Chinatown Wants Supporters, Not Saviors

Restaurants were hit hard in March when lockdown orders were put into place to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Across the U.S., sales plummeted 47% during the period from March 1 to March 22, according to a survey of more than 5,000 restaurant owners and operators conducted by the National Restaurant Association.

But restaurants in Chinatowns started losing business as early as January when news of coronavirus cases in China started to break through the periphery. It was on January 21 that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first stateside coronavirus case.

Jamie Lee, director of community initiatives for the Seattle Chinatown International District Preservation and Development Authority (SCIDpda), saw a decrease in sales for businesses in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District (CID) in late January when “the information about the coronavirus was coming out.”

SCIDpda, a community development organization that has been preserving, promoting and developing the CID as a “vibrant community and unique ethnic neighborhood” since 1975, works closely with 150 to 200 small businesses in the area—a home for over 400 businesses.

Lunar New Year, which fell on January 25 this year, is usually peak season for the neighborhood so businesses count on the holiday to bring in a lot of revenue. But Jamie Lee had noticed less people frequenting the CID by then.

Pivoting to takeout and delivery has helped CID restaurants earn some revenue and keep their staff on board, but “all of them are operating at a lower percentage of business than they normally would,” Jamie Lee says.

And these businesses are at a disadvantage in many ways when it comes to a pandemic. According to her, “many of them are people-of-color-owned, immigrant-owned” and the operators often have limited English proficiency.

SCIDpda has been supporting CID businesses during the pandemic in many different ways. Something crucial to owners in the area is being properly informed in a language they understand. “Many of them have needed support in just deciphering a lot of the information that is given out,” Jamie Lee says.

The CID has a strong presence from not only Chinese businesses but also Japanese, Vietnamese and Filipino businesses, so for any updates her organization shares with the community, that information is translated into traditional Chinese and Vietnamese at the very least.

Jamie Lee’s organization also partners with two groups in the neighborhood—the Chinatown-International District Business Improvement Area and Friends of Little Sàigòn—to support economic development for businesses throughout the year. Right now, all three of them are working closely together to “make sure that we are fully serving a lot of the businesses in the neighborhood,” Jamie Lee says.

This means helping owners apply to any funding opportunities and relief from the Small Business Administration. The three organizations also set up their own relief fund for small businesses. The fund had raised over $300,000 by May.

Currently, King County, where Seattle is the county seat, is still in the modified phase one of the Safe Start Washington reopening plan from Gov. Jay Inslee, but it recently applied to shift to phase two, which allows restaurants and taverns to have dine-in customers at less than 50% capacity and with a maximum table size of five people (no seating in any bar area, however).

But even after restaurants open back dining rooms and the coronavirus eventually becomes less of a concern, the CID is going to need a lot more to rebound, “When this thing’s over, we’re still going to need support,” Jamie Lee says. “It’s going to take us longer to come out of this depression that’s basically happening.”

Businesses in the CID are not sitting idly while waiting for help though. “I think that one of the things that has been really talked about in this time is how resilient we are and how resilient our community is,” Jamie Lee says.

She has been seeing restaurants in the neighborhood rethink their operations and business models. Places that closed down temporarily at the onset of the coronavirus outbreaks opened back up after owners realized the pandemic was a longer-term issue. 

CID business owners have concerns for the future, of course, but they have found hope and strength from their community. “There has been an outpouring of support for the businesses in our neighborhood and small businesses in general within Seattle,” Jamie Lee says.

The area is important, and not just for its inhabitants. According to Jamie Lee, the CID is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Seattle and has remained true to itself over the decades—a hard feat to accomplish in one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S., a hotbed for major tech companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

“It’s really nice to have a neighborhood that has stayed so authentic and really has local ownership in its businesses,” she says. “We want that to be able to be here for generations so that other people can experience what it is that we experience and we really love.”

Jennifer Tam, communications director for Foursquare, and Victoria Lee, corporate director of global travel and meetings for Estée Lauder, feel similar sentiments for Manhattan’s Chinatown, where they have resided for a long time. The pair also noticed a decrease in foot traffic in their area around Lunar New Year—a time of year when the streets are usually packed with crowds walking shoulder-to-shoulder—before anywhere else in the city experienced the same. “The economic downfall started much earlier than all the other restaurant and hospitality industries have been impacted because of xenophobia, of racism,” Tam says.

The duo drew upon their corporate experience to launch Welcome to Chinatown in March as a response to the rapid decline in sales. The grassroots initiative supports small businesses in the neighborhood. Tam leads communications and volunteer efforts while Victoria Lee oversees operations and outreach to businesses within the community.

