AtD: Doyers St. (Chinatown, NYC)

[Perry Noid]

Excellent story. Thanks for sharing
On Oct 21, 2014 12:53 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> 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.)
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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