NYC Chinatown Days of Yore

3/29/08

“Baby Elephant” strikes me as an elegant phrase with which to inaugurate my return to an illustrious writing career that had become sidetracked by other pressing matters many months ago. On second thought, the phrase “Pressed Duck” might provide a more appropriate beginning, and lo, images of Pell and Canal Streets in the Chinatown district of New York City readily come to mind.

Dare I admit in print, as I have often done privately, that quite a bit of my New York State Regents Scholarship of 1955-1959 went towards dining in George Goon’s atmospheric Canton Restaurant on 6 Mott Street? I can still savor the aroma of lobster with shrimp sauce, as well as the shrimp with lobster sauce, amongst other delicacies I enjoyed there during my undergraduate days of totally free education at CCNY, an education that appears to have been chiefly gastronomic, to judge by what I remember best from my college career of so long ago.

In hindsight it seems that the aforementioned elephant might well have blocked the doors of creativity had I let it do so. Nearby there lay a small arcade featuring a fortune-telling captive rooster. Feeling compassion towards this unfortunate soul, I inserted my quarter as instructed, thereby feeding our rooster a measly food pellet, in an act that also pulled a lever that released a small card bearing my daily fortune. I clearly had a fortune to be told, unlike that poor creature trapped in its cage till the end of its days. Ah, existentialism!

Walking a bit further along Mott Street, I often noticed a gift shop with an overhead sign that said “Yick On Lung.” Today, while in the throes of pneumonia, I clearly see that sign again, down across the years. For further solace, I can backtrack and turn the corner onto Pell Street, where there was a mysterious door to my right bearing the message: “Stop! If you haven’t a friend in the world, enter!” What was inside, and is it still there today?

Is my old acquaintance P.D. still squatting outside in the cold, nearby on Canal Street, as I once saw him after he was evicted from our tenement? He had initiated me into the secrets of boiling white rice in a large cauldron: the rice was ready to serve after the steam surrounded the lid and drifted towards the center. The remaining hot water was good for the stomach and could also be used in the preparation of a thick peasant soup variously known as “dzhuk” or “congee.” P. sliced tasty bits of Chinese sausage into the pot, and we had a nice dinner. As I recall, he was hoping we could pool our resources and open a casino together, with “bad girls” as temptresses, and with me in the role of fluent English-speaking manager. And then he was gone.

During the Chinese New Year celebrations, there were always paper dragons and colorful lanterns in the store windows of Chinatown, and with luck I could witness a lovely procession going down the street. For ethnic contrast a few blocks away, one could also partake of the Festival of Saint Gennaro in the Italian neighborhood.

And I walked onwards into other cities and into different times.