In the Chinatown of my mother’s youth, everyone knew everyone.
May 14, 2025
“Fai dee, oi dun zhou hou loi” (“Hurry up, I’ve waited so long”), my mother says as she breezes past me, not acknowledging that in fact I was the one waiting for her and not the other way around. I follow behind her the same way I have all my life, and she walks the same way she has since she was thirteen, weaving through the crowds with her head down.
I have been waiting outside of Big Wong, a restaurant that shares the name of a family favorite from when I was growing up in Manhattan Chinatown. Ever since my mom was young, the restaurant provided her with free lunches. It was a place where we were greeted like family as soon as we walked in, with shouts of “a mui!” (“little sister”). The aroma of the roast pork and roast duck would fill our noses and seep into our pores, and the men behind the butchering station would always give us more of the meaty parts and not the fattier pieces that were never as good.
The original Big Wong, which had opened in Chinatown in 1978, closed a few years back. The new location shares not just a name, but also the same street—Mott Street, Chinatown’s unofficial main street. It’s a street that was once marred with blood and fear from gang activity, when mostly young boys, who were struggling to make ends meet with no options or support from the city, took over the streets. It is now packed with eager tourists snaking through it.
My mom arrived in the United States from Macau at thirteen in 1990. By fourteen, she was out making her own living, working at a video rental store in Manhattan Chinatown.
I imagine what her commute was like in those days: She gets off at the Canal Street station after taking the N train from Brooklyn. As she climbs out of the subway station, her eyes dart to the ground, and her head snaps down. She makes her way down Canal Street. She passes the movie theater, which would be crowded with teenagers and young adults the same night and would cease to exist a few decades later. The street is not too long, yet it drags far. She avoids eye contact, determined to make it to work. Eventually, she turns onto Mott Street.
She lifts her head.
It’s the street she’s familiar with. She sees the men and boys standing on their assigned corners. She will go sing karaoke with them later that night, joining her boyfriend. Or go gambling, in any of the many basement mahjong or poker spots. They greet her, calling her “a mui.”
She turns quickly onto Bayard Street, heading straight into work. She’ll clock out at 5 p.m. But the men and boys on the corners? They don’t clock out.
Between the seventies and nineties, Mott Street was feared. It was home to the Ghost Shadows Gang, or 鬼影幫, “gwaiyingbong”. Walking on Mott Street could mean risking injury or your life. Gang members often lurked on the streets, shadows watching over and controlling everything. They warranted fear. A peaceful afternoon could quickly be interrupted by a shootout. Business owners and residents alike agreed to the gang’s terms, with many regularly paying them in exchange for their businesses to run violence-free.
But despite calling my mother “a mui,” many of the gang members were my mother’s age. Some even younger than her. While she was handing out DVDs, her boyfriend, as part of the Ghost Shadows, would go door to door, business to business, collecting payment. The product he was peddling was protection, and a guarantee that they could continue their business without being bothered by teenage gang members.
But it wasn’t all just shaking down businesses for money. The 1980s–1990s in Chinatown weren’t like the early darker years of the gangs in the 19th and early 20th century, where the opium trade and the trafficking of women were prevalent and the main moneymakers. But, with the expansion of the heroin trade in the city, these gang members were often also peddling heroin. Though my parents say they didn’t pay attention while it happened, back in the 1990s. By 1989, 75 percent of New York’s heroin supply was from Chinese dealers.
“You see how short Pell Street is?” my mom says, as we walk by it after leaving Big Wong. “Even on this short street, they would still have a gang. And you see how it connects to Doyers Street? See how short it is? It’s short here too. But each of these streets had a gang, and they would just fight on each corner,” she says.
Each gang guarded and patrolled a different street. Ghost Shadows on Mott Street; Flying Dragons on Pell Street; BTK (Born to Kill), whose members were mostly Vietnamese, on Canal Street; Black Eagles on Elizabeth Street, and on and on and on. Each street corner simmering, waiting for violence to come. And it always came.
“So did you come here to play and run around?” I ask.
“No, I came here to work. Just like them,” says my mother, speeding ahead on the sidewalk.
I had wrongly assumed her visits to Chinatown were for her boyfriend, seeing as she had to come all the way from Brooklyn. But the Brooklyn I know is different than the one she knew. It wasn’t full of opportunities yet, full of bustling businesses where you could work.
“Back then, there wasn’t 8th Avenue, no Bensonhurst,” she explains. “If I wanted work I had to go to [Manhattan] Chinatown.”
Her hour-long commute to Chinatown started in the early morning so she could return by early afternoon before her mother would get home. She worked because she needed money. She worked because her family—her mother, her younger brother and all her younger cousins all crammed into the same home, needed her to make money. My grandmother worked twelve hours a day in the garment district to support the family.
