Three Hours of the Year of the Dog

Of New York's ethnic neighbourhoods, Chinatown is the obvious one. The pavements are usually jammed with bum-bag tourists haggling over Vuitton clones. It is all shoving and no smiles, because the locals are hauling and pushing the oddest junk behind them, and the slimy, litter-strewn pavement serves as shop counter and shop window both. My usual business in Chinatown has been fighting my way onto the cheap Fung Wah bus to Boston. It has been trying enough that I developed a phobia of the whole place, and I have taken my Chinese experiences elsewhere: Sunset Park in Brooklyn, Flushing in Queens, or else Toronto and San Francisco.

Today, with the Chinese New Year as my excuse, I overcame my old aversion and took the D train to Grand Street. The crush in the station made sense when I surfaced into the middle of a parade of Peking opera figures and small children doing a knife dance. The parade marked the move into the Year of the Dog, which is especially lucky for weddings because, unlike an ordinary year, it has two springs. So the heroes of the parade today were mostly Tibetan spaniels dressed in all kinds of Chinese costume. I could hardly believe my eyes when the usually pushy, surly Chinese street traders beamed at the smoke-puffing dragons dancing past, the children letting off firecrackers and the bombs scattering confetti. The crowd was so dense that for a quarter of an hour I was quite literally in its embrace on the corner of Canal and Mott Street. The street crowd ran from Buddhist monks, thousand-year-old Chinese grannies and gentle-eyed Caribbean men to Park Avenue ladies and Bowery bums.

Even in the crush, everything imaginable was on sale on the pavements. A live fish leapt out of a wooden crate at my feet, and in another shop a bucketful of turtles crawled about, ready for the soup pot. Red jujubes, dried mushrooms and flowering bok choy were everywhere, but most of the dried vegetables I could not identify at all. At the meat counter of the Dynasty supermarket, neat polystyrene trays held cow's penis, duck's toes and pig's snouts.

I had not meant to buy anything, but I grabbed Taiwanese green tea rice cakes, crystallised ginger, Macanese almond and bean flour biscuits stamped with characters, which taste just like Portuguese pastries, and sweet-salty liquorice plums that are instantly addictive. For tea I bought oolong and white. I could not resist baby bok choy either, and then I found lychee bubble tea. To dot the i, I was sucked into a restaurant supply store on the Bowery and felt like a child in Santa's workshop. Pity the shipping container to Finland has already gone... Sixteen dollars got me a good three-tier bamboo steamer and a pair of chef's tongs. I had meant to walk over the East River to my favourite bookshop in Williamsburg, but getting three huge plastic bags onto the subway and home was challenge enough.

At home I put the steamer baskets, the tongs and the tortilla press to work at once and made dim sum dumplings, a meatless version of the ones I bought at four for a dollar from a Chinatown street kitchen (there is a good-looking recipe for meat dumplings here). I first ate these bok choy dumplings some twenty years ago in Germany, when Chinese exchange students cooked a feast for our family. I have always thought of steaming as fiddly fuss, but the dumplings came together neatly and fast. Steaming also gives them a better texture than boiling, and there is no need to fear the filling leaking into the pan, as it can when they are boiled.

Next Sunday there is one more dragon parade in Chinatown, as the New Year celebrations end on 12 February. I left so many fantastic dim sum restaurants and Indochinese shops unexplored that I think I shall be in Chinatown often from now on. For now I am settling down with liquorice plums and green tea sweets to watch Saving Face, in which my Taiwanese-American colleague Larry flits across the screen. Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman would suit the mood too.