This is the fifth of our five-part “What’s for Dinner?” feature series about Brooklyn meals.

There’s always something new cooking at Jenn de la Vega’s BedStuy apartment/publicity company—homemade mustard ferments in the fridge; a crockpot of vegetable broth simmers on the kitchen counter; and in the living room, a batch of new bookings are pending approval.

Such is the life of a freelance publicist and full-time foodie. De la Vega is a founding member of Mushpot Records, an independent music label and public relations company headquartered in her living room. She is also a classically trained chef with an impeccable taste for cheese. But on this evening, for no particular reason, she’s serving breakfast for dinner.

“I don’t operate by standard ‘breakfast, lunch, dinner’ practices,” she says. “Whatever strikes me, I’ll eat it when I want to.”

She takes the same approach to other aspects of life. In 2006, she graduated from the University of California, Davis, where she studied English Literature and Exercise Biology. But by the end of the year she decided to leave her home state of California and join a radio publicity firm in New York. The job lasted two years before she was once again ready for a change, and so in 2008 she entered a program at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan—where she studied Spanish tapas. The course led to a position as assistant chef at home/made BKLYN, a wine bar in Red Hook. This too, would pass, however, when “music beckoned” the 25-year-old back to the independent music scene that first drew her to the East Coast.

“I like to call it career ADD,” she said, as she smeared olive oil on a bowl of cut red potatoes. The sleeves of her black cardigan are rolled up to her elbows and her plastic glasses droop slightly down her nose as she turns the contents of the bowl. She had been working at the Brooklyn eatery for more than a year when a musician friend asked her if she’d like to join his band as a manager for their national tour. She accepted the offer, quit her job, and shifted her focus back to music publicity—this time for her own company, Mushpot Records. The name refers to the inner circle where “tagged” players must sit during the children’s game duck-duck-goose. Mushpot started as a weekly radio show that she co-hosted in college, but became a fully-fledged business soon after the move to New York.

Four years and multiple jobs, classes and internships later, de la Vega is finding ways to balance her two passions under one roof. While periodically scanning her inbox for new messages, she shifts between rooms to check on dinner. On the menu this evening are roasted breakfast potatoes served with a seasoned mustard glaze and hard cooked eggs a la Alton Brown, the brainy Food Network host that brings science to bear on culinary craft. By rigging a makeshift double boiler out of a wok and steel colander, she recreates the technique Brown uses on an episode of his show “Good Eats.” This way they won’t smell like they’ve been hard-boiled, she says, as she perches the eggs atop the colander. Like Brown, she has a keen interest in molecular gastronomy—the science of food. “I try to cook something everyday,” she says. “Or at least I fall asleep reading a cookbook.”

Running a freelance business from home is demanding, but de la Vega keeps up by staying connected. In addition to the Mushpot website, she runs a blog that combines both of her favorite things in life called BLT:IDM, or Bacon Lettuce Tomato:Intelligent Dance Music. Along with her four roommates, she also keeps a running blog of goings-on around the house titled Everyday Slumber Party. “I have, like, seven to-do lists,” she says as she browses through an index of notes. A list labelled “life” consists of four items: get health insurance; get your contacts fixed; fix your teeth; pay bills.

Back in California, her family still has its reservations about the move. “My mom is always saying I can come home and not pay rent and do what I’m doing over there,” she says after setting the table. The potatoes cook for 45 minutes before she pulls them from the oven, all golden brown and redolent with herbs. She then peels the eggs and sets them on large decorative spoons. “But Brooklyn has its perks. New York is like the media center of…everything, really.”

She serves the potatoes family-style in a large ceramic bowl and transfers the eggs, spoon by spoon, to a small table located directly between her computer desk (the office) and the kitchen. At the far end of the table is a stack of magazines and a mail caddy lined with paper supplies and official-looking letters. A small electronic keyboard and a cookbook titled “Please Don’t Feed the Bears” gets pushed to the back of the table as the plates are set. The potatoes are aromatic and tender with a punchy hint of tanginess from the mustard. The scientifically cooked eggs, true to form, are soft and nearly odorless, just as Alton Brown intended. Between bites, Jenn pulls up the tiny keyboard and improvises a song by one of the bands she works with. In addition to her job as a publicist, she says she’ll be playing a show in the coming weeks.

