Manhattan Chinatown is a hub of cultural and economic activity. One of its most iconic features is its bustling produce market, mostly along Grand, Mott, and Canal street. Impressively, the small-scale, low-tech vendors are able to sell diverse, fresh produce at a cost significantly lower than any other grocers. What lies behind them, is a network of produce suppliers that is vital to the local food ecosystem.

For decades, small-scale produce wholesalers in Chinatown have been connecting farmers and distributors with consumers, creating a food landscape that has become a cornerstone of the community. From fresh produce to specialty herbal medicine, the network plays a critical role in ensuring that local residents have access to healthy, affordable, and culturally sensitive food options. The benefits extend beyond just the local community; by supporting small-scale farmers and distributors, the network has helped build a more resilient and sustainable food system for many.

Yet this remarkable supply chain has been overshadowed by the gigantic Hunts Point terminal market and the distribution channels operated by the major supermarket chains. It is also overlooked by advocates of direct farm-to-consumer food retail. Over the years, this network of vendors and suppliers continues to face significant challenges due to the city’s rapidly changing landscape. Gentrification, upzoning, immigration policies, and other outside forces are threatening to diminish the vitality of this historic marketplace. Yet, despite these challenges, it is important to remember the agency of the ethnic enclave amidst these changes, as they seek to develop and adapt to different industries. The produce market remains a symbol of resilience and strength, a testament to the tenacity of the people who call Manhattan Chinatown home.

In this love letter to Manhattan Chinatown's produce markets, I explore the historical significance, present challenges, and future possibilities of this unique cultural and economic institution.

Chinatown’s produce network consists of four main nodes: consumers, vendors, wholesalers, and farmers. The physical system of edges and nodes are founded upon a strong social network of care, forged from shared ethnic ties, family and community connections, shared immigrant experiences, and a culture of collectivist values.

While the interpersonal proximity between suppliers and consumers is critical to the network's success, geographic proximity also plays a crucial role. According to Dr. Valarie Imbruce's seminal work "From Farm to Canal Street," three key spatial features support the Chinatown produce network. It relies on a small group of competitive, decentralized small-scale wholesalers who are clustered throughout Chinatown. This is in contrast to the predominant distribution model in New York City, which is centered around the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center. The spatial proximity allows the wholesalers to make small but frequent deliveries, allowing the vendors to forgo refrigeration and keep overhead low. But it isn’t just a local system, the network is also globally connected, enabling it to provide culturally appropriate foods farmers' markets cannot.

Dr. Imbruce’s research is the singular source that contains holistic documentation of Chinatown's food network. While it was published in 2016, the data was collected in 2005, which is nearly two decades ago. And much has changed between 2005 and now. To figure out what has changed and why, we need to travel back in time.

Most, if not all, of the city’s food policy documents calls for the renovation and further funding of Hunts Point Terminal without giving thought to alternatives that could host wholesale produce distribution in ways that integrate community jobs and food needs.

Our current culture around data means systems that evade quickness and bigness in data, such as Chinatown’s analog operations, become trapped in a feedback loop of being understudied, underrepresented, and undersupported.

But simultaneously, our culture around data also means the existence of omnipresent and omnidirectional surveillance conducted by entities with the capital to do so. Data that were not intentionally being captured are captured in the peripherals, allowing us to find data where data did not exist.

Taking advantage of this, I mined historical Google Street View Imagery to conduct virtual fieldwork through time, finding spectral remnants of where fresh fruit and vegetable used to be and pinpointing their closures in time. This allowed me to transform images into tabular time series, allowing me to see the rate of change over time.

Insights never arrive from just data, I needed contextual information about the data’s locality to understand what is going on. So, I spoke to community leaders like Wellington Chen – the Executive Director of the Chinatown Partnership and Chinatown BID, also Vic Lee and Jackie Wang – founders of Welcome to Chinatown. But perhaps the most fruitful conversations I’ve had were with the people who lie at the heart of this network: the vendors, wholesalers, and farmers.

What emerged from these conversations was the importance of the culture of GuanXi. GuanXi is a Chinese term that refers to a system of social networks and influential relationships. In Chinatown, GuanXi is crucial for building trust, and is often tied to a shared sense of identity. Every vendor and wholesalers I have spoken to are immigrants or refugees who came to the United States with few resources, no English, and little knowledge of how to navigate the complex systems of American commerce. They were able to rely upon informal networks of friends, family members, and fellow immigrants to help them find suppliers, negotiate with landlords, and navigate the various linguistic, legal and bureaucratic hurdles. GuanXi also enforces a shared sense of responsibility, as built within it is a strong emphasis on reciprocity and the idea of "owing" a debt of gratitude to someone who has helped you in the past. This can be a powerful motivator for people to help each other out, even when there is no immediate or obvious benefit to doing so.

