In the latest episode of LIT NYC, host Katie Honan talks with author Radha Vatsal, a speechwriter at city hall by day, to discuss her new novel about old New York, No. 10 Doyers Street, and “a past that was not as black and white as we make it out to be today.”
Vatsal, an immigrant herself, explains how she came to tell a story of Chinatown in the early 1900s as seen through the eyes of Archana “Archie” Morley, the only woman at her newspaper and one of just a handful of Indian immigrants in New York City at the time. While her editor and husband try to steer her away from covering notorious gangster Sai Wing Mock, AKA Mock Duck, Archie chases down the story of his adopted daughter being taken away from him by the city as it also plans to raze Chinatown:
I was casting about for what I wanted to write for my next book and I came across this guy from the Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Children, who was shutting down movie theaters because he believed they were dens of vice. ‘Okay, this is interesting.’‘ I go to The New York Times historical database and I put in his name and I see that in 1907 this article pops up called Cruelty Sought at Mock Duck’s, and it tells the story about how this guy came to the home of this Chinatown gangster, who’s in his 20s, and takes away his young daughter, who’s six years old. And the story was told in such a crazy way — it was so racist, with all these jokes that we could never imagine having in a news article today… but then when it comes to the taking of this child and Mock Duck’s hugely emotional reaction, it was so moving and so sort of visceral that I felt like I had to find out what was going on here…
And I started following his court case, which was reported by the New York Times and the Sun and the Tribune and that’s really when I saw how he interacted with the legal system, what the police thought of him and I realized that this was a very complicated story about immigrant life in the US that I needed to tell.
It’s a story about power and progress in a changing New York with themes that still resonate more than 100 years later.