One of their campaigns was Greens for Good—a collaboration with Asian-Veggies.com that helped the Chinese-American Planning Council provide bags of fresh produce to seniors, thus allowing them to stay at home without worrying about food. The project raised over $14,000 in donations, resulting in over 7,705 lbs of produce served to the elderly in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Welcome to Chinatown’s most successful initiatives to date is Feed Our Heroes, which has raised over $100,000 in donations to feed essential workers on the frontlines with more than 10,000 meals from Chinatown restaurants. But as New York begins to move forward with the next phase of reopening, Tam and Victoria Lee will retire this campaign to focus on fundraising for their small business relief fund, which will specifically be for Chinatown operators. In Tam’s opinion, these businesses have largely been left out of small business loans and grants related to COVID-19 relief.

The two also plan on continuing to encourage donations and merchandise sales and gaining more support for Care for Chinatown, their latest initiative. The mission behind the project is to revitalize the neighborhood with 10 custom murals in order to boost morale, create a stronger sense of identity among residents, encourage visitors and improve public perception of the area.

Though Tam and Victoria Lee have managed to find success with their campaigns (with a squad of 25 volunteers on their side), it would be a lie to say it’s been easy. After all, they’ve been working their full-time jobs amidst all this. And it’s been challenging to connect with businesses in Chinatown and tackle their different needs. 

Some need help with overhead costs, while others want assistance in rebranding themselves as modern businesses. Welcome to Chinatown introduces operators to new business models and point-of-sale systems. The organization also offers marketing advice, such as telling businesses to claim their own Yelp pages and engage with customers by responding to reviews. 

These may seem like little steps, but they’re huge for the many mom-and-pop restaurants who have previously been hesitant to modernize. “Seeing just how unprecedented the pandemic is, we think that there is going to be more of an acceptance to adapting to new ways of working,” Victoria Lee says. “And we’re hopeful too that those are things that we can help.”

While financial support is important, the Welcome to Chinatown co-founders want their neighborhood to be seen as more than just a place marred by misfortune and filled with people who need handouts and lessons on how to survive. Chinatown businesses have already been surviving for ages, Tam says.

She and Victoria Lee hope to use this platform to showcase the real Chinatown—the one they know and love. A resilient neighborhood rich in art and history. A vibrant, evolving community with not only family-owned businesses run by immigrants but also a new crop of small businesses from first-generation owners. A place to make special memories, whether you’re alone or with a group of friends.

“What we would say for those that don’t get to experience Chinatown the way that we do is that we hope that there’s a day where you can come visit Chinatown and see it more than its face value of a place for cheap eats or tchotchke shopping,” Tam says.

When Linxin Wen, CEO, and Suyu Zhang, CTO, launched Chowbus in 2016, they also had a goal of highlighting local, independent Chinese businesses, but in a different way. Chowbus is a third-party food delivery platform that started in Chicago, its headquarters. Since its inception, the service has expanded to 18 other cities in the U.S. and Vancouver, Canada with more than 500,000 users.

The idea for Chowbus started in 2015, when Wen tried to order food delivery but discovered that none of the restaurants he liked were available on any platforms. He decided to build his own food delivery platform tailored to these under-served restaurants and make it easier for diners to enjoy authentic Chinese and Asian dishes. What started as something born out of his personal need turned into a service that people loved. 

“As an immigrant founder, I just wanted to help these Chinese, Asian, immigrant [and] independent restaurant owners because they are cooking amazing dishes,” Wen says. “But very few people know about it except for Chinese [people].”

Chowbus differs from other big-name food delivery services such as Grubhub and Uber Eats because of this focus on small Chinese and Asian businesses. And it’s been successful in reaching out to mom-and-pop restaurants who may have been wary of this kind of platform before due to a language barrier. That’s not a problem for Chowbus. The sales and customer service teams are bilingual in both English and Chinese.

The service also stands out with a capability that Wen calls “restaurant bumbling.” Customers can get menu items from multiple restaurants in the same order. For example, a person can get a Sichuan dish from one restaurant and bubble tea from the shop next door—all at no extra charge, he says.

And according to Wen, the delivery fees that merchants pay on Chowbus also differ from those of other platforms. “I’m confident to say we have the most competitive commission rate for restaurants,” he says. 

For the CEO, this rate has to do with the very reason why he and Zhang started the company: to serve the little guys. “We are here to help them instead of to take every penny out of them,” Wen says. 

This philosophy has definitely come into play during the pandemic. More restaurants joined Chowbus after stay-at-home orders across the country forced businesses to either close or shift operations to takeout and delivery. The company has supported their merchants by waiving commission fees on pick-up orders, giving away free masks, lowering their delivery threshold from $20 to $15 and even setting up a small consulting team to assist with PPP loan applications. 

Actions like these have done wonders for retaining business. Out of over 1,000 restaurants that have joined Chowbus since its beginning, less than 1% have quit so far, Wen says. He believes vendors love the platform because it’s an easy channel to make “extra revenue without cost.”

Now that restaurants in Chinatowns have experienced the benefits of offering delivery firsthand, Wen expects these businesses to continue doing it, even after dining rooms open back up. And Chowbus is ready to help them in any way possible. “Everyone should support the small guys,” he says.