Jessica Liang moves with great speed.
With swift, practiced motions, Liang, 41, blends creamy foundation onto a bridesmaid’s cheek.
Once the teenage girl’s makeup is perfected, Liang instructs her to change into a beige chiffon dress. “Go go,” she points at the dressing room in the corner. Within seconds, another new bridesmaid sits down in Liang’s makeup chair, ready to be transformed.
It was Thanksgiving Day, once the busiest day of the year for Chinatown weddings. A decade ago, East Broadway, also known as “Little Fuzhou,” had a lineup of several wedding boutiques that provided full services for weddings: renting out dresses, providing makeup services, and prenuptial photo shoots for brides and grooms.
Fujianese immigrants are eager to tie the knot on the holiday since it’s typically the easiest day of the year for their families and friends to come together in celebration.
Today, little of this wedding tradition remains in Chinatown.
All the wedding boutiques have now closed except The One Wedding Plaza, where Liang works as the general manager and makeup artist. Meanwhile, iconic banquet halls, like Jing Fong, have shut down after suffering economic losses during the pandemic, leaving few wedding venue options in Manhattan’s Chinatown. According to a 2022 study, Chinatown saw a 26% decrease in jobs between 2019 and 2021, double the amount lost in Flushing. And according to the city, 21.4% of storefronts in Chinatown were vacant in the same year.
The neighborhood has also been dealing with changing demographics. Chinatown’s Asian population decreased by 10% from 2010 to 2020, according to the city. Meanwhile, Flushing and Sunset Park have inherited much of New York’s Chinese population, as well as its weddings and banquet halls. Manhattan rent prices have been partially to blame.
Also Read: The New Generation of Chinatown Leaders on the Neighborhood’s Future
For now, The One Wedding Plaza remains dedicated to the tradition of Thanksgiving Day weddings.
David Huang, 23, and Ana Delgado, 24, are high school sweethearts from Tennessee, and this year, they are one of three couples at The One Wedding Plaza on Thanksgiving Day.
“Because both of our families are immigrants, we’re not super attached to the Thanksgiving [holiday],” Delgado said.
The shop is filled to the brim, with family and friends standing between racks of white dresses, exchanging words in a mixture of Mandarin, English, and Spanish. The room is as cramped as it is hot, with groomsmen spilling into the stairwell, hoping to catch a break from the bright vanity lights.
Huang’s family originally settled in New York after immigrating from Fujian.
Delgado’s family is from Costa Rica, and the couple originally wed in a church in Nashville back in August. With no banquet halls suitable for a traditional Chinese wedding in Tennessee, the whole family flew to New York last week to host the second wedding at Golden Unicorn on East Broadway, one of the last banquet halls in Manhattan.
Also Read: Behind a Chinatown Real Estate Deal, a Web of Shifting Alliances and Political Connections
“This year, we have no weddings on Thanksgiving,” said Royal Seafood Manager Ruan, who remembers hosting Thanksgiving Day weddings up to five years ago.
At 4 p.m., Liang takes a break and begins eating a piece of prepackaged bread, washing it down with some black tea.
“Breakfast,” she says to the father of one of the brides. It’s the first thing she’s eaten all day since she began working at 8 a.m.
Thanksgiving Day is a stark contrast to regular weekdays at One Wedding Plaza, where Liang spends most of the day in the shop alone. With no customers, she kills time by reading a novel on her phone.
“Basically no one ever comes now,” Liang said. If clients do make appointments, they make it over the phone.
Liang is Fujianese herself. She immigrated in 2007, and the day she arrived, she was immediately hired at Top Bridal, a different wedding boutique on East Broadway that has since closed.
“This street used to be so lively,” Liang said. The businesses along East Broadway would be thriving until past dusk, Liang recalls, but now the street is dead at night. “Those foreigners who work in midtown, they’ve moved in while Chinese people have moved out,” she said, and by foreigners, she means non-Chinese Americans.
Less business means less wages for Liang, who relies on tips. The One Wedding Plaza has two other locations in Flushing and Brooklyn, and those shops are doing better. She yearns for a time with more clients and more income, but she stays in the Chinatown location because someone has to. She might have a busy day once a month, but for the most part, her days look nothing like they do on Thanksgiving.
At 5:30 p.m. Liang ushers Huang and Delgado out of the store, Delgado bracing for the cold in only her strapless ball gown and a checkered blue scarf wrapped around her shoulders. “Gong xi, gong xi,” she says and then in English for Delgado, “Congratulations!”
But her day isn’t over. Once the store is cleaned up, she heads over to Golden Unicorn across the street to do touch-ups for her clients until 10 p.m.
With a satisfied smile, she starts counting tips.
“Tiring, isn’t it?”
