By the time Shaohua Yu erected his stand at around 10 a.m., Chinatown was already bustling. Tourists were wandering around the stalls along Canal Street, where Chinese peddlers and recent immigrants from Africa were selling the same fake Louis Vuitton and Gucci products. Behind Mr. Yu, the New Kam Man supermarket had just rolled up its steel curtain. A row of roasted ducks hung in the window facing him.
Mr. Yu, 61, has occupied a spot between Mulberry and Mott Streets almost every day for more than 20 years, and he has seen enough to know that hustle can no longer promise prosperity to immigrants working in Chinatown.
The changes in his stand are proof.
For years, Mr. Yu was known and celebrated for traditional handcrafted sculptures: elephants, flamingos, butterflies and the like, all made from intricately folded palm leaves. Now he often doesn’t bother to even display them. His stall was almost indistinguishable from any other vendor’s: plastic bracelets for $1 each; knit caps for $5.
From the moment he arrived in New York from Wuhan, China, in 1999, Mr. Yu was unique. There were throngs of street artists selling calligraphy and portraits, but he was the only one in all of New York City, as far as he could tell, to deal exclusively in a distinctive Chinese-style palm-leaf weaving, a tradition that dates back at least 1,700 years.
Every night in his Chinatown bedroom, he would painstakingly cut, weave and coax palm leaves into frogs, cranes, reindeer. A simple frog would sell for $5, but for a complex figure, like a dragon, he would charge as much as $35.
Those days are long gone. During the depths of the coronavirus pandemic, Manhattan’s Chinatown was tormented by the absence of tourists and a surge of anti-Asian hate, and according to Mr. Yu, it has not been the same since.
He still makes his palm-leaf figures occasionally, but he admitted that his passion for the craft may have faded. “Anything above $5 is hard to sell now,” Mr. Yu said. “I have to diversify my goods in order to survive.”
The life of the vendor in Chinatown has been brutal since the pandemic, but according to Mr. Yu, the decline began with the attacks of Sept. 11. 2001.
The collapse of the World Trade Center led to the loss of business from much of Lower Manhattan, including the financial district. The area would slowly return to life, but many Chinatown residents were pushed out by rising rents and fled to other parts of the city. The Asian population in Manhattan’s Chinatown dropped by 15 percent that decade, and another 10 percent by 2020. About 26,000 Chinese people live in Chinatown now, fewer than in the Chinatowns of Flushing, Queens, and Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst and Sunset Park.
Then e-commerce exploded. Many of the quirky souvenirs Chinatown was known for are available with one click online. Even the counterfeit designer bags that were once a not-so-secret appeal for visitors are now available all over Manhattan. “People don’t need to come to Chinatown any more,” said Karlin Chan, who moved to the neighborhood as a toddler and has been living there for 64 years. He has known Mr. Yu for ages, and when he passes by, he offers the craftsman a fist bump.
The atmosphere on Canal Street has also deteriorated, Mr. Yu said. Customers bargain hard, even for a $6 necklace, and some people now just walk away when they drop and break items. On a recent day, a woman jumped out of her Jeep behind Mr. Yu’s stall and threw a bag of ice in the face of a truck driver who had also left his vehicle. As the vendors gathered to watch, a man swept up a bunch of grapes from a fruit stall and ran off.
There were happier days when Mr. Yu arrived in the United States with a marriage-based green card and a suitcase full of dried palm leaves. He even brought an inspection certificate for the leaves in case he was questioned by customs, he said, but no one asked about them.
When he was a child, palm-leaf crafts were ubiquitous in his hometown Wuhan, on the banks of the Yangtze River. He learned to make them as a teenager after begging a street craftsman to take him on as an apprentice. He soon expanded his repertoire to more than 50 forms beyond the basic butterflies and frogs.
“I’d seen American tourists on the cruise ships docked on the banks of the Yangtze,” Mr. Yu recalled. “They seemed wealthy. I thought it was easy to make money in the U.S.”
After trying his hand at odd jobs in restaurants and bakeries in various places, from upstate New York to South Carolina, he settled with his then-wife, Meifang Shi, and her parents in their apartment in a Chinatown housing project and focused on his palm-leaf figurines.
When he first set up his booth, he was the only one on Canal Street selling palm dragons and giraffes, and he quickly attracted attention from homesick Chinese immigrants and curious passers-by. A young Chinese man who worked nearby became a frequent customer and said he would keep buying his crafts until Mr. Yu became a millionaire. (Mr. Yu hasn’t seen the man for some years.)
