Shuttered restaurants cooked meals for first responders. It’s an echo of the days after 9/11, when, even as the neighborhood was plunged into isolation, its residents reached out. Businesses, non-profits and individuals alike have spent the pandemic providing free meals to healthcare workers and people in need, organizing volunteers to patrol the neighborhood amid the rise in anti-Asian violence, building free outdoor dining shelters for restaurants and fundraising to help struggling small businesses. ![]() Mutual aid efforts have proliferated in the neighborhood. Yet the crisis has also provoked an upwelling of energy and self-reliance. Many in the community feel a sense of existential threat. In the devastating 20 months since, numerous businesses have shut down, including Jing Fong, a huge banquet hall that seated 800 and served 10,000 people a week. Racism and xenophobia emptied the streets of Chinatown in late January 2020, months before the city imposed Covid-19 lockdown measures. Twenty years and another crisis later, many there feel ignored once again. “Asian Americans are always assumed to be fine,” said Hunter College sociologist Margaret M Chin. Those problems and their impact were little known outside the community. Phone and network lines went out, and full service did not return for nearly four months. Two subway lines skipped the neighborhood for six weeks. For eight days, vehicles and non-residents were blocked from entering the area, and access remained difficult for months more. In the aftermath of 9/11, a place defined by outsiderness became even more isolated. In 1882, the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act largely froze the community in place for eight decades, until changes to the law opened up immigration from countries outside western Europe. First established by Chinese sailors and merchants putting down roots near what was then a multi-ethnic, multilingual port area, its numbers expanded significantly during the 1870s, when waves of anti-Chinese violence across the American west drove large numbers of Chinese workers east. Manhattan Chinatown is an ethnic enclave born of exclusion – a great irony, given its physical location just blocks from City Hall. It would also, however, spur people to action, cast light on the neighborhood’s needs and prove its resilience.Ī vendor stands at an empty fruit and vegetable stand in Chinatown, New York City, in November 2001. Both then and now, the crisis would test the community and lay bare its problems – and by extension, the fault lines of the country at large. What followed felt unprecedented at the time, but is all too familiar today in the Covid-19 pandemic: empty streets, businesses at a standstill, mass unemployment.Īnd there was anxiety about health – about inhaling the poison hovering in the air – and absolute uncertainty about the future. In ensuing days, it also filled with posters of the missing – one face after another, their fates unknown – and national guard troops and police, stopping people and vehicles from entering what became known as the frozen zone. It was the first tower falling.Ĭhinatown, just 10 blocks from Ground Zero, filled with heavy smoke, debris and stunned-looking people covered in ash, making their way north. ![]() ![]() ![]() She made it to her office on the edge of Chinatown, and was inside when she felt “the windows shuddering and sucking in”, while outside, a huge gray cloud rolled up the avenue.
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