He Had a Dark Secret. It Changed His Best Friend’s Life.

[Lemonslice 4,926]

Good read. 

https://web.archive.org/web/20220717180736/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/nyregion/brooklyn-homeless-shelter-friendship.html

 

First part: 

Quote

On his first night at the Brooklyn homeless shelter, Tin Chin met his best friend.

Estranged from his family, Mr. Chin was alone, stewing in anger and shame over all he had lost and how low he had fallen. The Chinatown restaurants he frequented with his wife and daughter, the elementary school drop-off routine, the friendly neighbors in Queens — these had been the trappings of a middle-class life that once seemed secure. A college graduate and former civil servant, Mr. Chin had to learn his city anew, and now — he could still hardly believe it — as a homeless person.

On that evening in 2012 in the Barbara Kleiman Residence in East Williamsburg, he saw only one other Chinese person in the room. The man was skinny, his ill-fitting clothes hanging loosely on his frame. Mr. Chin sized him up with an expert eye: an immigrant, most likely from Fujian Province; no family, no English, no documents.

“I’m at the bottom,” Mr. Chin remembers thinking. “But I’m better off than him.”

The other man was named Mo Lin. Mr. Chin sensed that if they had met just a few years earlier, they would have had very little in common. “At the beginning, I can’t say I liked him,” he said. “But we are the two Chinese people in the shelter, so we talk.”

Mr. Chin possessed little more than his closely guarded secrets, including a criminal record that haunted him. They ran through his mind on a loop, but he divulged them to no one, certainly not this new acquaintance, and instead shared his story in broad strokes — he was born in Hong Kong and had grown up in New York and was new to being homeless.

Mr. Lin was hesitant and didn’t say much. It would be a while before he described his years scraping by in New York. He was indeed undocumented, and although he had worked in innumerable Chinatown kitchens, his poor health had long ago made steady work impossible, and he looked far older than his 46 years. He spent his days shuffling along the streets of Manhattan’s Chinatown, smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk, watching staticky TV in threadbare Fujianese community centers.

But the men soon began spending so much time together — always chatting in the shelter, strolling downtown streets, sharing plates of noodles — that acquaintances assumed they were family.