Walk towards Canal Street and when you’re two blocks away, you can hear the roaring of the business that goes on there.  It’ll take you about 10 minutes to walk down a packed block.  It almost seems as though you are tiptoeing your way down the block, and you can bet that vendors will bombard you.  They lean over and list a bunch of designers as they try to persuade you to buy something.

Reading both “The good old days of poverty: Merchants and the battle over pushcart peddling on the lower east side” by Suzanne Wasserman and “Push-cart Lane” by Jefferson Machamer seemed like a typical “Old New York” scene.  I could almost picture the sepia toned image of a crowded street.  Yet, the abolition of pushcarts describes in Wasserman’s article makes me think of something similar.

As a first generation child of Chinese immigrant parents, Dim Sum is something that has been a part of my entire life.  Dim Sum is a type of Chinese cuisine where little carts are pushed around a restaurant as you pick and choose which dishes you would like to eat.  With each dish, you receive a stamp on a card and at the end of the meal, the stamps are totaled and you are charged X amount of dollars.  Like the pushcarts described in the readings, the women who push the Dim Sum carts around are always screaming and yelling.  They’ll list the dishes in their cart and even stop by your table and try to persuade you to buy something.  

I have always associated Dim Sum with pushcarts and my first time in Hong Kong, about five years ago, had managed to shock me.  So, here I am, going to eat Dim Sum in Hong Kong, and to my dismay, there is not a Dim Sum cart in sight!  Why you ask?  Well, the government blamed the unsanitary conditions of Hong Kong for the huge SARS epidemic.  They thought that the Dim Sum pushcarts had spread the germs more rapidly, and therefore, they were abolished.  For some weird reason I thought of that while reading how the government had caused the absence of the pushcarts on Orchard Avenue.