AtD: Doyers St. (Chinatown, NYC)

[kelber at mindspring.com]

My family has been going to the Nom Wah Tea Parlor (located next to the bend) since the late 1940s.  My mother was introduced to the place by a Chinese (by citizenship) friend, Israel Epstein, in the late 1940s. Epi (as she called him) had a pretty interesting life. His parents were Polish Jews who fled across Russia around 1914 or so,(to avoid WWI) and didn't stop until they got to Shanghai, where Epi grew up. During WWII, he was incarcerated in a Japanese prison camp (similar, I guess to what J.G. Ballard portrayed in Empire of the Sun). He met a British lefty ex-pat there named Elsie Chumly (possibly Chimondley)-Fairfax (or Fairfax-Chumly), and the two escaped together in a rowboat. They later married. Elsie, whom I never met, was apparently very tall and slender, with an aristocratic bearing. Epi was not much over 5' and portly. Not sure when he arrived in the US, but he was apparently detained as an undesirable communist for some time (he wrote a simple paean to the Statue of Liberty: Move your ass and let me pass). My mother either met him through the CP, or as a reporter for the Federated Press (soon to be McCarthy-ized out of existence, but not before my mom was hauled before HUAC to take the 5th).

At any rate, my mother and Epi spent many pleasant hours over tea and dim sum at Nom Wah. I grew up eating dim sum there (at first, under protest) and eventually brought my kids there. My son and daughter were over there the other day, though none of us like the place much any more. It was taken over by the old man's business-oriented nephew a few years ago, who turned it into an upscale (and much more expensive) oreder-by-the-menu operation. Back in the day, when you walked in to the near-empty, grungy place, the old man would get up from the table where he was smoking and playing mah jong (or cards?) with his cronies, shuffle into the kitchen and come out with a tray of assorted dim sum, at least some of which you were required to accept. Greasy, and definitely not the best dim sum in Chinatown by a longshot, but still delicious and cheap.

Epi returned to China. When he visited us in the 1980s, he was a complete apologist for Mao's excesses and the cultural revolution. I think he'd be pretty miserable over the state-capitalist China of today. But somehow, I think his (very metaphorical) spirit still lives on in the angle of Doyers Street. He's part of the history.

Laura


-----Original Message-----

From: Monte Davis 

Sent: Oct 21, 2014 6:02 AM

To: “pynchon-l at waste.org“ , kelber 

Subject: AtD: Doyers St. (Chinatown, NYC)



More on the site of Dally's "abduction," discussed here in Nov. 2006.
http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2008/08/doyers-street.html

(The nickname "Bloody Angle" for the bend in the street had been used for parts of the Civil War battlefields at both Gettysburg and Spotsylvania.)
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l