Literary Yard

Search for meaning

The Chinese Food Factory

By Art Gatti

abhishek-sanwa-limbu-782224-unsplash

Shortly after arriving on Bank Street in Manhattan’s all-but-deserted West Village, I took on the family of a hippie earth mother from Princeton and we squoze into my tiny apartment and tried not to step on each other’s feet too much.

In 1971 there wasn’t much going on a block from the Hudson River. Cargo shipping moved to the Jersey side of the harbor. There were no more jobs. The neighborhood was full of vacant or half-functioning factories and a lot of beat-up old apartments and tenements housing longshoremen on disability or welfare. Empty streets and sidewalks.
Next door was a semi-functional Chinese food factory (yes, there were such things) a place that’d supplied local hospitals with barrels of chow mein, as well as public-school cafeterias for “Chinese Food Thursdays”. Industrial-size barrels of Accent MSG sat on their loading dock.

The owners were public-spirited: they’d fill up with goppy, noodley stuff any size pot you brought to their loading dock – for a mere two bucks.

In 1973 it closed and lay vacant for several months. But one day a notice was pasted out front that there’d be an open house to rent the empty factory space. It was then that the woman and I had a crazy hippie brainstorm: Since my second-story shoebox would be abutting the building’s second-floor space, renting that space told us we could break through both walls and join the spaces together for our growing family.

Laws? What laws?

When the day came, I was at work, so the earth mother did the walkthrough.

Another backstory: in its busy past, the place was in the custom of doling out free meals to poor Chinese workers earning below-subsistence wages in nearby kitchens and laundries…men who’d arrive with a bowl and chopsticks, and who’d be allowed to sit a spell and eat.

As my mate explored the upper floor space, she noted the most prominent feature–a large, deep, walk-in freezer that had been nonfunctional –open and unused– for years. She probably imagined it as the ultimate in closet space. Until she peeked inside…

“There’s a dead man in there!”

Toward the final days of the Chinese food business, none of the employees had a reason to go upstairs. The corpse was that of a very old man, probably skin and bones when he arrived with his eating implements, sometime during the sunset of the business, a year or so earlier. He had simply wanted a place to sit quietly and eat. And then, the long bench he sat on—so inviting to stretch out on….A body with little inside to rot, a soul who left no smell. Lonely. Peaceful.

So we passed on the rental scheme and made do—like the rest of our neighbors—with my tiny place. Tiny and full of life.

Tagged:

1 COMMENTS

Leave a Reply

Related Posts