I’m 40 years old now, with two young children of my own. But when I cross Canal Street heading south on Mott Street and enter the slipstream of the sidewalk crowds, I’m seven years old again, dancing over suspicious puddles on the pavement, grasping my mother’s hand tightly, pinching my nose as I giggle at the sharp smells of the street alongside my brother and cousins.

What did we come here for? Everything, really. Life events: christenings, weddings, funerals. Everyday things: grocery shopping, for Chinese vegetables and ingredients my mother and aunts and grandparents could not get elsewhere. We visited a neighbourhood bakery for egg tarts and fragrant buns with a sweet butter filling. We came to be immersed in the language: Taishanese and Cantonese, the dialects of my family’s native southern China. Even today, in their 90s, my grandparents do not speak English. Living in Chinatown, they never had to.