New York City restarts Manhattan Chinatown merchants are struggling to find a way to rebirth

According to the compilation of the Us Chinese Network, 10 years after former Morgan Stanley insurance analyst Wilson Tang took over the South China Tea Room, a century-old New York Chinatown restaurant, he returned to the entrepreneurial model.

As New York City slowly recovers from the COVID-19 lockdown, Deng Wei's Chinatown is also recovering painfully from a collapsed business. Mr. Deng, 42, hardly remembers a tougher time in New York, not even during Wall Street's 2008-2009 financial crisis.

After two months of closure, the South China Tea House reopened on May 17 local time, and Deng Wei has been driving his car to deliver lunch boxes to nearby apartment buildings, and he has provided a large number of orders for tenant organizations. He also drives from Benson Hor, Brooklyn, in the morning to pick up and drop off employees, who are wary of taking the subway because of the risk of infection.

After a long day's work, he sent them home again.

Like much of Manhattan, Chinatown's economic base of relying on tourists and high-income professionals has been wiped out during the pandemic. Because the city has only just opened, not many tourists visit it, and few white-collar workers commute to the city. Overall, the impact on Chinatown appears to be greater than that of many of the island's most popular areas.

Chen Zuozhou, chief administrative officer of Chinatown Co-Development Agency, said only 46 percent of the nearly 300 restaurants in the community had reopened in the week ended June 5. Data from commercial software provider Womply shows that the percentage for New York City as a whole is 63 percent.

Sun Qicheng, founder and chairman of National Treasure Bank, said the bank received record levels of applications for deferrals on home loans at the height of the pandemic, though he explained that this was partly due to an initial misunderstanding of New York's 90-day mortgage relief order. He still hopes that most people will eventually repay the full interest on their mortgages, as Chinese borrowers tend to have more savings.

The epidemic has inexorably exposed long-standing problems in New York's Chinatown: the challenge of succession to family businesses, an aging population unable to live elsewhere due to language issues, and the dependence on low-margin commerce in the world's most expensive cities.

Wang Zhongyi, owner of Su Home, which opened in August 2019, has yet to decide when to reopen, and the waste of rent and inventory during the epidemic has caused him to lose more than $50,000.

"We walked down the street today to see which restaurants were open and to what extent they were recovering." "It looks like most people are locals, not tourists," he said. The locals look as if they're just rushing to finish their stuff and go home. ”

To be sure, Chinatown has a history of reinventing itself. Since the 19th century, it has been a garment center, a transportation hub and a wholesale food district. Now, with tourism unlikely to fully recover in a matter of years, some businesses see opportunities to modernize — simple things like setting up websites, accepting Venmo payments, and serving customers outside of Chinatown.

Patrick Mock, the 26-year-old manager of the food shop at 46 Beng Street, is experimenting with some measures his elders would normally be reluctant to take: He works with nonprofits to explore the gift card system and offer free meals to homeless and seniors.

"We have nothing to lose." "Then, you're going to use this as an opportunity to try all the methods you've never tried before until it works," he said. ”