wonton justice

on the weekend, daphne and i often walk from our mid-town apartment to chinatown. we enjoy the exercise and the chance to talk about this and that. and the fact that we usually pick up some groceries and grab a quick bite while there is almost besides the point.

there is a tofu joint on lower bowery that we favor. we would each get a small plastic container of warm tofu-hua or tofu custard, hers with light syrup and mine with scallions, sesame seeds, soy sauce and minced spicy pickles. if we’re feeling it, we would also get an onion pancake or chinese fried dough to split. the fact that all this food costs us only 3 bucks always leaves me feeling a little smug afterwards.

last weekend, however, we decided to eat at another place we sometime frequented located in a supermarket on elizabeth street. as we settled in with our soy milk, taro bun and rice porridge with cod flakes, a man suddenly dashed out of crowd of shoppers with several angry store clerks in pursuit. just as the man reached the door he got tangled up with several confused shoppers and was immediately seized by the clerks.

as they dragged the alleged perp back into the market, a crowd gathered. the clerks, looking like a bizarre paramilitary outfit in their white cafeteria uniforms, shoved him against the wall. my cantonese is poor, but it wasn’t hard to tell from the harsh tones, rough handling and snatches of venomous words that the man was catching some serious shit.

a bag of frozen dumplings was found in the man’s jacket pocket and the crowd tightened around him. they stared at him like a pack of wolves about to rip into a cornered pray. just as i was wondering if someone should call the cops, out came a polaroid instant camera and a picture of the man with the bag of dumplings was taken.

it was a weird picture. holding the dumplings next to his head like they do on tv commercials, he grimaced into the camera with nervously twisted lips and small panicky eyes. i recall seeing similar polaroids at the checkout counters of other chinatown markets, their miserable subjects posing with the stolen goods, all with that same look of a beaten dog.

when we left, the crowd was still enjoying the spectacle, with a few egging the puffy-chested clerks on. i’m not sure if the cops were ever called.

shame or “losing face” is one of the great motivators in chinese culture, holding sway over even someone like me, who largely came of age in the us. so it’s not really surprising in the semi-insular world of chinatown that public humiliation remains an accepted form of punishment, if not deterrent. while such tactics may serve the same purpose as the “perp walk” often seen in high-profile cases from the world beyond mott street, in the hands of the chinatown crowd, however, it is a custom; and because of the mob involved, it is far more unsettling.

when i run across these odd cultural moments, i sometime think about alice stuart’s “(i’m going to) new york city,” from the “crazy with the blues” album (country con fusion, 2000). stuart has been playing the genre-hopping game since the mid-‘60s by working with the likes of lightnin’ hopkins, frank zappa, and jerry garcia. i found this song several years ago doing a+r for a music website and was struck by its world-weary longing, something that has always been part of new york’s unique emotional fabric for me.

sharing that emotional grounding as well as some stylistic similarities is gary lucas’ “mad world." a regular fixture on the downtown scene for decades, lucas is best known for his work with “ice cream for crow”-era captain beefheart and on jeff buckley’s classic “grace” album. “the mad world” is taken from “the edge of heaven” (harmonia mundi, 2003), a collection of mid-century chinese pop songs reinterpreted in different styles that i executive produced several years ago(more on that later).

Posted by cellpharmer at September 14, 2004 05:18 AM