She clears the table and sets the dishes in the sink before asking one of her roommates if they’ll be joining her at a nearby bar this evening. In the last few days, she’s been feverishly preparing for a major three-day concert known as Blip Festival and will be meeting some friends at the club. “Long term plans, huh,” she says aloud as she ponders the question. She isn’t sure what, precisely, the future holds for her, but has plenty of input as to where she’d like to be. “I wanna have this building of awesome. I want it to be a restaurant, a radio station, or like a recording studio, office, rooftop garden–” she says before catching herself mid-sentence. “But those are dreams, dreams. One step at a time.”

James Lim is that rare journalist who is actually well-liked by the people he writes about. One night, not long ago, he arrived early for the 72nd precinct’s community affairs meeting in Sunset Park, and it wasn’t long before he was swarmed by friendly greeters.

James Lim at the 72nd Precinct Community Affairs meeting. Photo: Chen/Brooklyn Ink

“Hey, whatcha got for me, James,” asked a young Chinese police officer.

Lim shrugged and smiled. A stream of cops and local residents walked by, offering firm handshakes and wry banter.

“What’s up with that camera, James? You need something bigger.” Lim deflected the jibes with a grin. “I don’t want one, too heavy,” he said. At the tail end of the procession, the chairman of Community Board 7, Randy Peers, caught him off guard.

“Thanks a lot for the story, James,” he said.

Lim was gracious, but still paused for a moment. “Who translates for you?” he asked.

“I’ve got people,” said Peers.

And so, apparently, does Lim. As one of the only reporters who can call Chinese Brooklyn their beat, he is the go-to source for all things Chinese in the borough of Kings.

Lim is a Senior Reporter for the Sing Tao Daily, one of the largest Chinese-language newspapers in the world. Founded in 1938 in Hong Kong, Sing Tao has grown to include nine international bureaus that circulate 16 different editions in over 100 cities around the world. In 1965, the first of four local editions in the Eastern United States was established in New York’s Chinatown. To meet the needs of the growing Chinese population, two more offices were later opened in separate, developing Chinatowns across the city—one in Flushing, Queens; the other in Sunset Park.

The Sing Tao Brooklyn office occupies two rooms in this crowded Sunset Park apartment building. Photo: Chen/Brooklyn Ink

But unless you craned your neck up at the apartment building canvassed in colorful Chinese signage on 55th St., you wouldn’t notice Sing Tao’s Brooklyn outpost. Located in the middle of Eighth Avenue, the main thruway for the area’s densely populated Chinatown, the building seems better suited for a grocery store—indeed, several Chinese markets surround the three-story property. The office occupies just two studio-sized rooms on the second floor of the cramped building. Eight other businesses share the same address—among them, a teashop, a computer store, a travel agency, a cellphone kiosk, and a “magic jewelry” shop that specializes in Feng Shui.

The staircase leading up to the office is narrow and creaky, and is constantly in use by other tenants, forcing visitors to strafe along the banister as they pass each other single-file. At the top of the stairs are three signs in English and Chinese to help visitors navigate the cramped hallway ahead. Sing Tao is situated between an accountant’s office and a driving school. Inside, the office is split into two rooms—an administrative space for the accounts manager, and a side room shared by the company’s two Brooklyn reporters. The walls are covered in family photos, phone directories and bright red Chinese New Year posters from Foxwoods Casino. The only natural light comes from two windows on the far wall that faces Eighth Avenue. But while the accommodations are spare, it’s hard to knock the brand recognition that Sing Tao commands.

The stairway leading to Sing Tao is canvassed in banners for neighboring businesses. Photo: Chen/Brooklyn Ink

“Lots of immigrants, they really believe the newspaper,” Lim said with a still-audible Chinese accent. With his fitted black sweater, blue jeans and dark boots, he looks the part of a beat reporter, even at 48. “One time I asked this Chinese guy, ‘why did you vote for Bloomberg?’ And he says to me, ‘because the newspaper said so.’”

All told, the New York edition of Sing Tao Daily circulates about 50,000 copies citywide and 11,000 in Brooklyn alone, according to their New York circulation desk. The World Journal, another internationally recognized Chinese-language newspaper, claims to circulate some 88,000 copies in New York and 12,000 in the borough. (It is difficult to independently verify these claims without auditing the companies; though, tellingly, the World Journal’s Brooklyn office is located within a Chinese bookstore, just a few blocks away from the Sing Tao building.)  What these figures fail to capture, however, is the scope of the newspapers’ influence over Chinese New Yorkers, especially the recently immigrated.

