Eveline Chao

It has been a while since the bad boys of Chinatown made anyone nervous. The hair they used to grease into pompadours has turned white; and instead of cigarette packs, they carry photos of their grandchildren.

On a recent Saturday the gang — or what remains of it — gathered at Yee Li, a restaurant at Elizabeth and Bayard streets, reminiscing about the old days. They were there at the behest of the original kai doy, Danny Moy and Soy Chu, who for the past 17 years have organized annual reunions at the restaurant.

Moy and Chu have been friends since before they hung out at pool halls, growing up in the area during the 1940s and ‘50s. In those days, Chinatown was small, just 10 or so blocks around Mott, Pell, and Doyers streets. There were only about 5,000 people in the neighborhood, and everyone knew one another. Children were often left unattended.

“I lived in 56,” said Larry Lau, 76, a retired commercial artist, referring to 56 Mott St. “Danny and Lungie lived down the hall. We ruled the first floor. When other kids had to go in or out of the building, they used to run past the first floor, hoping to not bump into us.”

Lau, like those squeezed around the banquet tables in Yee Li, felt a strong connection to Chinatown, though most of them had moved away during the 1960s. Some had driven in to the reunion from Connecticut, or New Jersey, or even Virginia; Moy flew in from California. One fellow, 77-year-old Sammy Lum, had stayed in the neighborhood. He made the trip from across the street.

Over 10 courses of Cantonese food — jellyfish and roast pork; fried shrimp and gai lan — they traded memories of childhood exploits. How they played kick the can on Pell Street and stickball by the Tombs prison. They knew all the underground tunnels in Chinatown; got in fistfights with the kids from Little Italy. Sometimes, they trekked up to Central Park to go fishing. “And do you know where we got the worms to go fishing?” Lau said. “We dug them from the mayor’s front lawn.”

Moy, 76 — an energetic talker with a booming voice known among friends as “the mayor of Chinatown” — pointed out people in the crowd. This was Constance, he said, indicating a woman seated to his left; they dated when he was 17, but her father forbade her from seeing him. That was Tracy, whose father used to own this restaurant; before that, it was a bar. George Kwong was called “Sleepy,” for how he looked after a few beers, and Donald Chin was “the Duck.” That was Lungie — Henry Eng — nicknamed after the Taishanese word for “dragon,” because he was the best dragon dancer. Moy and Lungie were especially close because they were both mixed-race and adopted. Once as children, they got in trouble after they bored a hole in the wall between their apartments, hidden behind the couch, through which they used to talk.

As teenagers in the ‘50s, Moy and his friends formed the Jade Club on East Broadway, in a space now occupied by the Golden Unicorn Restaurant. It was a place to host record hops and dances, closer to home than other socials hosted by the Chinese student associations at Hunter College or Columbia University. They played rock ‘n’ roll records and practiced Latin dancing — there was a craze for Latin music sweeping the city back then. Young people from other Chinese communities — in Washington or the now-long-gone Newark Chinatown, or from as far afield as Jamaica or Cuba — came to their dances.

Over the next decade, most of the crew left Chinatown. Lau and Moy joined the Army in 1961. (“I think every person in Chinatown was glad when we joined,” Lau said.) Others went to college, or found jobs, or they married and moved to the suburbs, settling in Long Island or New Jersey or Connecticut. But through the years, a sense of having experienced something special during their childhood in Chinatown has kept them close.

The Chinatown they were born into was on the cusp of transformation. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which virtually ended Chinese immigration, was repealed in 1943, around the time the boys and their friends were born. For decades the act effectively kept Chinatown’s population frozen at around 5,000 people. Slowly the repeal ushered in a wave of acceptance for Chinese in America.

When the last vestiges of the Exclusion Act were fully rolled back in 1965, Chinatown’s population exploded — some estimates put it as high as 150,000 — as new immigrants came from Hong Kong, Vietnam, Fujian province in southern China, and elsewhere.

The little Cantonese village became a melting pot.

For this crowd, those changes are something to celebrate — a reflection of the improved status of Chinese immigrants. But they also mean that what made their childhood special — the intimacy of a tiny Chinatown, frozen by exclusion, where everyone knew your name — is largely gone.

Moy, Chu and most of his friends were part of the first American-born generation in their families. Chu’s parents immigrated during the 1920s from Taishan in what was then called Canton — the region in southwestern China where, until the 1950s, a vast majority of Chinese in America came from.

