“My great grandpa opened a restaurant in the Bronx, then the first Chinese-American restaurant in Flushing,” rapper Awkwafina wrote on an Instagram post. “To see what the pandemic has done to my city, and especially it’s Chinatown is devastating.”
The long-time advocate for Asian American communities recently donated to a Chinatown small business relief fund started by Welcome To Chinatown, a grassroots initiative launched in March aiming to help disproportionately disadvantaged businesses in Chinatown through the COVID-19 pandemic. As restaurants in New York are looking to bring back indoor dining with the new option of adding a 10% COVID-19 relief surcharge to their bills, Chinatown, facing new challenges and opportunities, is still painfully recovering from its loss of foot traffic.
Back in February, widespread xenophobia and fear of the virus had caused business for Chinatown restaurants to drop by 40% since January before the first cases emerged in New York. Small businesses have been closing at an unprecedented rate since the city’s lockdown, although the number will be hard to pin down until a few years from now, said Wellington Chen, executive president of Chinatown Partnership, a neighborhood improvement organization.
“During the pandemic, what’s the number one problem? Cash flow,” said Chen. Volunteer-based organizations like Welcome To Chinatown and Send Chinatown Love also realized the gravity of the sudden drop in income for restaurants and started fundraising to provide struggling businesses with immediate aid.
“When stay-at-home orders were put into place in March, these businesses were already operating at a deficit,” said Louise Palmer, who handles PR for Send Chinatown Love. As a result of racism and xenophobia, Chinatown lost their most lucrative incentive of the year — the Lunar New Year. “It is the most joyous time of the year; it is the most money-making time of the year,” said Palmer. But because of the spread of the coronavirus in China, “the whole neighborhood lost all that business.”
Restaurateurs’ Pride
Both organizations were met with skepticism from business owners at first. “Back then the concept of getting donations and asking [for] help from other people wasn’t a really widely accepted thing in the Asian community,” said Palmer. “Like, you build your store, by yourself, ground up, very independent.” With an innate understanding of the immigrant restaurateurs’ pride, Send Chinatown Love started the Gift-A-Meal initiative to purchase meals from restaurants with donations and feed the communities in need.
Welcome To Chinatown also brought in bulk catering orders to restaurants and donated the food to essential workers. “They were not necessarily familiar with the concept of a donation or an initiative that’s helping their business,” said Jennifer Tam, the organization’s co-founder, “but they definitely know how to prepare 30, 40, or 50 meals at a time.”
As the city brought back outdoor dining in June, Chen’s Chinatown Business Improvement District provided restaurants with umbrellas, tents, chairs, and sand bags left over from street festivals free of charge.
“If you don’t have the money to buy the tents, this is the time where we step in to lend you,” said Chen. Chinatown’s Mott Street — home to restaurants like Wok Wok, Wo Hop and Noodle Village — also became the beneficiary of Rockwell Group’s DineOut Mott Street program and was gifted brand new chairs, tables, and pavilions with banquettes. Now the block between Mosco and Worth Streets is a staple for New York’s vibrant outdoor dining scene, which has recently become a permanent fixture in the city.
Long-term Sustainability
For a neighborhood that heavily relies on tourism and daytime office workers like Chinatown, “long term foot traffic is the best, and pretty much only sustainable way to keep these businesses open into the future,” said Palmer.
According to Chen, Manhattan’s Chinatown has taken an especially hard hit in comparison to the satellite Chinatowns in outer boroughs, like Flushing. “The foot traffic in the outer boroughs is picking up for the simple reason that people are living there,” he said. “Whether you are working remotely [or not], you need to come downstairs to get your food — that’s logical.” Flushing is also a transportation hub, bringing traffic in on the Long Island Rail Road, the 7 train, and more than 20 bus lines.
Last year, New York attracted 65 million tourists from around the world, and many of them were from China. This year, international travel restrictions have largely frustrated the city’s tourism. According to Chen, the approximate 250,000 daytime commuters that go to work near Chinatown haven’t returned, either. On top of that, the New Yorkers who fled the city in fear of contracting the disease further crippled the city’s restaurant industry. For the small businesses in Chinatown, without their regulars, reopening could mean six months of lost revenue, heating bills, water bills, insurance bills, taxes, mortgage payments and wages waiting to be cleared, said Chen.
