This Is What Chinatown Looks Like in the 21st Century

A world of its own to New York tourists and locals alike, Chinatown holds a singular experience for its thousands of residents—it’s a home away from home. Brought to life by its flavors, languages, and stories, the historically layered culture perseveres, even as everything around it changes. One of Manhattan’s largest immigrant communities, Chinatown began on Mott and Pell streets in the mid-1800s. As racial animus grew in western states during the Industrial Revolution, it became a sanctuary for the Chinese American immigrant community (which was predominantly male due to anti-immigration laws targeting Chinese women). The population was largely from southern China, setting the groundwork for the Cantonese cuisine and languages that are most dominant today. Following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which overturned the de facto immigration quota system in an attempt to abolish origin-based discrimination, the influx of Chinese immigration and diaspora boomed and diversified into the thriving ethnic enclave it is today. 

Amidst the changing cityscape and recent xenophobia in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinatown continues to uphold its culture as New York’s social and economic epicenter for the Chinese community. It serves as creative inspiration for its locals; from New York Fashion Week mainstay Sandy Liang—whose work is inspired by her upbringing in Chinatown and, more specifically, her dad’s restaurant, Congee Village—to Mei Lum, Wing on Wo and Co.’s artist in residence who creates immersive art through thangka, a traditional Tibetan fabric scroll. Though the 155 bilingual street names—handwritten by local calligrapher Tan Binggzhong (譚炳忠)—have shrunk to half the amount and 出租 (For Rent) signs grow increasingly pervasive on tenement façades, Chinatown’s ethos continues to prosper. In fact, it houses the largest population of Chinese people in the Western hemisphere, with an estimated 80,000 to 150,000 people. 

The photographer Thomas Holton’s intimate series and book, The Lams of Ludlow Street, narrates one Chinese American family’s story in Chinatown over the past two decades. The critically acclaimed series follows the lives of the five-person family, starting at their 300-square-foot apartment on Ludlow Street. Even though Holton, who is of Chinese descent, grew up with family in Chinatown, he always felt a disconnection due to the language barrier, which motivated him to investigate his community through his own work. “I photographed mostly the street scenes—the guy selling the fish on Mott Street, the merchandise stores, all that stuff anyone can see,” he says. “But I would look up and see apartments; I wanted to get behind closed doors because that’s where life was happening.” 

Initially introduced to the Lams through a Chinatown housing advocate, the photographer developed a familial bond with Shirley, Steven, and their three children. Holton recalls the family’s weekly hobbies, customs, and rituals that he became a part of: buying pork buns and sweet sesame buns on the corner of Grand Street, watching Chinese soap operas while setting the table, and picking up the kids from PS184M Shuang Wen, the only dual-language school in the city. 

“As a photographer, I used to look up at these old tenement buildings and want to see the lives inside,” he explains. “In those five- or six-story walk-ups, there would be 10 people over a hot pot.” While the photo series was initially born out of his urge to investigate his family’s culture, it grew into a lesson about family itself, as well as the familial values central to Chinese culture. “It’s much less about the material stuff; the leaky pipes, the tenement buildings, small apartments, whatever people see when they think ‘Chinatown apartment,’” he says. “Their experience isn’t everyone’s experience in Chinatown. The project isn’t about this family in a tiny apartment; it’s a document of one Chinese American family doing the best they can for themselves and their children. Life isn’t easily scripted: they went through a divorce; the kids have moved out and in; they go through ups and downs, just like we all do.” 

Over the course of the 20-year period in which he shot the Lams, as their family changed, so did the neighborhood around them. At the intersection of Canal and Ludlow streets, what was once an arbitrary cross section in Chinatown has become one of the buzziest micro-neighborhoods in the Lower East Side. The headquarters of New York’s young tastemakers—a niche of skaters, intellectuals (as well as pseudo-intellectuals), and artists—the neighborhood (or rather, the geographical concept) is lined with gate-kept boutiques, luxury hotels, and grimy dive bars with unparalleled clout. Nevertheless, the Lams’ familial tenacity persevered. The Lams’ apartment is rent controlled, but Holton notes that the other apartments in the building are close to $4,000 a month. “Their apartment looks exactly the same, but all the thick paint in the other apartments and hallways have been exposed to show ‘the exposed brick,’ as people say,” he laughs. “Mostly everyone around them is a 25-year-old hipster white girl!”

