Pushkin.

Hi everyone, I'm Liddy Agene Caught.

I'm dropping into your feed today to bring you a preview of my new podcast, The Chinatown Sting.

It's about a woman living in Manhattan's Chinatown in the nineteen eighties.

After she agrees to receive a package in the mail for her best friend, she finds herself caught in a criminal case.

It's led by a prosecutor determined to bring down one of Chinatown's most notorious gangsters.

No matter the cost, let's get into it.

On February ninth, nineteen eighty eight, David Shechan was working his usual shift.

He was a US customs agent at JFK.

Report his phone.

Rang I was talking through a customs agent in cal Ordia who says, hey, we just got three shipments of heroin and three different bailed parcels.

Do you guys want the case?

So I said it absolutely, We'll take it.

The parcels were on their way from Hong Kong to New York.

Customs agents were looking inside packages more often ever since President Reagan in Congress had ramped up the War on drugs.

David Shechan was part of this special task force to combat narcotic smuggling, so they got calls about drugs coming into New York City all the time.

This call was special, though, because inside each of these packages was about seven million dollars worth of heroine.

In today's money, that's something like eighteen million dollars per package.

Peter Mattesser was an agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

He really wanted to know who was waiting for those boxes.

I know it was going to be a big case because there was a lot of heroin and the focus was on China white heroin at the time, because a lot was coming into New York.

A lot of heroin was coming in from China to Hong Kong then into New York, and it sounded like a good opportunity to work a big case.

On February seventeenth, the boxes arrived at the airport.

Peter and David knew they were at the beginning of something big, but they didn't know how big.

My name is Lyddy Jin Kott.

As a journalist, I often report on law and power.

I've written an audiobook about the Supreme Court, covered the federal trial of the crypto billionaire, and investigated the fallout of the legalization of sports betting.

I'm interested in how throughout American history we've used the law as a tool to make our country both more and less.

Just a few years ago I came into possession of a suitcase.

It was full of thousands of pages of court documents.

They were all about a case a prosecutor spent years trying to build against a criminal who refused to be caught.

There was mention of a criminal syndicate powerful enough to take on the Italian mafia, an attempted assassination, a global manhunt, congressional hearings, international press coverage, a standing room only trial, And none of it would have happened without a group of ordinary people, people who in time would have to make a decision about who to protect and who to betray.

But that afternoon in nineteen eighty eight, one of these people was just waiting for a box.

This is the Chinatown Staying, Episode one Lucky Bird.

Court documents would later describe the exact contents of each box that landed in New York.

Twenty small bricks made up of white compressed powder, wrapped up in either brown tape or duct tape.

In one of the packages, the heroin was hidden inside these red and white tea boxes that had Chinese characters on them, and the other two the heroin was hidden among stuffed animals.

Now Peter Mattesser and the DA could get to work.

Step one, take out the heroin and replace it with decoy heroin.

It was made out of wooden blocks, cut and tape together.

Except you leave a sample of the heroin in there.

We'd put the stuffed animals back in.

Our goal was to get someone opening up that box and going through it.

That was our goal.

So when someone on the receiving end looked inside the boxes, they should notice nothing weird.

Step two.

The Feds hid thin wires in a transmitter inside each box.

Whoever was looking through the box would break the wires and that would trigger a silent electric signal that would be picked up by these special machines in the hands of law enforcement.

And this receiver had only two signals.

It was a slow beep you're listening in to like a computer almost and you hear the beat beat beeping in when a rapid beap goes beppp beat, that means it's been open.

The dagents set up their trap as fast as they could.

They didn't want the people who were waiting for the packages to get suspicious.

They know how long it takes from point A to point B, so as soon as you get a day or two late, you're an investigation could be compromised.

Step three.

Each of these boxes had to be dropped off at exactly the same time they were to be delivered by postal inspectors who were working undercover.

Vans full of agents were waiting nearby, listening in on their little computers and ready to spring into action.

You have to cover all the different parts of the locations because if someone takes the box and runs out the door, then we have Heroin on the street.

On February twenty third, the mail packages, the vans full of agents, and the undercover postal workers, they were all ready to go.

Two of the packages were addressed to Manhattan's Chinatown and one was going to Brooklyn.

Peter and the customs agent David Shan followed the two packages that were going to Chinatown.

The thrill of the chase really becomes it just it sort of takes you over.

That day, like on any other day, Chinatown was bustling.

The sidewalks were crowded with vendors selling cucumbers, eggplants, bockjoy, dried mushrooms.

People were walking shoulder to shoulder on the main street.

There were neon signs everywhere saying go this way or go that way, and there was always a truck somewhere squeezing its way down these narrow streets full of fresh wares.

That's all to say, Chinatown wasn't an easy place to find parking, especially not for a van full of non Asian undercover federal agents.

We were underneath the highway in the hen these for drive war, and that's where we had thirty agents all lined up ready to go with shotguns and rifles and un davy.

There were two wired up packages addressed to two apartment buildings right next to each other.

So the undercover postal inspector buzzed at one address and then he buzzed at the other.

No answer.

He left behind mail slips.

Peter and David waited to see what would happen next, and waited some more.

One of the guys from DA he took a leap in the East River, and believe it or not, two sanitation Please guys came up to him and said, Hey, you can't pee in the River.

David Shean could feel his hopes of catching anyone in Chinatown pissing away to Nobody was coming to collect the packages, even though their street value was supposed to be huge.

Maybe someone had tipped them off.

The whole operation now hinged on the third box, the one that was going to Brooklyn.

We heard the beep go off.

Peter Mattessa rushed over to the Brooklyn address to meet the agents.

There.

We knocked on the door or broke down the door.

There's the package open.

