Illegal sale of rice wine thrives in Chinese enclaves(2)
The underground trade in rice wine is foreign even to many Chinese from other provinces.
Since rice wine can go bad after excessive exposure to heat, it is widely regarded as a winter beverage, and vendors flourish in Fujianese neighborhoods during the colder months. But even in the depth of summer, a glass of it is never hard to find.
Indeed, many Fujianese are more than happy to talk about rice wine, explaining how it is made, describing its delights and extolling its virtues as an all-around elixir.
“If you drink this, you’ll stay young,” explained Chen Dandan, a retired garment factory worker from Fujian Province. “It helps you with your circulation.”
“If you drink this, you’ll live to an old age,” said Lin Yong, a long-distance bus driver who lives in Flushing. He said his grandfather, who died several years ago at the age of 99, lived by a simple dictum: It is all right to forgo a meal, but it is not all right to forgo a glass of rice wine.
Many said that even though legal rice wine is commercially available, they prefer homemade brews because they are said to have fewer additives.
But finding consumers is one thing. Tracking down moonshiners is another.
Over the past several weeks, interviews with dozens of Chinese store owners, restaurateurs and street vendors yielded prevarications, obfuscations and otherwise fraught conversations.
Nearly all said they were simply selling a product that others had made. Some spoke mysteriously of unnamed wholesalers who materialized once a week with supplies. Others seemed less concerned about the legality of the product and more concerned about the competition.
“What if you were to learn how to make it and set up shop across the street?” asked one restaurateur in Flushing.
In some places, it appears, anyone can buy bootlegged rice wine, as long as you know what to ask for and hand over money, usually between $3 and $5 a quart. But in other places, a non-Chinese person, even one fluent in Chinese, might not get far.
When the manager was asked for rice wine at a store on Market Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown, fear swept over her face, and she said she did not have any. What about those unmarked containers sitting in a soft-drink refrigerator next to the Coca-Cola and Gatorade? “Not for sale!” she blurted.
At a store on Allen Street, a cashier first said she did not stock rice wine and went back to watching a video on a laptop. But when it was pointed out to her that several quarts of rice wine were stacked on the counter next to the cash register, she looked flustered and exclaimed: “It’s for cooking, for sautéeing!” Then: “It’s only for the Fujianese!”
A vendor below the overpass of the Manhattan Bridge on East Broadway said he did not know who had supplied him with the rice wine stacked on metal shelves on the sidewalk. But several containers were affixed with a small label for a Fujianese food supplier on Catherine Street.
At that address, a Fujianese man wearing an apron came to the unmarked door. Shown the label, he said it was the wrong address. Then he said that it was the right address, but that the business on the label had moved.
Finally, he admitted that the business on the label was his, but he insisted that he did not make rice wine. With that, he said he had to get back to work, and shut the door.
