Getting my fix in Chinatown

Saturday was a quick, very wet, “get reacquainted” day with the city. I dropped my bags at the crib and set out to meet KC for a little food in Chinatown before being driven off the streets by Tropical Storm Hanna.

I’m pulled to Chinatown like shoppers are pulled to Harold Square or Saks or 14th Street and theater geeks are pulled to theater geek stuff.

No single group in New York lingers and mills about as well as the denizens of Chinatown. No single place in the city packs as many odd smells into an area, either. You can get a short travel fix (real travel is to Chinatown, what heroin is to methadone) just by getting off the subway on Canal and heading downtown, so when I’m jonesing, that’s where I go.

Chinatown is also my usual cheap-eats destination in the city. I’m sure there are other points of sustenance convergence and I have dedicated my life to finding them, but for a fallback, I can always count on Chinatown. It has everything from tourist favorites to hole-in-the wall dumpling shops to street carts. Prices can range widely and wildly, so check the menu on the front of the shop.

I’ll be coming back to Chinatown again and again in this blog, so let me just say in this post that the inventor of “Menu on Shop Window” needs to be canonized (if he/she is Catholic … or converted posthumously and then canonized if not) so I can wear his/her graven image around my neck.

I’ve heard it was an ancient Japanese thing where actual menu items and their prices were displayed in the window because the language was so damn complicated and the society so damn stratified that most of the populace was illiterate. I’m an egalitarian, but if ever there was a reason for oppressing the common man, it is “Menu on Shop Window.”

Of course, I was in Japan when I heard this creation myth, so it may be one of those spontaneous eruptions of genius. I don’t know. I do know I want to feel someone’s face on my heaving chest, and I’ll take what I can get. If you have a different story from a different culture, please let me know and I’ll let you in on a piece of the action when I start selling relics.