“When there’s a problem, they call my office instead of the police,” Lim said. “It’s because of the language barrier, trust.” Many Chinese immigrants, he added, fear the police.

Lim’s path to Sing Tao was an unlikely one. He was born and raised in Malaysia, where he studied Chinese literature at the University of Malaya. In 1989, he entered the United States immigrant lottery to apply for permanent residence. In 1990, he was informed that out of 5.4 million applicants, he was one of some 10,000 to be admitted to the country. While he was already working at a newspaper in Malaysia, he decided he would leave his job and try his luck in America. He even wrote a parting article on the subject for his hometown paper.

He arrived to discover that his prospects were less than appealing. “When I first came, I knew nothing, so I didn’t look for a job like this,” he said. Although he studied many dialects of Chinese, Malay and English at university, he needed time to adjust. “New York is intimidating,” he said. “I reported in Malaysia, but it’s different.” He traveled alone and was unfamiliar with his surroundings. At first he worked as a waiter and later as a restaurant manager, before preparing himself for another crack at journalism. He spent nine months working for a Taiwanese television station before he started to work for the Sing Tao Chinatown office in 1994. In 2004, he made the move to the Brooklyn office.

“The pay is no good,” he says, “but we survive.” Through the tumult of moving to a new country, Lim never married and the rest of his family still resides in Malaysia. “At first, my mother didn’t like it,” he said with a grin. “But after I sent her money, then she happy.”

He works from Tuesday to Saturday at the Brooklyn office, though he is often out on assignment. On the night of the community affairs meeting, he had just returned from a press conference where Mayor Bloomberg was speaking. On average, he writes two to three stories a day, or 2000 to 3000 words in Chinese. But over the years, the bulk of his work has dealt with a range of stories hardly noticed by the American press. As one of only two reporters assigned to Brooklyn by the Sing Tao Daily, much of his work over the years has focused on shining a light on the conditions of Chinese immigrant life.

In one recent article, he wrote about an immigrant couple that was robbed of their savings through an over-the-phone pyramid scam. The schemers, based in Hong Kong, would call the wife and inform her that she’d won a large sum of money. To claim her prize, she need only send them a series of fees for proof of identity. Through this incremental process, they stole tens of thousands of dollars from the couple. They were too ashamed to publish their names in the piece. In another story, Lim followed the court case of a woman who lost custody of her child after fleeing the country to escape her abusive husband. Before that, Lim recounted a string of violent attacks against Chinese deliverymen who were being targeted by black and Latino gang members as part of an increasingly popular initiation rite. Other stories have involved missing persons, passport hoaxes, crackdowns on sex shops, school reform, organized crime and a sundry list of other issues reflected through the prism of the Brooklyn Chinese community’s experiences. Because of the small number of Chinese-speaking journalists that cover Brooklyn, many, if not all of Lim’s stories, would have gone unreported if he had not covered them.

The work can also be more prosaic, as it was at the recent board meeting. Lim fiddled with his point-and-shoot camera as the board members took their seats. Seated across from him was a young Chinese woman from rival World Journal. He greeted her warmly. When he has an exclusive, Lim said, he won’t share information with the World Journal. But tonight was different. He told the young woman a joke in Chinese and she laughs. He seems in many ways like a mentor to the young journalist.

Lim and a reporter from World Journal at the 72nd precinct community affairs meeting. Chen/The Brooklyn Ink

Lim moves to the front of the room to take pictures as the month’s crime statistics are announced and the young journalists follows close behind. Lim opened a small notepad and began taking notes in a mix of Chinese characters and English shorthand. He filled about two pages before flipping the book shut with a satisfied flick of the wrist.

The two reporters stayed for just 20 minutes – their respective deadlines loomed. The young woman from World Journal said she would have to run to her company’s Chinatown office to file this evening, as the Brooklyn office closes before deadline. They rose quietly, gathered their belongings, and waved at the police officers who nodded and smiled back. As they approached the exit, Peers sprang up from his seat and followed them down the hall. They were in a rush but he caught them near the exit. He wanted to know if they’d cover a community board meeting he’d be involved in the next day—a liquor license dispute involving a strip club in the neighborhood. Lim responded briskly, affirmatively, and walked out the door.

Sister Mary Paul (left) and Sister Geraldine (right). Photo courtesy of The Center for Family Life.

