Street Level

Among the few photographs I have of my paternal grandparents is a succession of family portraits taken in their one-bedroom apartment at 417 Grand Street. In each picture, more than twenty people are squeezed into a space barely wide enough for the couch upon which my grandparents sit. Over the years, young children appear in the frames while young adults fade from them. The only real constant is my grandparents, growing grayer each year, but still sitting straight and dignified, unsmiling in the middle of their filial sons and daughters.

Looking at these photographs as I was growing up, I didn’t think about who these people were. Instead, I wondered how they all fit into such a tiny space. Were people smaller back then? Was it some kind of trick like clowns packed in a clown car?

My parents left the East Coast when I was three, so I had no real sense of these family reunions aside from the pictures. My memory of my grandparents was even more diffuse, reconstructed from what others told me. Years after their deaths, when I finally saw 417 Grand Street again, I thought of how people’s voices must have filled the living room with a bursting din.

The apartment is on the 11th floor of a towering brick co-op flanked by three others, much like spokes on a wheel. From one of the apartment’s windows—the one against which all the family photographs were taken—you can see the Williamsburg Bridge cutting across the East River and the spire of the Chrysler Building glittering in the distance. From the other window you can barely see the Manhattan Bridge leading into Brooklyn.

When my grandparents moved into the apartment in 1956, they were the only Chinese family in the building. In fact, they were one of few Chinese families in the area. Although Chinatown lay just a few blocks to the west, this part of Grand Street was predominantly Jewish.

My grandparents had come from Hong Kong, where they’d lived since the Communists took over China in 1949. Before that, they lived in a region in southern China called Toisan. In the mid-50s, it seemed every immigrant in Chinatown was from Toisan. Like most immigrants in New York, they sought a better life here not for themselves, but for their children.

My grandfather had retired by the time he came to the States. He had been a doctor. At one time he was the personal physician of Sun Yat-Sen, the man who founded the Republic of China in 1911. My grandmother had never worked inside or outside the home. According to some accounts, my grandfather thought of her as a fragile, beautiful vase. She was not allowed to do anything, even housework. Once settled in Chinatown, my grandparents rarely left their apartment, except to attend a wedding or funeral. Even after forty years of living in the States, neither of them knew English very well.

In a way, they didn’t need to leave their apartment. Everyone they wanted to see came to them – children and grandchildren and assorted relatives. My grandmother would give the children boxes of Sun Maid raisins. I like to think she did it because the red boxes resembled the red envelopes of money given to children during Chinese New Year.

Family members came together especially at American and Chinese holidays. Whether it was Midautumn Festival or Thanksgiving, Christmas or Chinese New Year, food played an important role at those gatherings. While there might be a token nod to American cuisine like a turkey at Thanksgiving, the rest of the menu was always Chinese. On most occasions, they ordered egg-drop soup and lobster from a Chinatown restaurant and grownups drank wine by the teaspoonful so they wouldn’t get drunk. Kids threw raisins at each other. And finally, at the end of a large gathering, a commemorative photograph would be taken.

Conspicuously absent from many of these family photographs is my father. He only lived at 417 Grand Street for a few years, while he attended Brooklyn Polytechnic.