Suzanne Ma Online

It started with chatter on Chinatown street corners, and soon, the conversations moved into neighborhood community centers.

Hold the terror trials here? In my neighborhood?

Apparently so.

Federal officials had announced in November plans to hold the trials of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other self-professed 9/11 terrorists in a federal courthouse – right in the middle of Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Steps away from the Pearl Street courthouse is Columbus Park; where seniors bellow out Beijing opera in the pavilion, where men gather to play cards and Chinese chess, and where teens kick around soccer balls on the astro turf.

Around the corner are Vietnamese pho eateries on Centre Street, and a plethora of small household supply shops and grocery stores.

On nearby Mulberry Street, three Chinese funeral homes serve the Chinese American community – and honor the Chinese American dead – in New York City and across the entire eastern seaboard.

New York City’s Chinatown is not just a place of business. It’s home to one of the city’s oldest communities.

The trials, which are expected to last several years, would have locked down those neighborhood streets and cut the area into security zones bordered by metal barriers and armed guards. The tightest security zone would heavily restrict pedestrian and vehicle traffic in the heart of Chinatown, an area still rebuilding and recovering from the effects of 9/11.

Chinatown and lower Manhattan residents mobilized quickly. They knew they had to fight this before it got too far.

Community board officials soon joined in, sending a resolution to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder proposing alternative venues: Governors Island, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, a federal courthouse in White Plains, Stewart Air National Guard Base in Newburgh and a federal institution in Otisville.

Support from city politicians followed, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who changed his mind on the matter.

He had originally called moving the trials to Governors Island “dumb.”

Chinatown residents did not miss a beat – they fired back calling the plan to hold the trials in their neighborhood “dumber.”

Then things started to change. Whether it was because of the mayor, I don’t know. But things snow balled. Politicians and lawmakers jumped on the bandwagon.

Gov. David Paterson, Sen. Charles Schumer and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said this week they were open to a move, and Republican Congressman Peter King introduced a bill that would prohibit the use of Justice Department funds to try Guantanamo detainees in federal civilian courts.

The growing chorus of dissent went straight through to Washington D.C.: Move the terror trials out of Manhattan.

Late Thursday night, news broke that federal officials were talking about moving the trials.

Today, it’s clear the message got through. The Obama administration is now looking at other options.

A source in Chinatown, who relentlessly called and emailed me about this story, talked to me on Friday about the “power of the people to make the impossible possible.”

I am so proud of the Chinatown community here in New York City. Literally from the grassroots level, from neighbors talking to neighbors, they fought through the politics and the bureaucracy to get their message to the federal government.

In a forwarded e-mail, a member of the Chinese community wrote this:

“…no more just firecrackers and lion dance.  From now on, we are not going to be taken granted, and we’ll say  “NO.” Don’t dare to take advantage of our amiable manner again, no more.  We’ll play hard ball too from now on.”

It’s a profound message because Chinese Americans have stereotypically been “model citizens.” They don’t like to rock the boat, they don’t like to make too much noise. They typically keep their heads down, work hard, and earn money so they can send their kids to good schools.

But when something like this comes along, they knew they had to fight it all the way. And they did. Bravo.

I just had the best Cheung Fun I’ve ever had in Manhattan.

I have always said New York City Chinese food is decent, at best. Never amazing. Much lower in the ranks when compared to my hometown of Toronto, the great Chinese food mecca that is Vancouver, and the most awesome city that is Hong Kong.

But today, I’ll give it to you, Manhattan.

Cheung Fun is a steaming rice noodle roll that I have a weakness for. It’s a Cantonese dish from the south of China and Hong Kong and you can usually find it at dim sum.

Cheung Fun – 肠粉 – is commonly filled with shrimp, pork, beef or vegetables. Pour sweet soy sauce over it and take a bite. … Amazing? Delicious? Yes. I know.

One favorite variety, that keeps it real simple, is cheung fun with dried shirmps and scallions embedded in it’s sticky, soft noodle. Today, I found what may possibly be the best cheung fun in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

I was on Grand Street and thought I’d try somewhere new.