By Stefanos Chen

The stairs leading to the fourth floor of the Center for Family Life in Sunset Park are winding and narrow, which is why Sister Mary Paul Janchill used the elevator in her later years. By the time you reach the fourth floor entrance, you can already smell her smell, says a staff member that knew her. To the uninitiated, the scent is imperceptible.

Sister Mary Paul died in May at the age of 88 from an apparent heart attack. She was a tiny woman, even before her back began to bend gently with age. Her death came nine years after the death of Sister Geraldine Tobia, with whom she created the center, which over 30 years transformed a great deal of thinking about the state’s role in helping children whose parents have given them up to foster care, but who nonetheless remain a part of their lives.

It is not an easy model to replicate. Both Mary Paul and Geraldine held advanced degrees and social work and lived on the premises, in a suite of sparsely furnished rooms on the fourth floor above the lobby. While their order, the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, encouraged the pair to live with other nuns, they insisted on staying in Sunset Park.

At the top of the stairs is an entrance to a white corridor of rooms, the doors of which are all shut. The staff member opens the door to a room numbered 41, but it won’t swing open all the way—a large cardboard box blocks the egress. This was her living room, he says, as he looks about the blank canvass-covered walls. The room is comparable in size to a small study, with just enough space for a bookcase and armoire. He points to where things used to be.

“This is where we watched Obama’s inauguration,” he says in the direction of boxes labelled “Girls Coats” for an upcoming clothing drive. She would often entertain guests in the room, discussing politics and policy, two of her favorite subjects, until around 10 pm, when the center closes its doors to the public and she would retire to her spartan bedroom.

In the corner is a stack of paintings and awards that Sister Mary Paul had accumulated in the 30 years that this was her home. Impressions of oceans and flowerbeds and rivers are interspersed with heavy brass plaques for years of public service. Most of her belongings—the habit she donned daily, the stacks of critical texts, the reams of typewritten letters —have already been packed in boxes, stored away in a distant Manhattan annex.

Yet the room is not entirely bare. In the spots where picture frames used to hang, grey rectangles outline the wall like a photographic negative. Further to the left, a cruciform shadow shrouds an unused nail in the wall. There are three windows—two in the back that frame a row of brick houses, and another obscured by a plastic-covered air conditioner coated with dust; the plastic crinkles in the breeze.

“We’re going to utilize this space for different programs,” he says in a quiet voice, partly out of reverence, but partly because the adjoining rooms are already in use as offices. The sound of youthful laughter rises from the third floor hallway as the staff member mentions a new cooking course that will convert the sisters’ kitchen into an East-Asian culinary lab. “Her life was materially spare, but spiritually rich,” he says on the walk back to the lobby.

A G train pulls up at the stop where earlier this morning a man was killed. Photo: Chen/Brooklyn Ink

The incident occurred shortly after 7:30 in the morning at the 7^th Ave. train stop in Park Slope. Witnesses claim to have seen the man jump in front of an oncoming Manhattan-bound G train. The man, whose identity is being withheld by police due to a lack of criminal intent, was pronounced dead at the scene. The train conductor, Kisha Moorehead, was taken to Methodist Hospital in Park Slope for trauma but was discharged before noon. “[S]haken up and stressed,” Moorehead wrote on her Facebook profile page. “Passenger jumped in front of my train this morning.”

Traffic along the F and G lines was backed up for close to two hours this morning as police investigated the scene. The episode was particularly traumatic for subway passengers and employees who witnessed the aftermath. A group of MTA workers sent out on an unrelated construction job watched as police debated whether or not to postpone cleanup of the potential crime scene. The body was visible for close to two hours.

“I saw the body on the tracks and it was mangled,” said one MTA worker who refused to be identified for fear of facing employer repercussions. “It shook me up bad. It was the first time I’d seen something like that.”

But by 10 am, the tracks had been thoroughly washed and the body removed, leaving little evidence of the gruesome scene, save for a pool of muddy brown water beneath the rails.

-by Stefanos Chen

]]> http://thebrooklynink.com/2009/11/19/5541-unidentified-man-struck-by-subway-train/feed/ 0 http://thebrooklynink.com/2009/11/12/5225-push/ http://thebrooklynink.com/2009/11/12/5225-push/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:00:19 +0000 Ishita Singh http://thebrooklynink.com/?p=5225 By Stefanos Chen

It’s 4 pm on possibly the last warm Sunday of the calendar year and the handball courts in Sunset Park are packed. A motley crew of teens, ‘tweens and indeterminate youths squat around the edges of the fenced-in perimeter as they wait for one last showdown at sundown—one last game to carry them through the shut-in months of winter. No one is watching the sunset.