In Chinatown, Chu’s father worked as a cook, supporting seven children and a wife, squeezed into a one-bedroom apartment on Division Street. “We grew up without material things, and learned from growing up in the streets of New York City,” Chu said. He attended Stuyvesant High School, where he was one of just a few Asians at a school that is now 70 percent Asian. He went on to found a software company called New Year Tech and retired in Virginia.

Moy was adopted as a baby by a prominent Chinatown couple. His father was the head of the influential On Leong Merchants Association, and his mother, who was born in Shanghai in 1919 and sold at age 6 to a traveling circus troupe, had performed as an acrobat with Barnum &amp; Bailey Circus. After the Army, Moy spent 45 years working for a steel company, Earle M. Jorgensen Co., becoming a vice president of marketing, and eventually retired in California.

Now once a year, Moy and Chu and their friends conjure the Chinatown of their youth. The impetus, Moy said, was 9/11. “I was living in California and I’d seen the towers come down, and it bothered the hell out of me,” he said. “I thought, ‘Well anything can happen.’ So I called up my buddy Soy and said we should get together. And I’ve made an effort to get everyone together every year since.”

Over time, the logistics have changed as people have aged. Cancer, strokes, and other ailments have taken their toll; many of their friends are dead. “We’ve probably lost eight or nine guys who used to come to these,” Moy said. He himself had to delay this year’s reunion (it’s usually held in September) because of a hip replacement.

Yet, even on a cold December evening, nearly 50 people made the effort to come out to Yee Li. Over the last course of the meal, Moy struggled to recall another game from his childhood: “I’m forgetting — what was it called in Chinese? The thing you kick, with the feathers on it? We used to make them out of newspapers and chicken feathers.”

A waiter, passing by, called out in Taishanese, “That’s called gai moyin.” It was a feather ball, also known as shuttlecock or Chinese hacky-sack.

“That’s right!” said Moy, who looked satisfied. It was another piece of the past, restored.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/nyregion/the-return-of-the-bad-boys-of-chinatown.html" id="648c3f02-60e6-3cc6-a251-9c1107979335">The New York Times</a>.

NEW YORK — Their friends call them the Chinatown kai doy — Taishanese for “bad boys.” They shot pool, rode motorcycles, and wanted to be James Dean. People would cross the street when they saw them, finding them just a little too rambunctious for comfort.

The Return of the Bad Boys of Chinatown

But she had misunderstood the ad: It wasn’t for an acting role, exactly. The job was to be a “brand ambassador” at marketing events. And it paid, in her words, “extremely, extremely decently.”

Malone, 27, had stumbled into a thriving industry that seemed ideal for people like her: the world of experiential marketing, which aims to create emotional connections between people and brands through real-life interactions. These happenings rely on temporary workers who function as something between event staff and human billboard.

Called brand ambassadors, or BAs, they’re the smiling (and suspiciously attractive) people greeting visitors at product launches, handing out free samples at music festivals, signing in guests to fashion shows, or appearing out of nowhere to chat whenever a long line forms, making sure people don’t get bored.

New York City’s role as a center of both theater and marketing has resulted in a convenient pool of professionally charming brand ambassadors. And with brands and marketers now producing lavish, over-the-top events akin to full theatrical productions, the line separating the two is starting to blur a bit.

“Brand ambassador work is the best thing that ever happened to me,” said Sean Hankinson, a 30-something from Tucson, Arizona, who has appeared in the soap opera “Days of Our Lives” and toured the country in the off-Broadway production “Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man.”

Hankinson was an apprentice at an off-Broadway theater in 2016 when he met a recruiter who said he’d make a great BA Like Malone, he’d been struggling to find good day-to-day work that could accommodate last-minute auditions and gigs. Up to that point, he had supported himself by working as a personal assistant, and cleaning or picking up laundry through an on-demand errand app called Hello Alfred.

He signed with a staffing agency and found himself in Times Square, handing out fliers for $20 an hour. “It’s soul-crushing, and you think, Everyone hates me,” said Hankinson. “But I kept doing it because the recruiter had told me if I kept at it, I would start getting better gigs.”

