For Mr. and Mrs. Lee, Wednesday is the best day of the week. During the pandemic, it’s been the one day they get to see friendly faces outside their home.
“Very good, very happy because they are like my sons,” Mo Fen Lee, 90, told NBC News in Cantonese on the porch steps of her house in Brooklyn, New York.
Since last April, Steve Mei, 43, has been stopping by the Lee’s home and nine others in Brooklyn to drop off hot meals and groceries provided by a local nonprofit called Heart of Dinner.
“What they're telling us is that they look forward to us stopping by every Wednesday,” Mei translated for Mrs. Lee, “because their children, also a little older, are out of state, in Jersey and in California.”
In these times a simple visit from familiar faces goes a long way.
“Some community members, for sure, we're the only people that they see,” said Mei, who’s the director of the Chinese American Planning Council’s Brooklyn Community Services. “It's also very tough to see. ... A lot of the older adults are feeling lonely, feeling isolated.”
Mei is just one of over 20 volunteers making these deliveries, and the Lees are two of about 1,200 Asian American senior citizens across the city who look forward to them every week.
Yin Chang, 31, and Moonlynn Tsai, 35, started Heart of Dinner, now a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. The effort began as the #LovingChinatown initiative at the onset of the pandemic.
“We were dealing with racism firsthand. People were leaning in saying really nasty profane things, inappropriate racist things,” Chang said. “At the same time, we were hearing news about our elderly in the neighborhood facing food insecurity and elderly being violently attacked. And these are elderly who remind us of our own grandparents.”
Chang, a podcast host and actor, and Tsai, a chef/restaurateur, said they were feeling helpless and frustrated at the time.
“We wanted to channel all of that energy into something that was what we thought was productive in a way that made our elderly feel loved and feel the warmth of a community,” Chang said.
They started by packaging 200 meals and letters in their own kitchen. Then, they expanded at a friend’s studio.
“She posted on Instagram and then people were reaching out,” said Tsai.
“We were flooded and flooded with so many people from around the world,” Chang added.
Now, they’re operating out of Essex Market in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Almost a year after they started their mission, with the help of local restaurants, businesses, volunteers and donors across the globe, the pair have delivered nearly 55,000 bags of food to Asian senior citizens in the city. They’re carefully crafted with loving messages and cards, and filled with nutritious, “culturally thoughtful” hot meals and groceries.
“I'm floored. We're just so grateful every week,” Tsai said.
Van Da, a Vietnamese restaurant in the Alphabet City neighborhood of Manhattan's East Village, is one of their partners.
“Every restaurant is hurting. You know, the fact is that people are scared to go out,” said the restaurant’s owner, Yen Ngo. “It [Heart of Dinner] keeps us busy creating things and it keeps us being happy to do something good for the community. It makes me so happy. It makes me a little bit more, you know, we all have to feel a little bit more human. We need to help each other.”
But as hard as Chang and Tsai have worked, some things have not changed.
A recent rise in attacks on Asian Americans from coast to coast has reminded them of their mission.
“We did not think that the same reason that started this initiative would happen again, this surge of anti-Asian racism and violence, especially towards our elderly community,” said Chang. “It's very, very heartbreaking. And honestly, it inspires us and pushes us to work even harder to get the message out even more, because we've seen throughout the year that there has been so much rallying of our communities together.”
Over 2,000 miles away in Los Angeles, Heart of Dinner’s mission has brought the Gage family together.
Making cards for Heart of Dinner deliveries has made Diana Gage and her daughter feel closer to their “ama," or grandma in Taiwanese.
“I emailed Heart of Dinner and I wrote to her, ‘My mom lives alone in New York, I live in Los Angeles and I wish there is a way I can sign her up,’” said Gage, who hasn’t seen her mother since before the pandemic. “The services that Heart of Dinner provides nourishes my mom and others, not just with food, but with love, and it really helped send the message that we all care collectively about them, even from afar, and even when we can't see them for over a year now. And we miss you so much.”
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