Do you pick up the phone when your mother is calling and you’re face down at a massage parlour in Chinatown?
It’s a Saturday afternoon and I’m waiting for David Chen, the Clint Eastwood of Dundas Street who became a local hero after catching a shoplifter and hogtying him in his van behind his Lucky Moose Grocery Store.
Chen is a nice guy; a father of two. We’ve met a few times and I’ve even become fond of Nina, his shockingly cute wife who, from what I can gather, spends most of her days shucking peas in the small Lucky Moose kitchen.
Chen is a man who works hard so when I show up for our guided tour across Chinatown he’s as present as a Jewish deli on Spadina Avenue. So I pass the time by giving myself a little tour that begins at the Oriental Health Beauty Centre and find myself topless and face down in a white-walled room getting worked over by a woman in black boots and dark blue jeans.
“What does the Chinese New Year mean to you?” I ask her, in between grunts and groans as she works me over with her elbows, fists and wok-hard hands.
“It’s a chance to start over,” she says,as my telephone begins its guilt-inducing ring and I peer over to see the familiar phone number of Mom.
The massage only takes 10 minutes and it hurts more than it helps, but the answer to my opening question is simple: whenever you find yourself at a massage parlour, let your voice mail handle your mother’s phone call.
The Chinese New Year begins on Feb. 3 and this year it leaps from the Year of the Tiger to the Year of the Rabbit. There are 12 animals in the Chinese celestial cycle. When I do find David Chen, after my massage when I’m feeling like jelly, he tells me the Year of the Rabbit will bring positive change.
“It’s a good thing, a proud time; the rabbit is a symbol of wisdom and strength,” says Chen, a hero to Chinatown’s local merchants who say they’re sick of being robbed by folks like Anthony Bennett, the thief Chen captured who has 43 convictions for theft.
Chen, who was acquitted of his charges in October, turned a gangland hot spot into a bustling grocery, and says he’s pleased to be turning the page on last year.
“We didn’t even fight him, we waited for the police,” Chen says, before passing me off to his tenant, a 68-year-old man named Son Myung Soo. “Everyone hopes that the new year is better,” Chen adds, “but you don’t know what tomorrow will bring.”
Chen advises Son Myung Soo and I to dine at Asian Legend, but when we walk through the door, the only faces staring back at us are white. I dip back into the Chinese massage parlour for another opinion, and it’s on my masseuse’s authority that I end up at The House of Gourmet.
“Canada is different from our country. Here, if we catch a thief, they sue us, but we need someone to protect us because people steal from us all the time,” says Melissa Szeto, who opens her restaurant at 8 a.m. and sometimes works until four in the morning.
For Szeto, the Chinese New Year means second chances. She is part of the growing Asian community living in Markham and she knows her downtown restaurant faces stiff competition north of the city and from Toronto’s east side.
“The Year of the Rabbit is very important,” says Szeto. “This last year was very, very hard on our area, but everyone likes a rabbit, right?”
At this point I should say a few words about Son Myung Soo.
He’s a colourful character who dips into his denture case for change when we receive our bill (I swear I was going to chip in, but they don’t accept credit cards). And, he believes David Chen should run for office.
“He changed Chinatown,” says Son, as we head back onto Dundas Street and pass the vendors selling roast sweet potato for two bucks.
“The rabbit outsmarts anybody. He’s tough like the tiger, but even stronger — that’s David Chen.” Of course, the mysteries of Chinatown only reveal themselves in the shadows and so after I ditch the old man, I’m yanked into a hidden commercial strip of fly-by-night shops by a hoodlum wearing an Asahi ski cap and shades. The knock-off DVDs sold here seem so corrupt that if you put them into your machine the entire system might explode.
“I love David Chen!” says the young woman behind the desk in the alley between Darcy and Dundas streets as she directs me to DVDs of The King’s Speech and 127 Hours.
“David helps people who no one else can,” says the woman, who says she’s from mainland China.“Everyone knows about David Chen. Everyone here followed his case.”
Unfortunately the woman was unable to recommend a nice place for coffee, so I find Ten Ren’s Tea Shop at Huron and Dundas on my own. I buy a $15 packet of make-it-yourself bubble tea and then scurry over to Ten Mile Aroma, which sells fried pork intestine and lamb entrails, but I am much more taken with their $1.75 glasses of cold draught beer.
Outside, the snow has started falling and I know that I need to call my mother and check out the new Owl of Minerva that just opened inside the Dragon City Mall, but I can’t shake the image of David Chen. I walk back across the street to his grocery store and order a cup of coffee and exchange a few pleasantries with Nina who, of course, is still shucking peas.
Along Spadina Avenue and Dundas Street, the Chinese New Year is a celebration to behold. For David Chen, who returns to the Lucky Moose when the day has darkened, it’s just another day at the office.
“When I bought this building, Chinatown was terrible, dangerous, violent,” he says. “I made it a supermarket because I thought that means safety. Everybody has to eat.”