The wall is a massive slab of poured concrete, divided into three separate courts by broad swipes of orange paint, like an unfinished triptych. There are three doubles games in play, side by side, four kids per court. Each game has its own row of spectator/challengers who switch off between calling the shots and shouting obscenities.

The handball court in Sunset Park. Photo: Chen/The Brooklyn Ink

“It’s been, like, point-game for the longest time,” says an older boy who’s been waiting to play for close to an hour. He wears black and blue from head to toe, his growing beard is landscaped into a pencil thin line and his hair is cropped into neat cornrows. The ends of his braids stick out from his Yankees cap as he sighs and stares down at his impeccable Pumas.

“Nah, we’re gonna push!” comes a higher pitched voice from the far right court. “Relax, I got this.”

Most games end at 21, but when the game is tied at 20, the players can agree to “push” the score until they reach a decisive victory. If the players need another tiebreaker, they “push” the game again. And again, as 10, then 20 minutes elapse. It’s too late to challenge the winners of the middle court;  a new game has already started. And on the far left court, an older man rifles through a small stack of singles with a five in the middle—money game; no hope of playing there. Black and blue grumbles to himself as he presses up against the fence, staring daggers into the players.

Just outside the chain-link fence, a police car drives by at a crawl, signaling the start of the evening patrol. Black and Blue strikes up a conversation with a new kid, who isn’t looking to play at all. They talk for a few minutes, but their words are unclear. “Yesterday…f..ked my whole day,” he says to the new kid. Between words, he occasionally looks up at the handball game and listens for the score. It’s getting harder to spot the tiny rubber ball as it whizzes back and forth.

“Man, what is this push shit?” Black and Blue grumbles aloud. One of the players, a youngish boy the others call “Dragon” volunteers an answer.

“Was I talking to you?” Black and Blue asks. “Inevertalk to you.”

“You’re talking to me right now.”

The game continues at a snail’s pace. One of the players announces the handball equivalent of double over-time: “Game 31!” he says. It’s just after 5 o’clock and the park lights have come on. The court on the left has emptied and the middle court players are getting ready to leave. Black and Blue plugs in his earbuds and walks away.

Entrance to the Three Hierarchs Church in Midwood. Photo courtesy of gkjarvis/Flickr

The service was already running late when the priest asked the choir to join him at the altar. It took close to three minutes for the elderly choir members to walk or wheel their way down the aisle. The priest explained that the Three Hierarchs Greek Orthodox Church of Brooklyn was celebrating the 66^th anniversary of two of its most senior choir members. He spoke mainly in English to the mixed group of Greek, Russian and Ukrainian parishioners, most of them well over 40.

The choir members wore matching red robes with plunging gold necklines, which gave the impression of an ancient Greek cabal. The choir leader spoke in long, grandfatherly sentences that tended to trail off. When he struggled for words in English—not for lack of mastery, but from a lapse in memory—he spoke in quick bursts of Greek, as if to reach into the word bank of bygone years.

After the service, the congregation gathered in the basement for cold-cut sandwiches and potato salad. The food was catered and paid for by a local Greek diner. A man in a suit stood by the doorway offering “cawfee” to churchgoers. One of the community board members, a graying woman in orthopedic shoes, announced over the portable PA system that choir members would be the first to be served. The line broke down almost immediately. “That guy isn’t part of the choir,” an overdressed woman complained. She muttered to herself for several minutes before catching a neighbor off guard: “It’s those Russians that cut,” she said, her face turning flush with anger. Others at the table ignored the comment, or, when she persisted, nodded in passing and carried on.

Upstairs, the afternoon service for Russian speaking church members had begun.

A commuter van docks in Sunset Park. Photo: Chen/ Brooklyn Ink

After 17 years of pacing the streets of Sunset Park, you might think that Wai Yeung Wong would bring a chair to work–except he never does. He doesn’t dare. Not with everyone, it seems, horning in on his business.

