On June 1st, 2024, 15 the northeast chapters of APALA, CALA and other BIPOC library staff participated in a half-day outing to Manhattan’s Chinatown. The tour kicked-off with a 90-minute, 5-stop historical walking food tour, led by the Mott Street Girls, a minority and women-owned business. We learned about the history of the local eateries, buildings, and streets.
To kick off the food tour, our group gathered at Fong On (meaning Grand Peace), the oldest family-run tofu shop in New York. It was established in 1933, originally on Mott Street, but reopened at its current location in 2019 at 81 Division Street due to tourism. At Fong On, we enjoyed some refreshing herbal tea and 75% sweetened soy milk. There, we also enjoyed Shu Jiao Fu Zhou’s delicious dumplings with house-made chili oil.
We learned about the history of the bloody angle and admired the mural dedicated to Corky Lee, who documented the lives of Asian American communities on 2 Doyers Street and spotted the iconic peach in the mural, by Peach Tao.
Our next stop was 46 Mott for mushroom and tofu sticky rice. 46 Mott was the original address for Fong On. Today’s 46 Mott Street offers Cantonese desserts and snacks such as silken tofu with ginger syrup, zongzi (sticky rice in lotus leaf), char siew baos, and fresh rice noodles. Our 4th stop was Aliamama Tea, which is a gluten-free bakery. We sampled their taro and green tea mochi munchkins, which were fresh and hot.
On the way to our final stop on the food tour, we stopped at Columbus Park and looked at the 40-story mega jail being built. The construction will continue until 2027 and will cost $8.3 billion. It has impacted local businesses, senior housing, and the local park. We learned about the community’s concerns.
The final stop on the food tour was Spongies Cafe for sponge cakes, opened by Fernando Ponce. Fernando learned how to perfect the art of Hong Kong-style sponge cakes from Mr. Zeng, founder of Kam Hing bakery. Fernando worked at Kam Hing from the young age of 14 and learned how to speak Cantonese from the almost 30 years he worked for Mr. Zeng. In 2020, Fernando opened Spongies Cafe in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
Following the historical food tour, attendees stopped at Yu & Me Books. We wrapped up our eventful day with a tour of the New York Public Library’s Chatham Square Branch, led by Qi Wen Wu. Chatham Square opened on November 2, 1903, and has had a circulating Chinese language collection available to patrons since 1911. The lower level houses the Chinese Language Collection and the Chinatown Heritage Collection. The first floor houses the adult and young adult collections. The second floor has a large dragon soaring from the ceiling and large windows with plenty of natural light for the children’s collection. The Chatham Square Library also features beautiful hand-painted murals and serves as a central space for chess, computer lab programs, creative workshops on AI for teens, board games for kids, and English conversation classes. All programs are hosted in multiple languages!
The APALA/CALA partnership was organized by Miriam Tuliao, Senior Library Marketing Manager at Penguin Random House, Janet H. Clarke, Associate Dean of Research & User Engagement at Stony Brook University, Edward J. Lim, Business and Entrepreneurship Librarian at the University of Connecticut, and Sunny Chung, Health Sciences Librarian at Stony Brook University. Many thanks to CALA and APALA for supporting this special day.
Event write-up by Sunny Chung with editing support from Noelle Cruz
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