By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Chinatown
“Let’s go to the Asian shop,” said Flannery.
“Which Asian shop?” I asked.
“The one I went to when I was 16.” That was eight years ago. “They had seaweed,” my daughter said.
“I didn’t know you liked seaweed.”
“I don’t,” she said.
Siri pointed us to Kim Nhung Super Store, 4242 S. Division St., near where I’d lived as a bachelor. It was heart of a Golden Plaza with Pho Soc Trang (Vietnamese) and Wei Wei Palace (Chinese restaurants.
After my North Muskegon paper blew up, I moved to Grand Rapids and drove from my new digs on Montebello Street to the Penasee Globe in Wayland. The freeway was faster but South Division led straight there too.
After work I ran to explore the neighborhood. East was cooler, greener; I’d hop the chain-link fence around school playfields and cross to curbed streets with broader lawns, shade, a graveyard and next-door church lot that summer they retarred to the Kentwood Library, five miles out and back.
West down Montebello was South Division, gritty and crammed with whizzing cars, human detritus. Left and south were Coney Island Drive-In, Restaurant Pupusaria El Salvador, Brickcrete Wyoming (1-Star hotel), Bullet Firearms, Kung Fu Bubble Tea, Tonttu Sauna, used-car lots lit by strings of bulbs hung from poles overhead, Sikh-run party stores on down.
Mopping off sweat I popped into a pet store selling ligons to hopeful owners.
An abandoned drive-in across Division had chain-link fence gaps through which I could view expired films for free. Speaker poles jutted through concrete cracks sprouting weeds; glass shards glittered, empty cans rolled and clattered when winds came up.
North on South Division brick buildings were tight against tiny lots in which Opals and Fiats fit parked diagonally, bumpers flush against plate-glass windows with bullet holes.
Inside were emporiums like Mitten Vapors, Bad HabitsTattoo, Bubble Magic Laundry and A-1 Golden Pawn phasing into Kelloggsville’s Little Asia.
How “Little” is Asia?” she asked.
“Don’t belittle it,” I said.
Kim Nhung floors were stacked with Mit Tui and dragonfruit crates, Nemchua Spiced Meat in coolers humming near a glass case with snakefish on ice as doors opened and closed July outside.
Savefor your own film the Beaver Cleaver man in a scale-spangled bloody smock, poised to chop your choice of filets to the ounce with his eyes wide shut.
We brought home a dragon fruit, split it, took the yin-yang picture nearby and ate it. “I knew you’d like what it looked like inside and out,” she said. Also a tin of Glia Vi Nau Bun Rieu (Minced Prawn in Spices) shown on Page B4 last week. Then we’d feed it to our cat Poe she named “for that bird that sang nevermore.”
Home we’d passed Bad Habits Tattoo & Art Shop, Angel Nails and Grand Rapids Liquidation outside of which souls sat on bus stop benches fanning themselves with 12-step flyers next to grocery carts spilling over with returnables. Past them Pupuseria sold Caldo De Gallina (Hen Soup, the sign translated taped inside the glass).
“Chinatown” screenwriter Robert Towne, 89, died July 1 having said his and Roman Polanski’s 1974 LA noir was “a condition of total awareness almost indistinguishable from blindness.
“Dreaming you’re in paradise and waking up in the dark — that’s Chinatown. Thinking you’ve got it figured out and realizing you’re dead — that’s Chinatown,” Towne went on.
Gumshoe Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson), goes the plot, delves into a water-diversion plan enriching the system’s owner and parching out farmers not able to pay for it, gets half his nose cut and sees Evelyn (Faye Dunaway) drive off in a white car.
“Forget it, Jake,” a beat peer says having too seen it. “It’s Chinatown.”
