Street Level

Jack Chu leans against someone’s black car parked in front of May Lok Grocery, a tiny storefront on Hester Street where he and his friends stock up on soda, chips, rolling papers, liquor, beer, and cigarettes that cost less than the standard citywide price. It’s a Saturday night, and Jack’s waiting for a phone call from a girl from Philly. He met her the night before in a bar in Chinatown—or C-town, as he calls it. The girl has Jack’s brother John’s cell phone number. She and her friends are supposed to call to hang out with Jack, John and their friend Perry.

I met Jack once before, on Thanksgiving, when he was home from college upstate. He originally told me he was studying at a broadcasting school. He later revised his story and admitted to living at some sort of juvenile delinquent home. Now he’s back in town for spring break. He greets me, “Yo, girl, you got guts being down here.” Then he whispers, “Better watch out for your green.” I wonder if I should be worried. I wonder why most of these kids think I’m a cop.

“Yo, I think she’s frontin’,” Jack tells me, fidgeting with the hood on his gray sweatshirt and tipping his baseball cap at a jaunty angle to shade his glassy eyes. He debates ditching plans with the Philly girl and going instead to the foreign import car show at a Flushing mall. “That’s where my boys are at,” Jack says, but he’d rather not pay the $25 entrance fee. When he finds out there’s going to be a wet T-shirt contest for the

buxom models who display the cars, he’s tempted to hop one of the vans that take people from Chinatown to Flushing.

John and Perry have no interest in the car show. They lose patience hanging out on the sidewalk, yet come up with no alternatives. It’s too dark to play handball at the courts around the corner on Grand Streets, and anyway, that’s where they just spent most of the day. They veto joining friends at a pool hall on Eldridge. The cyber café they used to frequent a few blocks down Canal Street has closed permanently, and they definitely don’t want to hang out in one of their families’ cramped tenement apartments. Besides, Jack is in charge of making the plans for the night.

So, John and Perry stand in front of May Lok, wandering in and out to play one of the four video games jammed into the back corner, chatting with friends who walk by. May Lok grocery has been the locus for Jack and his friends for the past ten years, a significant chunk of time in their lives considering that Jack’s 20, John and Perry are 19. It’s a prime hang out block. A playground and I.S. 131 (the Dr. Sun Yat Sen School) take up the whole corner, so there’s little traffic. Proprietors of other shops on the street—the drop-off Laundromat and hair salon with purple fluorescent window lights—don’t seem to mind the kids on the sidewalk.

Jack points to I.S. 131’s main entrance. “One day my mom dropped me off at school right there and walked away.” He indicates a second, side door. “Then I walked through the halls out that entrance.” When he did, Jack says, he walked directly into his mother, who pulled him right back into school. “She tried,” he says of his mother, though she was busy raising three kids and working long hours in a garment factory.

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