Radha Vatsal specializes in mysteries set in World War I-era New York City. Her latest, No 10 Doyers Street, is set a decade before that in 1907 New York City when mayor George B McClellan had grand plans to build new parks and bring safe drinking water to residents of the city. One of these plans included bulldozing Chinatown so it could be turned into one of these planned parks. The star of her book is an Indian female newspaper reporter named Archana Morley who finds herself covering more than one story in Chinatown. The result is a descriptive, engaging thriller set in the dark alleys of New York’s Chinatown more than a hundred years ago.

Doyers Street may not be as familiar a name as Canal and Mott Streets in New York’s Chinatown, but it is a real street albeit easy to miss.

 

No more than a few hundred feet long and maybe ten or twelve feet wide, the street hung from Pell like a sock on a line, bent sharply at the heel, and emptied out onto Chatham Square and the Bowery. The newsmen slowed as they approached the curve. It was known as the “Bloody Angle” because it had been the site of so many shootings. 

 

It is not as far-fetched as it might at first seem that an Indian woman might be a reporter in 1907 New York. Throughout the book, Vatsal weaves a couple of real life Indian women who made a name for themselves in late 19th-century America. One was Christian missionary Pandita Ramabai, who traveled from India to the United States and wrote about her two years on the east coast. During her visit, she also met Anandibai Joshee, the first female Indian doctor of western medicine.

 

Reporter Archana Morley first arrived in the US on travels that were supposed to only last half a year. While she was in America, her parents succumbed to the plague and Archana had no reason to return to India as planned. She decided to stay on for a few more months, during which she met and married an American doctor. 

As a reporter, she comes across the real life Hip Sing Tong boss, Sai Wing Mock, also known as Mock Duck. Archana first encounters Mock Duck at a murder trial for which he has a solid alibi. She sees him as just another ruthless gangster. When Mock Duck’s biracial daughter Ha Oi is taken from their family by city officials because they’re worried about her living among the “heathens” in Chinatown, Archana starts to view the Mocks in a different light. This story—and the threatened destruction of Chinatown—become the main stories Archana chooses to report on, sometimes against the wishes of her editor. But Archana perseveres and eventually gains an interview with Mock Duck. He’s not the sinister person he’d been portrayed as.

Since New York’s Chinatown is still standing, as vibrant as ever, it is no spoiler to write that it wasn’t bulldozed in 1907 or at all. By the end of the book, a decade has passed. Archana wants to move back to Bombay and her husband is happy to go with her. They settle into an old Bombay house built by David Sassoon. She also follows through with her promise to Mock Duck to write his story after the dust had settled.

 

I unearthed my boxes of files, notes, and clippings and began to write. As my pen scratched back and forth across the page, I was transported once again to the bend on that narrow alley, to the homes that leaned in toward each other. I wonder whether the girl who once lived there will ever read this and realize that he preserved the neighborhood for her. Whether she does or not—and I hope she does—it is a story that has remained with me, a story I promised I would write, and I have done my utmost to do it justice. 

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Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China, Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.