“As soon as the galleries and Thai restaurants showed up, I was like, ‘Okay, now Ludlow Street is a destination. It’s the Lower East Side.’ But we still go to King’s dumpling for our 50 bags of frozen dumplings. And the Lams still live in the same home, they’re just growing and evolving.” 

Qian Julie Wang, a civil rights lawyer and author of Beautiful Country: A Memoir of an Undocumented Childhood, similarly reflects upon Chinatown’s poignant diaspora amidst its changing cultural climate. The award-winning writer moved here with her family from northern China in 1994 at the age of seven; although they battled extreme poverty, a stark culture shock, and the threat of deportation, Wang managed to find community in downtown NYC. “It was my second or third day in America—we lived in Brooklyn, and [Chinatown] was the first place we visited and eventually the place we went every day,” she says. “According to my dad, it was the hub for everything if you were a new Chinese immigrant—a place to buy Chinese food cheap, a place to get a job, a place to find a community.”

Division Street was the place of many firsts for Wang. Her mother’s first job was at a sweatshop on Division, where she sewed labels onto garments and earned three cents per piece. After school, Wang would join her—snipping threads off the back, she earned one cent per piece. Her mother later worked at a sushi manufacturing facility, where they were “wooed by the relatively (it was always relative) lucrative pay and our dreams of a better life.” In the outskirts of Manhattan, which has evolved into Tribeca today, they worked from morning to night; she describes how “my nose saw a hundred eels making their final swims through a sewage pipe….The fish smell stayed on our skin and in our hair until our next washing, and we did not stop shaking until long after we wrapped ourselves deep in our comforters, our purple arms with their goose bumps and dark blue veins crossed against our chests.” 

Division Street was also where Wang learned English and American culture. “I went to school there at PS124—I’d take the subway there every morning, and after school I went to work at the sweatshop,” she says.“When I got older I went to the Chatham Square Library, which was the first home for my American learning and my American dream.” 

It was also where Wang first experienced the diversity of Chinese American culture. “Every child is myopic, so I assumed every other Chinese person was like me,” she says. “But I didn’t realize China was huge, and there were a lot of people from Guangzhou and Fuzhou who talked differently. We were close to Beijing, so we were watched more closely, and there were more barriers to immigration. It was weird seeing people whose families had been here for generations and American Chinese kids who spoke English and Cantonese or no Chinese at all. I didn’t feel like I looked different, but it was a disconnect that took me a while to adjust to.” 

Despite these cultural barriers, Chinatown was still the only place that offered any semblance of home to Wang. In her gripping memoir, she writes, “Mei Guo (the Chinese word for America, which translates to ‘Beautiful Country’), was nothing like what everyone promised. Everything smelled strange and looked different.” She remembers how her family would buy familiar produce in Chinatown after work and school and bring it back to Brooklyn each evening. “It was always the best deal, especially if you waited till the end of the day. We could rarely afford meat back then, but we got a lot of veggies from carts and the markets on Pell and East Broadway and Mott. It’s still the best place I go to for my produce.”

Although the western outskirts of Chinatown have evolved over the past 20 years, many prime spots in Chinatown that best embody the neighborhood ethos (and represent Wang’s aspirational American life) have been preserved. “My biggest interaction with Chinatown restaurants was Golden Unicorn,” says Wang. “My dad worked a floor above the restaurant, so sometimes I would press the button to Golden Unicorn on my way up so I could see and smell what people were eating. It was the biggest unicorn of my Chinatown life—something that I wanted but couldn’t have.” Now run by automated electric dim sum carts and recognized as a tourist staple, Golden Unicorn still remains a popular, authentic dim sum spot on the corner of East Broadway. 

“I don’t know that I wish the sweatshop and sushi processing place were still there. It’s bizarre to me that there are now lofts on that block where Justin Timberlake has property,” Wang says about the neighborhood’s recent changes. She still frequents East Broadway and Division Street, often looking up at the old sweatshop building and wondering what’s there now. “I remember taking the F train to East Broadway and walking toward Division Street, approaching a whole hub near the Manhattan bridge,” she adds. “I remember clearly noticing that the buildings were American, the streets were American, but there were Chinese people. I thought maybe there’s a place for us, a place where we can live.”