He eventually graduated to costume-character jobs, like dressing as a mummy ($75 per hour) or being the wrangler who keeps rambunctious children from hurling themselves at other costumed characters ($50 an hour). For one job, Hankinson wore NFL-branded clothing and chatted up guests on the rooftop of a Midtown hotel, earning $700 for just an hour of work.

Hankinson books his work through Mustard Lane, one of many BA staffing and production companies that have cropped up to service “brand activations,” as such events are called. (Nearly every brand ambassador at Mustard Lane is a professional actor or performer, according to the agency’s founder, Kristal Mallookis.) Adam Hollander, who founded his company early enough to snag the name Brand Ambassadors, estimates that since his agency started 20 years ago, more than 30 other BA agencies have opened in New York City.

The rise of social media has vaulted event marketing — what is now called experiential marketing — from an afterthought to a top priority for brands. And according to Stephen Papageorge, president of the creative agency the Loveshack, spending has followed suit.

Part of this is owed to the success of “Sleep No More,” a free-form immersive theater production that opened in New York in 2011. Audience members were sent wandering through a former hotel, stumbling upon scenes and interacting with performers. It was a hit, and kicked off a craze for all things immersive, both in theater and in marketing.

By 2015, Papageorge’s previous agency, Mirrorball, was creating elaborate productions like Motel No. 7, an event for Jack Daniels strongly influenced by “Sleep No More.” It also had a budget, Papageorge said, “in the many millions of dollars.” The immersive motel-themed party featured more than 100 actors, including bellhops who sent guests on mysterious errands and a bachelorette party that sang karaoke all night. After kicking off in Brooklyn it toured the country like a Broadway production.

It also paid on par with one. Jesse Patch, a producer for the event (and a former theater major), said that to ensure Broadway-caliber talent, he paid Broadway-level rates — at the time, $1,750 per week or higher.

Mayte Natalio, a dancer from Queens who has toured with artists like Kanye West, and used to support herself by teaching dance and leading 6:30 a.m. fitness classes, heard about one of Patch’s events through her agent. She was cast in Bazaar Noire, a touring event for the beer brand Dos Equis. She played “a vendor in this crazy street bazaar, trying to make people eat these weird foods.”

She estimates that sponsored brand events now amount to a quarter of her income. She even started an immersive event company called Minute Zero with five fellow performers. “There are very few artists these days who can afford to just do one thing,” she said.

Like any job, being a brand ambassador has its downsides. “Giving out free things brings out the ugly in people,” said Hankinson, the onetime mummy. “When you’re standing in the park handing out free Popsicles, you experience the most manipulative, lying, negative side of people. And you have to be able to keep smiling and laugh it off. Even when you’re like, Ugh, I know you’re not really allergic to strawberry because, Honey, I just saw you go over there and eat the strawberry Popsicle, then come back and ask for a coconut one.”

He also noted that lately, as more staffing agencies have cropped up, he’s been approached to do the same kind of work that pays $30 to $50 at his current agency, but for $16 per hour instead.

Malone, for her part, worries that her BA gigs are becoming less accommodating. One agency she works with has begun requiring commitments of up to five days at a time, making it harder to schedule last-minute auditions.

For now, she feels upbeat about the future. In March, she performed in a play about Harriet Tubman. In April, she landed a small role in an Amazon docuseries. “They put us all up in such a fancy hotel,” she said. And the past few months, she’s been working as a BA at a Dolby audio “pop-up experience” in SoHo.

Hankinson, on the other hand, recently relocated to Atlanta, drawn by the boom in film and TV production there. But he is always ready to return to New York for work: his BA gigs certainly beat working in restaurants, he said, and still pay so well that he finds them hard to turn down. At least for now.

“You don’t want to be a waiter when you’re 45,” Hankinson said. “I don’t know if you want to do BA work either, but you could.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/nyregion/brand-ambassadors-actors-nyc.html" id="83eac849-e8a3-3ab9-a465-c12faddaecb3">The New York Times</a>.

For struggling actors, no more waiting tables, the new side gig: Brand ambassador

NEW YORK — Chérie Celeste Malone was a struggling actor who had been piecing random jobs together — waitress, barista, rental property manager. Then she saw a casting call on Backstage, a jobs website for actors. She went to the audition, but to her confusion, didn’t have to read any scenes. She was hired immediately.

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Eveline Chao

Articles written by the author

The Return of the Bad Boys of Chinatown

For struggling actors, no more waiting tables, the new side gig: Brand ambassador