Every morning, I woke to the chorus of Chinese women crowding into the narrow elevator on their way to the garment factories upstairs. My first home in New York was on the second floor of a seven-story building on Grand Street in Manhattan. As the elevator climbed, their lively voices slowly dissolved, as though sinking beneath water. Just as I began drifting back to sleep, another sound would rise from across the street: women calling to one another from opposite windows, their voices echoing through Grand Street with the warmth and force of everyday life. By evening, that same energy returned like a passing storm, filling the building with laughter and conversation. I would set aside my work and follow the tide of neighbors into Chinatown, where the glowing red lights and crowded sidewalks became part of my nightly routine.
My husband and I had little money, so we shared a cavernous loft with his roommate. A creaking wooden staircase led to our sleeping loft, where a pile of dusty drums and percussion instruments had been abandoned by a previous tenant. Lying beside them at night, I often imagined myself as a traveling performer, exhausted after another stop on an endless tour, finding a moment's rest in the corner of a worn circus tent.
One afternoon, my husband burst through the door, still clutching a broom, his face glowing with excitement.
“I got it!”
He had convinced the wide-eyed Greek owner of a donut shop at the corner of Broadway and Canal Street to let him set up a sidewalk stand. He built a cart from a wooden work crate, attached rubber wheels, and draped it with canvas until it looked almost professional. Before sunrise the next morning, we wheeled it several blocks through the quiet streets. The Korean couple selling nearby watched us cautiously at first, then relaxed when they saw my husband's embroidered Brazilian blouses instead of merchandise that competed with theirs. I exchanged a quick smile with them before hurrying down to the R train, headed for my part-time job at a clothing store in Brooklyn.
“Check it out! Check it out!”
My husband's booming voice rolled through the street. Chinese women and tourists drifted toward the stand as if pulled by the sound itself. Whenever his best-selling items ran out, he would hand a few dollars and a scribbled note to the bespectacled homeless man who lingered nearby. The man would hurry several blocks to a wholesaler, where supplies could still be picked up on credit, then race straight to the liquor store after collecting his errand money.
By then my husband had long since stopped worrying about appearances. Even when fellow artists tried to slip unnoticed into Pearl Paint across the street, embarrassed to be caught by a friend hawking blouses on the sidewalk, he would call out their names at the top of his lungs. Finding someone to watch the stand while he ran to the restroom mattered far more than saving face.
Our landlord, an elderly Chinese man, grew bean sprouts in the damp basement beneath the building. Once a month, when I went downstairs to pay the rent, he would come stomping toward me in heavy rubber boots, pocket the money, and then generously stuff several handfuls of fresh bean sprouts into a bag for us to take home. After rent, there was rarely a dollar left. We survived on bean sprout soup, bean sprout rice, and seasoned bean sprouts. We were desperately poor, but we never put down our paintbrushes.
Eventually, soaring rents forced us to leave. We crossed the Williamsburg Bridge in search of a cheaper place to live farther from Manhattan.
Yet the voices that filled that narrow elevator each morning, and the quiet generosity of neighbors who helped one another endure hard times, have never left me. Chinatown remains the place where I first learned that becoming an artist had little to do with art school or polished galleries. It was something I learned on those crowded streets, among working people who carried one another through ordinary days with resilience, dignity, and grace.
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