Bullet-proof Chinese

I love the unusual sign of this Chinese restaurant, especially the cartoon Asian homeboy in the center. What's up with that very un-Chinese name? Are they trying to make an association with the all American chain Arby's?

And then, once inside there's the ubiquitous bullet-proof plexiglass behind which is a gorgeous arrangement of chotchkes from Buddha, to lucky bamboo to Ganesh? and what looks like My Little Pony. This is my kind of Chinese restaurant.

Ever since Mr.Kiwi's, my new favourite grocer opened up on the Bushwick side of Broadway, I've been wondering whether the bullet-proof plexi that one sees in nearly every bodega and Chinese restaurant in Bed-Stuy is really necessary. Mr. Kiwi's is across the street from three or perhaps four bullet-proof bodegas and one bullet-proof liquor store. Mr. Kiwi's, however, is completely open, exposed, if you will. Then of course there's the exposed fishmonger, in between the bullet-proof bodegas, but one rarely hears of anyone holding up a fishmonger. In investigating the history behind the bullet-proof plexi in our hood I came upon this unfortunate article from over a year and a half ago in which a cashier at the Happy House (a Chinese restaurant without the bullet-proof plexi) was shot in the face. From the NY Times, January, 2007:

The Happy House Chinese takeout restaurant in Bedford-Stuyvesant does not feed the rich, or put on airs, and maybe that is why, in the seven years it has fed its busy and occasionally even violent corner of Malcolm X Boulevard, it was never robbed. Maybe the thought simply never occurred to anyone. It would be like holding up one’s own kitchen.

That all changed, twice, in recent weeks, in two vicious attacks on the restaurant’s workers, two botched robberies that caused serious injury and yielded no cash.

Last month, the son of the owners, Man Seng Wong, 25, was beaten while delivering $24 worth of food, and spent the night in the hospital, his sister said. The young boys who hit him took the food, and there have been no arrests.

Then, last Saturday, during the generally calm lunch hours just after 1:30 p.m., a man entered the Happy House and, when the newly hired cashier — the first stranger the Wong family had ever taken on — turned her back, he leaped over the counter and drew a pistol, the police said.

The woman screamed, and the man shot her in the face. Another shot struck a relative of the Wongs by marriage, Hoy Wang, 37, piercing the palm of his hand. The shooter fled without any money and, in a final touch of carelessness, left behind his cellphone.

Lest the Bed-Stuy haters take this as further proof that our hood is the cesspool of the universe, let's not forget that crimes such as these can and do happen in other Brooklyn neighbourhoods as in the murder in May of this year of Kyung-Sook Woo who owned a dry cleaning business in Windsor Terrace. And the recent glut of stabbings in Williamsburg. I could go on. But that's all the doom and gloom I can handle for this evening.

Instead let's ponder the meaning of the ponies in the above arrangement. I think they could use a Ken doll in there too. Or maybe a Cabbage Patch doll? A rabbit's foot?