“But [with] two children, it wasn’t enough, so of course I had to work,” my mother says.
It was the same deal for her boyfriend and the other boys guarding the corners of Chinatown. Many of them came to the U.S. with the influx of Asian immigrants after the passing of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Many of them were from Hong Kong and Vietnam. They were coming from cities. Most of them were poor. And most of them had parents who were so busy working that they couldn’t be active in their children’s lives.
This new group of immigrants were coming with no education, no work experience, and little to no understanding of English. Available jobs were mostly limited to restaurants, video rental stores, and butcher shops in Chinatown. But none were as lucrative as serving the tongs of Chinatown, community associations that relied on criminal activity to fund their services.
My parents are people who, as you walk down the street almost anywhere in Chinatown, can tell you the entire history of a place, the people who used to work there, and who frequented there. As I wrote this piece, they connected me with dozens of people who could speak about the past.
“I had a lot of friends,” my dad brags. He’s not really bragging, simply stating a fact. “I wasn’t like you.”
“I have friends,” I respond, insulted.
“Not like I did.”
And unfortunately, he is right.
When we go to get yum cha (what others call dim sum), we get a seat immediately at any of the restaurants crowded with people. At the dumpling places across Chinatown—many of which have gone viral for their cheap eats—my dad will go in, be called “leng zai” (“handsome guy”), and be given a free bag of frozen dumplings.
Walking with my mom now, we pass by a bookshop that no longer exists, where, as a young girl, I was given free rein over all the graphic novels, activity books, or blind boxes. My mom’s yee yee (aunt, biologically or non-biologically related) owned the place. Every time we were in Chinatown, my mom would autopilot towards the store just to say hello. When I call my dad to ask about the bookstore that hasn’t existed since before the pandemic began, he quickly recalls that it was “on Mott Street, between Doyer and Bayard.”
It is a neighborhood where my mom and my dad’s friends became landmarks, where their businesses and memories would serve as pushpins in their minds of street intersections. It’s a neighborhood that they’ve been in since the eighties and nineties, a neighborhood that has transformed from people who look like them and were confined in the space that is Chinatown, to a neighborhood that is larger, busier, and whiter.
Before I can ask another question, my mom stops in her tracks and walks the other way as her muscle memory kicks in. I follow her, confused. “Ice cream!” she says simply, walking into the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory. It’s a restaurant that went viral on Tiktok, with a line out the door. But when I was growing up, it was a quick treat. Not something that was even notable. And for my mom growing up, it was just the ice cream store. She immediately knows what she wants—the black sesame flavor.
As I watch her order and pay in cash, I can’t help but feel what the neighborhood must have once been like to her. The joy, the excitement, the ease of having a place like Chinatown, which you knew so intimately that you could walk through and describe every building that is there now, and every building that was once there.
We eat our ice cream in silence. “As I was saying…” she begins. I listen, soaking up every word that she tells me, as my black sesame ice cream drips onto Bayard Street’s sidewalks.
Ice cream cups thrown away, we catch up to my dad at the corner of Canal and Elizabeth. He’s smoking a cigarette, leaning against the front of the car.
My dad remembers the violence of the past much more clearly than my mom. While my mom was “a mui,” he was “da go” (“big brother”). When he immigrated in 1986 at age twenty, he was older than most of the boys in gangs. He was careful walking through the streets, but was never really afraid.
“Did they all have guns?” I ask.
“A lot of them,” he says matter-of-factly.
“Why weren’t you scared?”
“I knew them. They knew us.”
There was a sense of community then. Nowadays, Chinatown could mean any of the nine Chinatowns all over New York City. But back then, that wasn’t the case. Back then, it was just these few blocks where Chinese immigrants were allowed to work, hang out, and be as they were. Everyone was connected one way or another.
My dad played soccer with a team at Chinatown’s Columbus Park, which these days is constantly filled with children after school, elders stretching and dancing, and young boys running around like my dad once did. For my dad, his connection with the gangs came from this soccer club. The Ghost Shadows sponsored the team, allowing them to travel all across the country and Canada to play in tournaments.
For others, their connection with the gangs came from being literal neighbors, living next to each other in some of the residential areas of the city. People lived next to members of the same gang and sometimes even members of rival gangs. And back then it was easier to acknowledge each other. The same language was spoken, both verbally and nonverbally.
“They were our neighbors,” explains my dad. “We all lived in the same areas [in the other boroughs]. So we would all come here [to Chinatown], and someone you could go to school with, who you lived in the same apartment building with, they would then see you and they would have to attack you.”
In other words, the gang culture dictated violence even against your own neighbors.