Wong co-owns the J&HE Transportation Inc., a private shuttle service that transports Sunset Park’s growing Chinese population to and from Chinatown. He joined the company two years ago, but has been involved with the commuter shuttle, or “dollar van” business, as it’s often called, for nearly 25 years. After a quarter century, Wong, now 58, might have cornered the market. But in the transient world of cash transactions, street-side pickups, and blurry licensing laws, where getting ahead often means breaking the rules, nothing is a sure thing.

So it was that he was standing on the corner of 59th St. and 8th Ave, as he does most days, directing commuters into one of his company’s white Ford vans. But less than 10 blocks away, dozens of Wong’s potential customers were boarding improperly licensed vans–as his competition watched from worn-in folding chairs. “It’s not fair for us,” he said with a groan.

The commuter van business grew out of the need to transport Brooklyn’s growing Chinese population to and from the more established Chinatown of lower Manhattan, where many Brooklyn Chinese found work in restaurants, textile factories and retail stores during the 1980s. The combination of one-stop travel and the lure of riding with fellow Chinese convinced many commuters to ride the vans instead of taking public transportation. By 1985, vehicles of all shapes and sizes were being used to cash in on the booming industry, according to Wong.

“In the beginning, there was just one van,” he said between long drags on a cigarette. “Then my friend bought a yellow school bus, the kind for students, and started using that too.”

But as business grew, its tenuous legal status created several problems for the companies. Police were impounding vans and owners were facing large sums in moving violation tickets for causing traffic congestion. So in 1988, Wong applied for one of the first commuter van licenses issued in Sunset Park from the Department of Transportation. Once licensed, Wong’s company became subject to annual taxes, insurance costs and frequent safety inspections, but it earned him a sense of legitimacy among the legion of unmarked vans.

By the early 1990s, Wong’s prudence had paid off, and he became a partner in “Wah On,” a popular shuttle company with a fleet of 16 vans. For close to a decade, he worked 7 days a week, with vans running from 6 am to 11pm. With the money he saved, he managed to buy a home for his family, become a U.S. citizen and put his four children through school. But in the years to follow, not all of his competitors would be as keen on playing by the rules.

“There’s been illegal competition for about 10 years,” he said. “I always complain to police. They agree with me, but they don’t take action.”

The problem for Wong is that the laws regulating the van business are often complicated and difficult to enforce, allowing anyone with knowledge of the business to take advantage of the system. One major source of consternation, for law enforcement and drivers alike, has been the issue of licensing. For instance, all vans that carry 16 or more people are required by New York law to carry a bus-grade commercial driver’s license, according to the Unofficial DMV Guide, a website designed to simplify its namesake’s instructions. However, several van drivers are only issued Taxi and Limousine Commission licenses meant for vehicles with half of that capacity. Drivers who only obtain these licenses are therefore under-insured, and are putting their passengers at risk, said Community Affairs Officer Janet Zhang of the 72nd precinct.

“The reason we stop vans is because they didn’t buy enough insurance,” she said. “In China, maybe they allow it, but here we have regulations and law. We do it for your safety.”

Wong (far right) traveling by dollar van to the 72nd Precinct Community Affairs meeting.

In some cases, vans aren’t licensed at all. While she estimates that there are approximately 60 licensed vans in Sunset Park, there are several more that are not on file with the department. Out of the three or four legitimate van companies that compete in Sunset Park, close to 40 of the licensed vehicles belonged to Wong’s company.

But all of these issues tend to circle one major, underlying problem. At a community affairs meeting on Tuesday, it was revealed that Sunset Service, one of the other major van companies in Sunset Park, was attempting to move from its 53rd Street pickup location to 57th Street–just two blocks away from Wong’s pickup area. But unlike public bus companies, neither J&HE nor Sunset Service was ever granted a permanent pickup site.

This is not to say, however, that there isn’t still plenty of demand for the commuter van business as a whole. Even though the so-called “dollar vans” now cost $2.50 a ride, many residents continue to rely on the service. Since so many commuters travel straight to Chinatown, the vans remain the fastest way to travel. “The MTA is never on time, not punctual,” said Wendy Lai, an assistant at the Brooklyn Chinese-American Association, an organization that provides social services to Sunset Park’s Chinese community. “It takes a half hour with the van but one hour by subway. It’s just more convenient.”

Wong is currently waiting for the Department of Transportation to either approve or reject his application for city-approved commuter van pickup stations. Until then, the companies will have to make due with what they have.

“No, I’m never angry, I just feel that it’s not fair,” he said. “Because if you’re angry, you can’t do nothing about it.”