Immigrant communities within communities are generally interesting and this tale grabbed me because it seems structurally as if it belongs in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.
This extract is not the start of the (well-written) article, but an introduction to the scam that the writer utilises to introduce the topic--you may well be able to guess where it's going:
One afternoon in late April of last year, she [Wang Jin] was leaving the Bensonhurst branch of Marshalls when an agitated woman in her early forties rushed up to her. “I’m looking for a doctor called Xu,” the woman said, in rapid-fire Cantonese. “It’s urgent—for my daughter.”
Wang had been to plenty of traditional Chinese-medicine practitioners in the neighborhood, but she’d never heard of a Dr. Xu. “He is very well known here,” the woman went on. “I think he’s my daughter’s only hope.” She said that the girl had begun her first menstrual bleeding two weeks earlier and nothing would staunch the flow. Friends spoke of Dr. Xu as a miracle worker, but no one knew where to find him.
A woman passing by overheard and interjected, “Are you talking about the Dr. Xu? He’s a treasure. I have him to thank for my mother-in-law’s incredible recovery.” When the first woman asked for more details, the newcomer shrugged. “He’s become a real recluse in recent years,” she said. “I don’t even know if he sees patients anymore.”
Wang was curious. She’d had her own share of ailments. A decade ago, she had surgery to remove a tumor in one of her ovaries, and, a dozen or so years before that, her husband had suffered a back injury that left him unable to work. She became responsible for supporting their two young children. “I would tell the kids, ‘Mama is not hungry today—you guys hurry up and eat,’ ” she told me. At the time, she made around a hundred and thirty dollars a week, at a garment factory on Grand Street, and the physical demands of the work had ravaged her body.
As Wang and her new acquaintances talked, it turned out that the woman who’d met Dr. Xu was from a village not far from where Wang had grown up. She introduced herself as Liu, asked about Wang’s husband and children, and extended an open invitation to have tea at a bakery she owned with her husband. Wang was touched by her solicitude. It reminded her of life back in Taishan, where you’d constantly cross paths with acquaintances and there was a web of trust, woven over generations, from the reciprocal exchange of favors. If you had an unfamiliar problem, you’d seek out a shu ren, a “familiar person,” to help. In the U.S., however, Chinese people shared less about themselves. “Everything is business,” Wang said.
Full Article:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/chinatowns-ghost-scam