Bakeries offer Chinese immigrants fresh opportunity

Egg-glazed pastries, bright yellow egg tarts, and golden brown buns sit behind a glass window at Mong Kok Station, one of the many bakeries in Chinatown.

There's a bakery at 109 N. 10th St. And, on the same block, two others plus Mong Kok at 153 N. 10th.

That's four bakeries on one block, all offering almost the same thing: a cacophony of cream and carbohydrates.

In the kitchen, dough is rising. And bun by bun, the bakers, some of them Chinese immigrants with little or no education and English language skills, are improving their lot in life.

They are eking out their version of the American dream in a business that requires hard work and common sense, but not fluency in English. That may explain why there are 10 bakeries in the heart of Chinatown.

Mong Kok's owner, Wan Wen Ling, 52, came to the United States in 1992.

"At that time in China, there wasn't much money and work, people wanted to come to the United States to make money for the sake of their children," said George Tang, 73, who helped Wan and her family move to America - and interpreted Cantonese to Mandarin for an interview.

The Chinese immigrants' goal is a simple one: Work hard, save well, run a business and invest in their children's education.

"That's the model for low-income immigrants," said John Chin, executive director of the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation.

Finding a job and running a business can prove tricky with the language and cultural barriers, Chin said.

Other than restaurants, Chinese immigrants usually choose a bakery because of experience in the field and the success stories of others.

In some ways, Chin said, a bakery is easier to run than a restaurant. Instead of struggling to understand a customer's food order, a baker can simply hand over whatever delicacy the customer points to in the glass case.

It also helps that Chinatown's population in Center City is increasing. Both may explain why Chinatown has a higher concentration of bakeries than most Philadelphia neighborhoods.

Stories such as Wan's are rising all around Chinatown.

The bakeries sell staples such as roast pork buns, egg tarts, and hot dogs wrapped in a bun. There are also beverages such as hot coffee and the famous bubble tea. In a bid to separate itself from the rest, Mong Kok offers ice cream, too.

These humble snacks are inexpensive. A dollar buys a pork floss bun at Mong Kok. The snack is a soft-baked bun, the size of an iPhone 6 Plus, slathered with mayonnaise and topped with rousong, the Chinese counterpart to shredded jerky: a sweet, savory, and sometimes-crispy concoction known as pork floss in Asian Anglophone countries such as Malaysia and Singapore.

Greenland Tea House, a bakery at 210 N. Ninth St., tried and failed to purvey steamed Chinese rice cake.

Business ebbs and flows, said Jeff Lee, who co-owns the bakery with his wife and a family friend. Business boomed in the early 2000s when there were textile factories in the region, he said. Dozens of factory workers looking for cheap breakfast would pop in for quick service.

As the factories folded, business buckled, Lee said. Today, Greenland sells wholesale to Asian supermarkets across the city.

The bakery business in Chinatown is so low-margin that most bakeries don't accept credit cards.

"Everything we sell is so cheap. You can buy a cake for 80 cents. There's nothing left for us after the card companies take a share of the sales," said Lisa Gan, 25, a medical receptionist who helps her mother, Wan Wen Ling, in the evenings at Mong Kok.

Gan serves customers in the store front, but her future is not in the bakery.

Wan doesn't want her daughter, or her two other children, one at Philadelphia's Central High School and the other at Girls' High, to repeat her own life of hard work and struggle.

Neither does Lee, at Greenland.

"I never thought of my children taking over the business," he said, sitting at a table in his bakery. "They make their own decisions. I am not going to force them to follow in our footsteps."

@MooGoo_GaiPan