Alan Chin
Chinatown in Manhattan is no longer the largest “Chinatown” in New York City; that distinction now goes either to the Chinatown in Flushing, Queens or the one in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Yet both of those are relatively new satellite communities, having sprung up only in recent decades. Whenever “New York” and “Chinatown” are mentioned in the same sentence, iconic images of Mott, Pell, and Doyers Streets still come to mind first – because Chinese Americans, most hailing from Guangdong Province of China, have been living in the neighborhood since the 1860s.
In the 19th century, much of what is today’s Chinatown was a slum district notorious for overcrowding and crime – known as the “Five Points” – though it’s debatable how much of the area’s seedy reputation was exaggeration against the disenfranchised, given that most of the residents were Black, Irish, working class, and/or poor. Chinese immigrants began arriving on North American shores starting with the California Gold Rush of the 1850s. When they reached New York City, they would settle in the Five Points during an era of vicious racism and housing discrimination.
From those humble beginnings, Chinatown grew slowly or not at all for a long time, because the many decades of the Chinese Exclusion Act and racial quotas on immigration (between 1882 and 1965) meant that the growth of the Chinese American population remained stagnant. The Exclusion acts made it impossible for Chinese to come to the United States, unless they were in a few exempted categories, and specifically harder for Chinese women to enter the country than men, using spurious stereotypes of prostitution and miscegenation to justify the prohibition.
One of the only ways that the Chinese could enter the United States was through the subterfuge of “paper sons,” as one exemption to the Exclusion Act was for the adult sons of already naturalized Chinese American citizens. Young men in China adopted fictional identities in order to emigrate, after memorizing the details of their new names in the hope of correctly answering the detailed questions they faced upon arrival at Angel Island, Ellis Island, and other American ports of entry. The American interrogators understood the scheme, and deported anyone who failed to convince them that they really were the sons of Chinese American fathers.
The result was that Chinatown, for several generations, was largely a “bachelor” society. The men worked long hours in low wage professions, hoping to save enough money to return to China where they could contract relatively advantageous arranged marriages. Even when they did so, their wives could not accompany them back to the United States, and their male children only could upon adulthood. Many families endured decades of separation. In their absence, social life – and economic opportunity – revolved around family and regional associations that formed to support their members. Inevitably, some of that activity led to an overlap with organized crime. Spectacularly, but not typically, the conflict and violence that occasionally occurred became sensationalized by outsiders as “tong wars” or “triad wars” that made the headlines of mainstream newspapers, without much context or deeper understanding.
Nonetheless, Chinatown became the nucleus of a community not just of residents, but also for the laundry and restaurant workers scattered all across the Northeast, whose members would come once a week or month to shop, eat out, pick up their mail, get a haircut. The family associations eventually came to own many of the buildings. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) was formed in 1883 and their current building at 60-64 Mott Street remains essential to community life, housing Chinatown’s largest auditorium and the New York Chinese School, which has been operating since 1909.
1965 saw a sea change. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act into law – an often-forgotten part of the Great Society, as instrumental as the Voting, Civil Rights, and Fair Housing Acts in defining contemporary America. It ended racial quotas for immigration and for the first time in 80 years, prospective Chinese immigrants were treated equally to those from Europe. All of a sudden, long separated families could begin the process of reunification. An era of explosive growth and cultural evolution began in Chinatown. Every ten years after that, just about, the Chinese American population would double and double again.
The Toishanese variant of Cantonese that had primarily been spoken before 1965 became replaced by the standard Cantonese that many immigrants had learned during their years in Hong Kong. Many new immigrants came from Taiwan and other parts of China as well. The growing population through the 1970s and 1980s engendered an urban working class in sweatshop garment factories, as well as the emergence of an entire sector of small businesses manufacturing goods and foods marketed to Asian Americans. Reaching a critical mass in the number of college graduates meant that for the first time, parallel priorities of assimilation and assertion of identity could happen simultaneously.
In this period, dance troupes, music ensembles, and arts initiatives started forming. Non-profit social services providing healthcare, English classes, childcare, and job training grew out of the Sixties’ awakenings of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam-War movements. More recent young immigrants and American-born Chinese challenged what they perceived as their elders’ passive submission in the face of discrimination. In that crucible, Chinese American activists took to the streets to protest for and against various issues and causes, from housing to working conditions to police brutality. The different generations, regional and language groupings, and social classes struggled to code-switch successfully not just with mainstream, white-dominated America but with each other as well.
Chinatown also had to navigate a larger cultural revolution in American life – New York City in the 1970s lost almost a million people, even as the Chinese American community was growing – traversing racial conflict and white flight, street crime and changing generational expectations, often encapsulated in individual family narratives. The stereotype of a “model minority” became fixed both within and outside the community, even as Chinese American New Yorkers, especially the elderly, continued to be the poorest of all demographic groups.
Although the 1990s saw another spurt of growth with a wave of new arrivals from Fujian Province, more recently Chinatown’s core began to change again as aging immigrants died or moved away and their children and grandchildren didn’t necessarily stay. The terrorist attack destroying the nearby World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and then the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21 both had enormously negative impacts on Chinatown businesses and residents’ health. Real estate prices have continued to rise, forcing out many family-owned establishments. As in many New York neighborhoods, gentrification threatens Chinatown’s identity. In the 21st century, the percentage of Chinese residents in Chinatown has been steadily declining.
From 1897 until the early 1970s, the Port Arthur Restaurant at 7-9 Mott Street established Chinatown as a dining destination. From 1992 to 2021, the Jing Fong Restaurant at 20 Elizabeth Street was one of the largest restaurants in the city, with over 600 seats. They – and the tic-tac-toe playing chicken at the Chinatown Fair arcade, not to mention the Orientalist architectural adornments of pagodas and the Wonton fonts of lettering once intended to lure tourists – are all gone now. For the moment, though, Chinatown’s character remains vibrant in cuisine, shopping, and cultural activity. New businesses have finally started to open since the pandemic, and a new generation of dynamic non-profit organizations like Think!Chinatown and Welcome to Chinatown are hopeful signs that Chinatown will continue to survive more cycles of boom and bust.
