years we worked there so you wouldn’t have to,” she said, sobbing. She shopped there, worshipped there, ate there, but for her, the point was to get out of there: to be somewhere else meant you had made it. Eventually she calmed down and said, “Fine. But if you hear gunshots, don’t be a hero.”

It was 1999, and Chinatown had become safe. It had always been delicious. And even though I never told her this, it had always felt like home. Not in a comforting way, in a placeof-loving obligation way. You see, I’m the son of immigrants from Hong Kong, and I spent my entire youth blowing off my parents’ every attempt to assimilate me into their culture. Now I can never feel Chinese enough.

For years I would take visitors to Chinatown and play tour guide with expert, practised lines. I’d tell them that Mott Street General Store opened in the 1800s to sell groceries to Chinese men forced to cook for themselves because America forbade them to bring their wives. I’d take them to Fong Inn Too, a fresh tofu shop, where, standing on the always-wet floors and eating over a rubbish bin, we’d devour warm bowls of silky soy pudding, barely set, quivering on our spoons under a veil of brown sugar syrup. I’d see them stop and stare when they turned the corner of Doyers Street to glimpse the picture-perfect Chinatown view, and I’d know it was the right moment to drop the bit about how this used to be called the Bloody Angle because of all the organised crime syndicate killings on This. Very. Spot. If I couldn’t grow up in Hong Kong like my mother did, then at least I could feel as if I had a place in Chinatown.