Between Two Rivers

Two short essays. In Chinatown, Manhattan.

1. haircut (kelly hair salon)

On Sunday morning, my father and I drove into Chinatown to get haircuts. The weather was bitterly cold and the sun brought all light and no heat, but none of it was cold enough to deter us from heading out. After parking at the municipal garage on Division Street—right in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge and the D train roaring overhead—we crossed the Bowery, walked up the crooked hook of Doyers Street, and then entered the Kelly Hair Salon at the corner on Pell.

It’s been just a few months since I was last in Chinatown, when I entertained my friends R. and F. from Belgium on separate occasions. But it was much longer since my last visit to the Kelly Salon, which has been around for as long as anyone in my family can remember. Indeed, it’s a miracle that the salon survived through three years of Covid, and the broader changes that have swept through Chinatown over the past decade and more.

But the moment I stepped inside, I knew I’d returned. In the same narrow space were the same two banks of chairs, each filled with a Chinese or Chinese American customer who was being served by a barber or stylist. The room was filled with lively conversation in Cantonese and (to a lesser extent) Mandarin, with every tenth exchange conducted in English. Over in the corner, three older barbers were debating the best (re: cheapest) way to cross the border between Hong Kong and mainland China, while a fourth was busy checking the weekend’s horse races. At the back of the room next to the coat rack, two stylists were huddled over their boxes of takeout from a local restaurant.

By the time I took my seat, and by the time the stylist’s razor made its first pass over my head, I felt like I was my twenty-something self again. The woman who cut my hair wasn’t a familiar face, but she could have been the stylist that used to ask me have you eaten yet? (the traditional way of asking how are you? in Chinese). That latter stylist, in turn, could have been my late aunt, who was still alive in those days and who embodied everything I loved about Chinatown: generations of city and neighborhood knowledge, a finger on the pulse of local gossip, a passionately material view of the world, and a maternal warmth residing beneath a layer of feigned impatience.

In any case, I closed my eyes—as I always do whenever I get a haircut—and watched as the darkness became filled with the light and heat of my memory. I’ve never forgotten that feeling, the way the city can take you back far enough to long for it.

2. tiny grains (pearl river mart)

I never grew up in Chinatown, but I visited it often enough in my childhood and adolescence to understand its significance. Living across the East River in Queens—and later, across the Hudson River in New Jersey—meant that every trip into Chinatown, and Manhattan more generally, was an event: whether it was to celebrate Chinese New Year, to mourn the passing of relatives, or to take friends out for lunch (and if they were lucky, dinner). Even now when I think of New York—not just as “the city,” but as an entire slice of life and a world of experience—I think more about neighborhoods like Chinatown (of which the entire metropolitan region has plenty), and the sensory data attached to them, than anything else. The clattering of porcelain at the now-defunct Grand Harmony Dim Sum and Seafood Restaurant. The smell of fresh and less-than-fresh fish on the corner of Baxter, Walker, and Canal. The endless chorus of car horns on Mulberry, Mott, Bayard, Elizabeth, and virtually every other street in the neighborhood.

That said, I never lived in Chinatown, and much as I’d like to, I can’t lay claim to any experience beyond that of the local day-tripper. For that reason, I’m especially grateful for the work of the local photographer, programmer, and activist Edward Cheng, which I discovered when the family and I visited the latest location of the longtime institution Pearl River Mart. Tucked away at the very back of the all-ranging store—behind shelves of calligraphy supplies and racks of qi paos, and right next to the fitting rooms—was a small gallery space featuring an exhibition titled Tiny Grains. The exhibition, which will run through January 12, comprises Cheng’s photographic record of Chinatown on its “return to ‘normalcy’” from the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic, and his series of grainy black-and-white photos shows the neighborhood’s irreversible evolution in relief (in all senses of the word).

Cheng, it turned out, was also there, and he greeted us warmly with free coffee (“If you guys don’t drink it, I’ll be hyper-caffeinated till 5 pm”) and a brief overview of the project. A native of Chinatown who still lives ‘around the corner’, Cheng makes visible both the pandemic’s psychic and economic scars and the community’s deeper stages of struggle and success. Unsurprisingly, he also knew my aunt M. and her son L., both of whom are equally active in Chinatown affairs. This knowledge led to some lively exchanges between him and Dad, who also worked as a photographer in New York for over two decades.

It also convinced me to buy Cheng’s book for ourselves, as a small but significant reminder of the meaning Chinatown continues to hold in our lives, long after we ourselves had left it.