I spied on Hong Wong Restaurant at 300 Grand St. near Allen. It was a small shop, with barbecue ducks and chickens hanging in the window. A television set at the back was broadcasting a Chinese singing contest. All locals. Regulars. No tourists. Waiters were super nice and not rushed. I loved it.

I planned to order a classic wonton noodle soup, something quick I usually grab when I’m working and on the run. But I noticed Hong Wong had 肠粉 on the front of their menu, going for just $1.75 a plate.

I was greedy. I ordered wonton and duck noodle soup AND a rice noodle roll with dried shrimps and scallions.

So soft! So sticky! So very fresh and tasty! And it cost me less than $7 total.  Be sure to check it out next time you’re down there.

The Loews Canal Street Theater in its heyday. (credit: New York Public Library, left/Rebecca Lepkoff, right)

Admittedly, I have walked by 31 Canal St. and never looked twice.

It is an old, shuttered electronics shop with a sign that reads “ABC  enith”  – It’s missing the Z in “Zenith.”

But if I looked up, I would have seen this beautiful white façade, festooned by masks, wreaths and griffins.

And inside, the old chandeliers and much of the original terra-cotta details remain, although the movie theater seats — which held 2,314 people with 1,481 on the first floor and 833 on the balcony — were cleared out long ago.

Yes, 31 Canal St. was once a Loews “movie palace” and when it opened in the 1920s, black and white pictures moved silently on the screen while a man at the front of the theater played classical music on the piano.

Today, the neighborhood is much changed. Chinatown residents, looking to establish a culture center for the community, believe the former Loew’s theater may be the right spot.

Here’s my latest on a hidden gem in our incredible city of New York:

By Suzanne Ma

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

LOWER EAST SIDE — On summer weekends, Rebecca Lepkoff remembers holding 15 cents in her hand and lining up to get into the Loew’s Canal Street Theater to escape the heat of her Hester Street tenement.

It was 1928, and she was just 12 years old

The enormous movie theater on Canal Street near Ludlow was the center of the neighborhood.

“It was a lovely theater. It was a beautiful theater,” Lepkoff, now 93, told DNAinfo. “It was very roomy.”

Today, the decrepit theater, which closed down nearly four decades ago, is a warehouse.

But it may get a new life — as a Chinese performing arts center — and once again become the center of an old neighborhood, now largely dominated by Chinese immigrants.

The former movie palace is easy to miss. At first glance, 31 Canal St. looks simply like a shuttered electronics shop.

But look up and you will see a beautiful white façade, festooned by masks, wreaths and griffins.

Inside, the old chandeliers and much of the original terra-cotta details remain, although the seats — which held 2,314 people with 1,481 on the first floor and 833 on the balcony — were cleared out long ago.

Over the next six months, engineers will be surveying the 84-year-old building, which today is owned by Thomas Sung, the founder and chairman of the board of the Abacus Federal Savings Bank in Chinatown.

The building is just one of many locations Amy Chin is scouting out on behalf of a non-profit arts group in Chinatown called CREATE.

The search for a cultural center in Chinatown began after 9/11 with the help of former City Councilman Alan Gerson. CREATE received $150,000 for the performance center from the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, and should receive an additional $140,000 for the next phase of planning.

“There isn’t one place where the Chinatown community can gather for cultural events or performances,” Chin told DNAinfo. “This theater is just amazing, sitting there, unused all this time.”

Happening NOW – Google.CN seems to be scouring the Internet as any normal Google search engine should.

Meaning, you type in a few words and you’ll get whatever you are looking for. No strange message saying the website you are trying to seek is forbidden. No watching the cursor load and load and load and load… to no end.

Want to search about the Dalai Lama? How about the Tank Man? Go for it.

That’s because Google has officially said that it is no longer willing to censor search results.

When Google.CN launched in 2006, the company agreed to censor sensitive material – details of human rights groups, certain sources reporting on peasant protests and reports from Tibet and Xinjiang, and references to the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

On Google’s blog, the internet giant explains why they’ve put their foot down: they detected a cyber attack in mid-December, originating from China, and they believe it was aimed at gathering information on Chinese human rights activists.