A white man living in SoHo loved his stuff so much, Mr. Yu recalled, that he once gave him an $80 tip. He was invited to perform at Lunar New Year parties. And some cultural event organizers even called him an “artist,” which, he insisted, was a misnomer.
The shift in the market for palm-leaf dragons was gradual. “It’s so sad,” said Ching Hin, who often stops by to chat with Mr. Yu when he comes to a Canal Street pharmacy his family owns. “One more Chinese tradition is lost.” He added: “But I don’t blame him. It’s hard to make money these days.”
The market is no better for traditional crafts outside of Chinatown. Mr. Yu had taught Ms. Shi how to fold palm leaves, and she set up her own stand at the corner of Broadway and Canal. It was there that Ms. Shi met a Bangladeshi immigrant who worked at a gift shop nearby and volunteered to teach her English. They fell into a relationship, and in 2001 she and Mr. Yu divorced. Ms. Shi and her new husband had started selling the crafts at other tourist sites in New York, and now she is a fixture in Times Square.
But just as on Canal Street, she has found that few customers are interested in handmade palm-leaf sculptures, and she also mostly gave up selling them. “Tourists now hold their wallets more tightly,” Ms. Shi said. She hopes the market will recover, but she has no plans to return to Chinatown. “There is no business there,” she said.
And yet there are signs of life. Though a bakery, a Chinese-style gift shop and a Chinese language bookstore that had been in the neighborhood for more than 50 years have shuttered recently, and the New Kam Man supermarket now opens later and closes earlier than ever, the trendy cafes and bubble tea shops have brought an undeniable vigor to a neighborhood that is more than 150 years old. At least a dozen Bangladeshi-owned gift shops have opened there in the past year.
“When the pandemic was going, tourists were down and down and down,” said Rafin Ahamad Raful, who runs one of the newly opened gift shops. “We are trying to make Chinatown again crowded.”
His shop took over the space of a Chinese-run fish market and is the third one Mr. Raful’s family owns in the neighborhood. Mr. Raful, 24, moved here from Bangladesh three and half years ago to join his family, and now his dream is to open more gift shops in Chinatown. “There are a lot of people coming for these souvenir stuff,” Mr. Raful said.
But to others, the identity of Chinatown is getting lost. “I admire the hardworking Bangladeshi vendors very much,” said Justin Yu, former president of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, a community organization almost as old as Chinatown. “But their souvenirs obscure the characteristics of Chinatown.”
But Mr. Yu doesn’t want to be preserved. The days when he made his living weaving palm leaves till midnight every day left him with chronic pain in his neck, back and waist. Making money in the United States, as it turned out, is much harder than he imagined.
Still, the street is cozy. Friends — former customers, postal workers, off-duty cops, people working at nearby shops, seniors on their way to doctor’s appointments — often stop by to chat with Mr. Yu. In the run-up to the election, his stand became a regular stage for political debate.
Mr. Yu, who said he voted for President-elect Donald J. Trump, frequently got into it with Fun Fun Lee, a 72-year-old Chinatown resident who liked Vice President Kamala Harris. “She always laughs crazily,” Mr. Yu said of Ms. Harris, “and she is responsible for crime problems in California.”
“Your Trump is crazier,” Mr. Lee countered. “He encouraged people to drink bleach.”
On election night, Mr. Yu went to bed at midnight and woke up in the wee hours to check the outcome. Mr. Trump’s victory made him too excited to fall back to sleep. “His policies will make the economy better, and people will have more money to spend in Chinatown,” he said.
Mr. Yu wraps up every day by 7 p.m. Before the pandemic, if the weather was nice, Chinatown’s streets teemed at night, and he would stay open until 10 p.m. But now most of the streets in Chinatown are empty after dusk.
“When I just came to the U.S.,” Mr. Yu said, “I thought, it’s such a great country, I won’t hesitate to fight a war for it. But now, it feels like a different country.” He had folded up his stand and bundled together his cartoon figurines, paper-cut cards and bracelets in two wooden trunks and some shopping bags, which he needed to load into a nearby storage unit.
“This feels like a different Chinatown, too,” he added wearily. After he divorced his wife and moved out of the housing project, he couldn’t afford to live in Chinatown. He now has a long subway ride to his home in Queens.
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