For Chinatown’s forgotten residents, mutual aid projects are lifelines.
The elderly woman hadn’t had a meal in seven days, Moonlynn Tsai heard from a social service staffer when she and her partner, Yin Chang, called to offer help. That had been during the peak of the pandemic, in the spring of 2020. “She didn't want to bother her son to [send her food] because she didn't want to get her son sick,” Tsai recalls.
In those early days, Tsai and Chang put together simple breakfast kits featuring oatmeal, dried fruit, and nuts and left them outside of Kopitiam, Tsai’s restaurant at the time, as well as outside of their Lower East Side apartment for families struggling to feed their children amid school closures.
“Chinatown was my home away from home,” Justin McKibben tells me. He’s the founder of Send Chinatown Love, an organization that provides support to small businesses in Manhattan’s Chinatown. “It was the only place I could get a meal that felt like a home-cooked meal in a city that can be very isolating.”
With his background in software engineering, McKibben says his first instinct was to help them by registering them for food delivery apps or building them websites and social media followings. But very quickly he realized that what the businesses needed was money, and fast. Unable to apply or ineligible for government relief due to their cash-only nature, many of them direly needed a way to pay their rent and workers.
When I ask Tsai what she’s taken away from the experience of running Heart of Dinner, she echoes McKibben. “Something Yin and I have both learned is to really listen, especially to our elders,” Tsai says. An integral part of their work involves hearing the needs of the individuals they serve. Every week, volunteers call elders to remind them their care package will be delivered the next day—in case they’ve forgotten or if they have another appointment they might need to reschedule.
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