To generate foot traffic, Send Chinatown Love partnered with 13 restaurants and eateries, and hosted a self-guided Food Crawl to expose them to new customers. The event contributed over 1,200 purchases to the merchants, according to Julia Fei, one of the organization’s volunteers.
Online Presence
Welcome To Chinatown’s Jennifer Tam believes that some degree of modernization needs to take place for the neighborhood’s restaurants to develop their online presence. “I think it’s less about trying to change business models because one thing that we recognize is we see ourselves as partners; we don’t see ourselves as people coming in to suggest that they turn their business models upside down,” said Tam, whose team encouraged cash-based businesses to start their Instagram accounts and helped them build or update websites.
“However, we do think there are small bites and small ways they can make modifications to their businesses that they can explore that fit within their needs,” said Tam with modesty. “Because at the end of the day, these business owners are the owners, they know what’s best for their business. We’re just here to help.”
According to Send Chinatown Love’s website, most immigrant-run micro-businesses in Chinatown were not eligible for government loans. The language barrier posed even more difficulty for them to fill out the paperwork required for loan application. By the time they did get the paperwork ready, said Palmer, all of the funds had been used up by larger corporations.
“I firmly believe that if you’re an immigrant or minority owned business, you don’t have the same equity or equality into the resources that are made available,” said Tam. “That’s where I would hope that the city will help support Chinatown and other neighborhoods.”
While the city, facing a liquidity problem and lacking billions of dollars of taxes, is struggling to help, at least one elected official has expressed her empathy for the linguistic adversity that immigrant owned businesses are facing. “Folks don’t realize, we have so many different languages being spoken in Chinatown, and it’s important that we provide services that are accessible by everyone,” said Assemblymember Yuh-Line Niou in an interview with Gothamist. Niou is also one of the sponsors of the COVID-19 Small Business Recovery Lease Act, designed to alleviate rent burden for small businesses.
New Prospects
On Sept. 30, indoor food services in New York City were able to resume at 25% capacity, but Chen suggested that a lot of customers might not feel safe to dine indoors yet. The City Council also passed a bill to allow restaurants to apply a 10% COVID-19 relief surcharge to their bills. These changes will decidedly pose new uncertainties to the recovery of the restaurants in Chinatown.
In Chen’s opinion, 10% does not even begin to cover the restaurant owners’ colossal loss. He noticed that people had been, rightly so, tipping more generously, but the tip does not go to the restaurant operators, who are still in financial distress due to months of idling fee. “So if I were to say: I lost a lot of money, now to make up for a higher food cost, higher operating cost, higher minimum wage, I’m increasing my food [price] by 10%, you will not object to it — you will not even barely notice it,” he said. “Because a 10% increase for $10 is just one more dollar.”
Palmer, on the other hand, thinks the issue is trickier than that. “In Chinatown, these mom-and-pop businesses that we support have a very low price point because that’s what the community can afford,” she said. For young and employed millennials, a dollar might not be a big deal, “but if it is an older auntie that is on food assistance, a dollar can be a huge deal.”
“They were operating on thin profit margins,” Tam said of the community-oriented businesses in Chinatown. “That’s why they had been able to keep their prices so reasonable for so many years.”
October 1 marked the Mid-Autumn Festival, a time for family reunion at dinner tables. In the past, Chen’s Chinatown Partnership used to hold celebratory ceremonies in observance of the traditional holiday. While his organization has canceled its annual celebration due to city regulations, community members invited the Wan Chi Ming Dragon Lion Team for a dance performance last Sunday, which successfully drew a crowd and brought the streets of Chinatown back to life.
“In this special period of time, the number one guiding principle is be kind,” said Chen, in a note to those who wish to do their part in helping small businesses not only in Chinatown but in other neighborhoods as well. “Be kind, because people are hurting, and people need help and encouragement. So if there is any way we can help a fellow human being, do it.”
“During the pandemic, what’s the number one problem? Cash flow.” Wellington Chen, executive president of Chinatown Partnership