From the Google blog:

“We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech. In the last two decades, China’s economic reform programs and its citizens’ entrepreneurial flair have lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. Indeed, this great nation is at the heart of much economic progress and development in the world today.

We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

Really interesting stuff.

“In the last year, China has ramped up Internet censorship denying netizens access to social networking services and websites hosted overseas. Friends in China disappeared from Twitter, Facebook and Youtube for weeks at a time, only to resurface again with status updates like this: “finally get access to facebook,GFW go to hell.”

Chinese authorities have said the ramped up censorship was a move to stop “vulgar” content, but clearly Chinese internet users are not amused.

So what does this mean? It means Google may close it’s offices in China.

Not far from my old stomping grounds in Beijing, is the Google office in WuDaoKou 五道口。

Apparently, some locals are dropping off flowers - have they come to pay their respects?

“The passion for the craft younger journalists have will keep them heading to far flung places … Media institutions need to find a better way to prepare and better support reporters.”

An interesting report from TIME.com:

Someone asked me about what direction the blog will take in the coming year. You may have noticed the change of the banner, from a bubbling Sichuan hot pot to a beautiful night panorama of the Manhattan skyline taken from a Brooklyn pier.

You also may have noticed my last two posts have been about my job at DNAinfo, an exciting local Manhattan news service. Since September last year I’ve been immersed in the local neighborhood news of Chinatown and the Lower East Side. I must admit, I was opposed at first to covering the Chinatown beat. It made total sense, since I am a Chinese speaker and the only Chinese speaker on staff at DNAinfo. But having reported there during my year at Columbia, I felt like I needed to branch out and have a change of scenery.

Alas I was assigned the beat and off I went.

For the past 5 months, the reporting in Chinatown has surprised me. I am making contacts in the community and what’s interesting is how deeply rooted and passionate people are about their neighborhood. After all, it’s where they live. It is home.

People really care about a local Charter school expanding, about that new luxury hotel opening up around the corner on the Lower East Side, and about the speeding trucks racing off the Manhattan bridge that have crashed into other cars and pedestrians on narrow, busy Chinatown streets.

I have come to care about these issues too.

So I changed my banner, seeing as I’ve been in New York City for a year and a half now. This is my home, for now. This is the place I’m writing about every day.

My Tweets follow big Manhattan stories we cover, but I’m keeping my finger on China, too. I’ll tweet a good selection of news from China and about the Chinese diaspora in America.

Over wonton noodle soup last night in Chinatown, a friend and I contemplated life in the world’s big cities. She has spent considerable time in Paris. We have both lived in Beijing. We now call New York City home. We both agreed life in the big city is stressful; the rhythm of the city is exhilarating yet draining, the people here are passionate yet at times that passion is transformed into aggression and attiTUDE. Still, the stresses of our city lives are in many ways self-fabricated. We work hard (it’s that Chinese work ethic) and we’re competitive (it’s that type-A personality).

But we worry all the while, mulling over decisions and fretting about the future. Maybe it’s because we have too many options in this day and age.

We choose to live in New York City. Where will we be next year?

Two days ago, I started getting hate mail from taxidermists, hunters and self-described animal experts. One e-mail came from as far away as Australia.

When a large animal bust reportedly fell off the wall of a Lower East Side restaurant and struck a woman on the head, many press reports identified it as that of a moose because, well, it had antlers.

The emails were pretty harsh. They attacked me, insulting my intelligence, reporting skills, and one even said I should be ashamed of being Canadian. Well, that did it.

I took to the streets with a camera and began canvassing New Yorkers. I showed them a photo of the animal head in question and asked: “Tell me what this animal is?” Check out the responses below and also surf over to DNAinfo.com and look at our cool interactive.

“Give me a break,” he scoffed, “Don’t you think there are more important things you should be writing about? How about those commies in the White House?”

I had approached the follically-challenged, bespectacled man sitting on the brown, wooden bench on a Lower Manhattan subway platform, thinking he might make a good interview.

