According to my in-depth online research, I was first able to identify the names of a total of sixty-two Asian restaurants around areas mainly in the Chinatown and East Village neighborhoods in lower Manhattan that were once closed since March 2020—when the “New York State on Pause” was authorized by Cuomo. While six have fortunately resumed their business, other fifty-six have permanently shut down. This staggering rate of closure even increased during my later in-person visits to the neighborhood as I discovered five additional closed eatery spots that have not made any appearance on the sources I have examined before. This hence enlarged my data set to sixty-seven Asian restaurants(table 1), sixty-one of which are permanently closed since COVID hits the country (i.e., indicating the closing rate of 91.0%). Visualizing the locations of these restaurants in pair with the shapefiles of NYC geographical features(figure 1 to 4), while the red dots represent shops that remain closed, the orange dots display the ones that have now reopened[1]. The predominant color of red thus conveys both the tremendous loss and slow rate of recovery that has taken place in the food and service industry.
In this case, the first set of descriptive maps(figure 1 to 4) present my initial analysis based on the quantitative data obtained from the official source which respectively concerns with four indicators that demonstrate the local demography of New York City. According to figure 1 and figure 2, the lower east region is certainly amongst the areas in Manhattan that have the highest concentration of people of color and especially Asians. Specifically, given the darkest degree of brown with reference to the legend bar(figure 2), Chinatown—as denoted by its name in a literal sense—is proven to be the district that attracted the greatest number of Asian population in Manhattan. However, in contrast to this seemingly blooming pattern of minority cultures, figure 3 and 4 both suggest the potential social issue of this very same district as a site of extreme poverty. Unlike other surrounding neighborhoods located in downtown New York, Chinatown and its eastern surroundings exhibit the lowest level of medium gross rent and household income in as suggested by the lightest hue in the legend bar. Indeed, the information extracted from the map is confirmed by numerous news articles and scholarly studies that depicted the pressure of gentrification to local residents(Xu 2013, Naram 2017, Ngu 2019). The construction of new luxury buildings especially targeted to rich overseas Asian investors has resulted in not only the displacement of low-income residents but also a higher poverty rate in Chinatown and the lower east Manhattan(2019). Consequently, a combination of these indicators as depicted by the quantitative analysis together delineates the socio-economic background of Chinatown and its surroundings as a place with a high concentration of Asian population but also of severely disadvantaged economic standing. Given the research based on quantitative evidence drawn from statistical records, I was able to better understand the difficulties faced by Chinatown’s local businesses. Situated in the low-income neighborhoods, not to mention the lack of customers, the owners themselves might hardly have enough savings to sustain their business.
To better affirm my analysis and attain a more authentic sense of its local specificities, I visited Chinatown three times from November to early December. The empirical observation drawn from these trips thus leads to a fundamental change in my research methodologies. Upon my first arrival to neighborhoods near Bowery Street and the Manhattan Bridge on Sunday, Nov. 21 around 2pm, I was utterly shocked by its barren, solitary street view. According to my observation of the upper west side near Columbia University and Soho districts in midtown, while most shops have resumed their daily operations, the area is oftentimes flooded with visitors. However, on contrary to this, certain streets I’ve visited around Chinatown rarely have any pedestrians; the rusty iron curtains of the closed stores seemed to be ubiquitously present. While my discovery of the five additional closed restaurants has led to an enlarged sample size which further supported my calculations of the high percentage of Chinatown stores impacted by COVID that still haven’t reappeared on the market, I become increasingly curious about the specific logics of why such phenomenon occurred. In this case, what are the reasons unique to Chinatown that have resulted in a racialized pattern of desolation and passivity?
Inspired by the creativity of the feminist approach and the class discussions, I thus moved on to the qualitative aspects of attaining evidence to better support a narrative of loss. By striving to conduct street interviews with random local Chinatown business owners and customers, I used their accounts as first-hand evidence to disclose the hidden “everyday political struggles”(2018: 382). Figure 5, as my first qualitative map, demonstrate this nuanced preservation of disappearance. “70% of restaurants nearby were all closed”, “we have very few customers”, “I am not very optimistic about the future of Chinatown”; these heart-breaking accounts(i.e., yellow text boxes) from local business owners whom I have met during the way of my movement through space to visit these closed restaurants(i.e., blue dotted lines in accordance with red and orange points) have greatly enriched the subtilties and hence complicates my research. In this case, beyond a dominant regime of qualitative techniques, the reasonings that came from actual parties involved in the situation of social injustice not only display the sincerest attitude which commemorate the loss but also offers valuable evidence to certain underlying socio-political factors that I have previously overlooked.
Emphasized by business owners Zhang and Zheng(i.e., in figure 5 and figure 6), the fear of anti-Asian assaults remains a prominent factor that refrains many from reopening their store. “You heard about the recent shocking news? Many are afraid that their customers and especially employees will get hurt when traveling from elsewhere to Chinatown to eat and work.” Despite talking in Cantonese which I cannot immediately comprehend, Zheng’s facial expression of sorrow and indignance is clearly visible underneath the mask. “The news are all true… one case happened nearby, just around the corner… But I’m still opening my shop. I sincerely hope that more future actions will take place.” As a representative of Chinatown residents, Zheng serves as a great exemplification of the grassroots power that took place through her narration of remembrance and more importantly, a courageous sense of resistance. Refusing to be reduced to a passive agent prone to injustice and eviction, Zheng articulates a sense of hope and also activism. In a way, by returning to the individualities and nuances against “a violence of abstraction”, I regard the map in figure 5 as a collective work of storytelling that aims to criticize and pushes back against the violence of anti-Asian racism and dispossession (2018: 385).
Following Zheng’s response, I then asked: “If people are anxious about traveling from elsewhere to Chinatown… what do you mean by ‘elsewhere’? Where exactly do they come from?”. Referring to the answers by Zheng and moved by her bravery of resistance, I decided to incorporate my visual documentation of Chinatown I’ve taken along the routes(i.e., its locations are denoted by the smaller, geotagged green dots in figure 5&6) into figure 6 that is both a map and an artwork of collage. In the map, the purple arrows pointing to Chinatown illustrate the approximate residential address of three customers(according to my street interview) and three employees(according to Zheng’s exemplification) who regularly travel to Chinatown (e.g., near Rutgers Park in the LES, Little Neck in Long Island, uptown West Harlem, etc.). From this process of drawing multiple arrows from the so-called “elsewhere” to Zheng’s small eatery under the Manhattan bridge, I am able to better visualize a pattern of intense connectedness. Through linking Chinatown with diversified places beyond its official, cartographic boundaries, I further challenged my previous, static view of space.
Consequently, rather than conceptualizing Chinatown as a place that is encapsulated and confined by a set of a priori borderlines, figure 6 presents a powerful counterargument by demonstrating the spatial dependencies between this district and the “elsewheres” beyond its confined boundaries. The geographic scales of Chinatown, never as an isolated area by itself, is fact socially and culturally constructed by the dynamic flow of people who are moving in and out through space. Contextualizing this framework of theory in the background of the closing stores, the declining businesses in Chinatown then must never be attributed as a result of its own fault. Appealing to a more open view of space in figure 6, I consider the racialized violence in Chinatown and its surroundings as embedded in an all-encompassing network of social relations constituted by people across all regions in which everyone may hold a portion of responsibility.
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