Many of the teenagers and young adults roaming Chinatown would then live in some of the boroughs where Asian populations were growing. “But at least we knew each other,” says my dad. “Now I don’t know anyone.”
Money was taken, but it stayed within the community, meant to build and provide resources within it, since it faced a lack of government support.
The tongs of Chinatown, the employers of these gang members, were always meant to serve their respective communities. Each tong was meant to represent a smaller group, whether that be a family name or a shared homeland. For this new group of immigrants, a group that the city wasn’t culturally competent to support, and with limited employment opportunities for those without education or English language skills, the tongs were a place to find employment, housing, or even help solve intercommunity conflicts.
And for my mom?
“Oh, they never bothered me. They looked at me, and they knew not to bother me,” my five-foot mom says. “They knew I was guai” (obedient, good, pious). Even though in traditional terms, my mother wasn’t always obedient or pious, she was someone who kept her head down, focused on her work, and didn’t bother anyone or cause trouble.
I ask her if it had anything to do with being a girl back then, a gender difference.
“Well, of course they treat us differently,” she replies. “They still bothered girls. But for me, it was because I was working hard, and I was younger than them. They saw me and knew I was just a leng mui” (“young girl”).
It is no longer like that. Now the streets are full of faces who will only be there temporarily, who come to consume and then leave. Now, the streets are full of the harsh language of America. And for my parents, that’s scarier than the guns ever were.
In 1985, the federal government concluded a ten-year investigation into the crimes and inner workings of Chinatown’s gangs. As a result, twenty-five members of the Ghost Shadows gang were charged with 85 different crimes, including 13 charges of murder, and locked up behind bars under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, also known as RICO. This began the rapid shutdown of Chinatown gangs’ criminal activity, as more of the leaders were put behind bars in the following decade. In November 1994, New York City law enforcement indicted thirty-three members of the Flying Dragons, the last major criminal gang in Chinatown, on racketeering charges.
By that time, the gangs’ influence had also waned due to increased access to education for Chinese immigrant youth, the expansion of Chinatowns to other more residential boroughs, and cheaper pathways for drug trafficking from other countries such as Colombia. By the time my mother was eighteen, five years before she would give birth to me, the decades-long legacy of Chinatown gangs had faded.
Chinatown isn’t much quieter now than it was back then. Gun violence has been replaced with pushy tourists and increased harassment of our elders during the pandemic. Now, the danger of shoot-outs has been supplanted by the danger of increasing violent crimes, targeting the community simply for being Asian, according to NYPD Hate Crimes Data. The danger of extortion and drugs on the corners has been replaced by big landlords selling out landmark generational restaurants and small businesses for a bigger profit. Chinatown is also facing the threat of a “skyscraper megajail” that the city plans to build in the middle of the neighborhood.
As we finish up our walk, my mom remembers her ah yee, one of her aunties, someone whom I will pretend to remember but whose name and face I only recognize because my mom insists I do. She remembers that this ah yee owns a store on Pell Street, and walks up and down multiple times looking at each store. She faults her memory, saying maybe it’s on the next street. Maybe it has moved. She realizes later that it had closed only a few months ago exactly where my mom had first brought us. Another lost store, a place of familiarity for my mom, a lost face from the streets that grow busier but feel emptier.
We eventually get back to our car. A car rather than a train because my mom no longer feels safe traveling on her own on public transportation. Her old commute is no longer familiar to her. As we drive, the vision of red-and-gold street decor disappears behind us. We head towards Brooklyn, towards Bensonhurst, one of the younger Chinatowns. And where my home is now.
It’s hard for me to imagine some of the key members of my childhood, uncles and aunts that I saw every weekend at the dim sum parlors, or at the chicken butcher, as part of the bloody, violent history of gangs in Chinatown. It’s even harder imagining my parents, who raised me near Brooklyn’s Chinatown in Sunset Park and later settled into a Staten Island suburban lifestyle, walking those streets of downtown Manhattan.
And while Chinatown to me now has never felt dangerous, and I had only heard of the danger through movies and television shows, a grief took over me. A grief for a history and neighborhood that was never mine as I grew up more in Brooklyn than in the city. A grief for a community that was very troubled, yet was familiar with each other. And a grief for a history that will take many more interviews and conversations to fully unfold.
I ask my dad some follow-up questions during the drive, pestering him with my endless curiosities. Eventually he tires from talking but ends the conversation with one comment.
“It’s like this: When I used to walk around, I would say hi to everyone, right? Now, there’s no one there. I don’t know any of them,” he gestures behind us. “Back then I knew everyone. Or I knew that they would at least say hello back to me. But now, it’s not like that.”
“Was it better back then? Even with all the gangs?”
“I think so. I think it was better then than now.”