Admittedly (and I admitted this to the man himself), the story I was nosing around about, was a light-hearted piece about…cats. It’s not hard hitting journalism and I never pretended it was.

So while I was taken aback by his rudeness and his seriously skewed view that there are “commies” in the White House, one thing struck me after this encounter: he was right about one thing.

What am I writing about and why?

Do we, the journalists, have the responsibility to write what the public wants to read? Or is it our written word that shapes the appetite for news?

There are times I am inspired by what I believe to be a journalist’s calling to shape public opinion, and to steer the public into thinking, reacting and caring about important issues.

But in a world where headlines announcing Brittany Murphy’s death trump news that Democrats have secured enough votes to pass health care reform, I sometimes lose a little faith. You want more readers to surf to your site, to pay for your paper, to subscribe to your magazine… so how do you strike a balance between hard and soft news? Between what’s easy to digest and what might be harder to swallow?

Hello readers, I’m sorry for my absence over the last month. I’ve been meaning to update y’all. SuzanneMa.com is going to take on a bit of a different direction in early November. Please sit tight – more updates to come soon, I promise.

The skylit courtyard at the center of the new museum space. AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

For years, they dreamed of a bigger space to work with.

That dream will come true when their new facility opens Sept. 22.The 14,000-square-foot space, six times bigger than its original home, was designed by Maya Lin, creator of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, and touted by some big-name movers and shakers including “Brokeback Mountain” director Ang Lee, architect I.M. Pei, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and playwright David Henry Hwang.

But despite the big names attached to the $8.1 million project, the museum is run by a small staff of nine, including newly appointed director S. Alice Mong.

“We are a very lean organization,” Mong said. “As you can see there’s no fat.”

For nearly 30 years, the museum has been housed in a 2,000-square-foot space at 70 Mulberry St. on the second floor of a 19th-century schoolhouse. There is no way to feature the hundreds of documents and objects collected over the years, sharing the history and culture of Chinese immigrants in America and the role their descendants played in constructing American society.With the new space, there is more room for the vast collection, a bigger staff and a growing fan base. There are nearly 4 million Chinese Americans in the U.S.

“It’s our story,” said Mong, who immigrated with her family from Taiwan in 1973. “There isn’t another national museum for Chinese Americans. We hope to be a cultural anchor not only for the local Chinese in New York but for Chinese across the United States and around the world.”

The Journey Wall - donors receive a plaque with their family name, where they came from, and where they settled in America. AP Photo/Mary Altaffer

The new museum, converted from an industrial machine repair shop on Centre Street, features a skylit courtyard reminiscent of courtyards found in the center of a traditional Chinese home. In the front lobby is an art installation called “The Journey Wall,” which consists of bronze tiles that show where Chinese American families came from and where they settled in the United States.

Fundraising for the new space began in 2004, spearheaded by museum co-founder Charles Lai.

“Having this new facility gives us the legitimacy and the credibility we have always sought,” Lai said. “It allows people to realize that together with our wonderful programs and strong content, we are worthy of a higher level of support.”

Lai said one donor had, for years, contributed $100 annually. When the donor recently learned of the museum’s plans to move into a bigger space, he wrote a check for $100,000.

So far, the museum has raised $12 million, and Mong said it is well on the way to reaching its $15 million goal. Mong said the museum is in good financial shape because fundraising began long before the economy went bad. So far, all donors have come through with their promised pledges.

Mong attributes the success to the museum’s niche cause.

One of the new objects that will be featured in the museum’s main exhibit hall is a wooden replica of the carvings found in the Angel Island Barracks in California. Some 175,000 Chinese immigrants were detained and processed at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay during the first half of the 1900s. During their internment, many carved poems in the walls in traditional Chinese characters, detailing their fear and despair.

“When people come to Chinatown, they are saying, ‘Oh, look there’s the Buddhist temple, the place where the ducks hang from the window and let me get to the place with knockoff Coach bags,’” Lai said. “There is another part of the story. There are complexities and realities in the Chinese American community and we want them (visitors) to experience and understand that.”

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