By making use of collective knowledge, shared resources, and social capita, residents of Chinatown were able to build thriving communities, businesses, and a network of care for people who might otherwise be isolated and vulnerable, even when disenfranchised and discriminated against.

I also benefit from GuangXi. I live on Mott and Grand. The ground-level storefront of my apartment is a produce vendor. This network is one I actively participate in. I am one of the people it serves and the people that serve it are not just subjects of this research but neighbors I say hi to every morning. They are aunties that pass me recipes for her pork stew, and uncles that pass me a free banana or two as I rush to school.

So I benefit, not only from an inherent kinship that exists just from the way that I look and the language that I speak, but also from pre-existing personal connections. The GuangXi privileged me to certain personal histories that they shared over beer and egg-tarts. Together they paint a story of hardship, care, and resilience through an oral history of the network, providing a lot of insight into what Chinatown has been facing over the past two decades that could be contributing to the change we saw in the data.

Many of the vendors and wholesalers I spoke to immigrated to New York in the 80s, the majority of them refugees; many Shan, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian. When they arrived, they spoke no English and this was the only work they happened to find – through a cousin, through a friend, or through a brother in a Tong.

They talked about their children with pride as they showed me photos of them celebrating birthdays and talked about how great they are in school. None of the vendors or wholesalers have children in the business, some explicitly saying that they don’t want this life for them.

They noted that immigration patterns have changed, causing labor shortages. The Fujianese man claimed “We’re the last class!” and he came in the 90s.

They talked about the disappearance of the Garment Factories post 911, whose workers were the majority of their clients post 911; they talked about the fear and phobia they faced during SARS, and the way SOHO Gentrification priced out their wholesalers.

They talked about COVID-19 and the lack of foot traffic on the street even today, three years after the initial outbreak. One of them claimed that he used to sell ten boxes of fruits in just an hour, and now he’d be happy with two boxes a day. They talked about rent increases and the fear of congestion pricing, noting that that would be the nail in the coffin for the network.

It is easy to imagine a world where the produce network does not exist at all, and yet it stands.

Perhaps it is a given for a system built by diasporas whose own identities straddle binaries of “here” and “there,” when unpacking Chinatown’s Produce Network, I found it best characterized by various pairs of binaries across which the system straddles.

It becomes clear that the network’s ability to malleably navigate and negotiate, when empowered with varying degrees of agency within complex infrastructures of varying degrees of formality, is their biggest strength. It offers important lessons for policy-makers interested in increasing access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food, highlighting the need to step away from the binary notions planners and policy-makers typically use to understand food systems.

The following section explores Chinatown through the lenses of binaries and the many ways in which the network dismantles them.

Click on a binary to read more.

Looking ahead, the story of Chinatown’s produce network offers valuable insights for food systems planning today. The Chinatown’s produce network provides a model for how such networks can operate, connecting small-scale producers with retailers and consumers in a way that supports local economies and cultural traditions. Sustaining alternative food supply chains dependent upon decentralized and clustered wholesalers requires attention to zoning policy in cities, specifically the need to preserve mixed industrial and commercial land uses on which distributed supply chains depend. Chinatown is unique in its ability to host such a system, and so if we want to see it replicated elsewhere, we need to preserve and integrate more mixed industrial and commercial land use. Including small-scale food retail networks in government incentive programs now directed at conventional supermarkets could help to finance infrastructure that would make distributed food supply chains more possible.

However, the network also faces ongoing challenges, including competition from larger distributors and rising costs of real estate and labor. As we consider the future of urban food systems, it is essential that we learn from the successes and struggles of networks like the Chinatown Produce Network, and work to create policies and systems that support their continued growth and success. As neighborhoods gentrify and affluent residents seek to remove messy mobile food vendors, protections from displacement are important to sustain the supply of affordable fresh food. And finally, looking into the future we need to be reminded of how inequitably city-wide policies such as congestion pricing impact different communities and can place entire cultural and economic institutions at risk.

Ultimately, the story of the Chinatown Produce Network is a reminder of the power of community-based food systems to transform our cities and our lives for the better. As New York City and others around the work continue to grapple with issues of food access, sustainability, and social equity, we should foster interest in alternative food networks and the role they can play in creating more equitable and resilient food systems.