The stuffed animals were out.

Peter found himself face to face with a thirty eight year old woman, a mother of two, an accountant at a bank.

Peter explained she was under arrest.

Read her rights, you know in Cantonese, Amandarin.

I forgot exactly which one it was.

She was very upset, crying, and your goal.

Is to try to calm the situation down as soon as you can and then hopefully move up the ladder.

By move up the ladder, Peter means this woman might have information that would help the FEDS figure out who's in charge of importing the heroine.

The first rung of the ladder was right here in this house.

Peter needed to know the box's next destination, and to find that out, she needed this woman to act totally normal.

She needed to call whoever she was going to call after the box's arrival.

They needed her to go from being an accomplice to being a cooperating witness quickly.

I tell her the amount of heroin here.

You're facing ten years to life because it's so much Harwin.

This is your time to help out yourself.

We can't guarantee you how much jail time you do, but it'll be brought to the attention of the judges.

We'll know how much you've helped out on this.

And it's a courageous decision to make.

We try to tell them.

We think it's the right one to make.

To help us, and we help you.

But the person this woman was going to call was her friend.

If she cooperated, that would mean betraying her friend.

But if she didn't cooperate, she might not see her two children grow up.

She had to make an impossible decision as the agents hovered over her the clock was ticking.

This woman agreed to cooperate.

Her name is in the court documents, but she never responded to her request for an interview.

Anyway, her name's not that important to the story.

What's important is the chain of events she set off by giving the federal agents the name of her contact.

Over the next few days, agents were arresting moms like her all over in New York City.

It was like the first time we've ever seen anything like that.

Really, basically, you're stay at home.

Were picking up these lodge amtsa heroin, and I'm sure they knew it was drugs.

It turned out that all of these women, women who received packages of heroin sent to their homes, onto each other from playing mahjong.

Majong is a game of luck and skill.

You play with domino like tiles instead of with cards.

They have different designs on them, stones, bamboos, dragons, and the goal is to end up with four pairs of three tiles and one pair of two tiles.

That's called the eyes.

Different hands are with different amounts of points.

There were Majong parlors all over Chinatown.

These are places where people could play for a bit of money or a lot of money.

The parlors were replaced to catch up with old friends and make new ones.

But now many of these friends were under arrest and they were being forced to turn on one another.

Customs agent David Shechian was doing a lot of that forcing.

We're going to seize all your assets, we're gonna take all your kids away from you, and you're going to go to jail, and they're going to go to forster care and things of that nature.

You know you're doing that because you really need their help to get to the person at the top.

I guess absolutely, Yeah, you need somebody, and you know you need more than one person to cooperate.

Because you need it to be cooperated.

Yes.

After I got that suitcase full of court documents on the Chinatown drug trials, I realized I need help from someone who spoke Cantonese.

That's the language that's spoken by many of the people in the documents.

My name is Shu Yu Wang.

I'm a practicing attorney in the city in New York.

I met she through a friend of a friend.

We met up at a bar and I told her all about the Chinatown case.

It was a very interesting story to me personally.

I came from the Cantonese area in China, which is like super cool to Hong Kong, where a lot of those people in the story were originally from My major in college was actually journalism, so I sort of like opened up a part of my brain.

So she joined me in reporting out this story.

We went over court documents together, and we visited Chinatown together for months and months.

Podcast.

Yeah, that's for most of the time that I've lived in New York, Chinatown's been a place where I'd get dinner or drinks with friends.

For sure, you was a neighborhood where she caught groceries.

There are certain ingredients that's a rare fine in a non Chinese grocery stores, like chicken feet.

There are like certain things that I can only get here at a good price.

But we've been learning that Chinatown's a place with one hundred and fifty years of history.

So Chinatowns today we think of as the councturist destinations, and you know, they're fun places to go to get you know, trash keys or jim sum and some kind of a colorful urban experience or you know, a fun meal or something.

But the reason Chinatowns exist in the first place is really about a history of racial segregation.

That's Ellen Wu.

She teaches history at Indiana University Bloomington, and she talked to us about how Chinatowns arose in American cities in the face of anti Asian laws and violence.

US immigration laws also helped create Chinatowns, especially a law called the Chinese Exclusion Act, which passed in eighteen eighty two.

Another historian we spoke to is Michael Luo.

She's an editor at The New Yorker, and he wrote a book on Chinese immigration called Strangers in the Land.

It was the Justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen Field, who wrote the opinion, referred to the Chinese as strangers in the land, talking about how they could never assimilate with our people.

And I feel like the stranger label remains imprinted on Asian Americans today.

She says she's felt what Michael Lew was describing, especially when she first moved to the US for law school.

So I was kind of like surprised at how friendly people were surrounding me.

But also to that I'm sensing, like your people out there just kind of like, oh, you're different, and you can tell by their gestures, by their like facial expressions, things like that.

As a white person, I've never experienced that, but I do know how bad it feels to be viewed as a stranger.

My family moved to the US from Poland when I was eight.

My English was kind of weird, but I wanted to fit in so badly.

When I look at pictures of myself, it's embarrassing.

I was like a parody of what I thought an American kid was supposed to look like.

And the more sure You and I looked into this Chinatown case, the more we came to see that it's also about someone who was trying, in their own way to feel like they belonged.

Whoah Tina Date of birth nineteen fifty eight in New York, New York, Chinese female citizen US height five foot nine inches, weight one hundred and twenty pounds, brown eyes, black hair.

As she You and I went through that suitcase full of documents together, we kept coming across the name of one woman, sometimes called Tina Wong, sometimes called Tina.

I'll say, in or in between early August nineteen eighty seven and late Decemmer nineteen eighty seven, within the Eastern District of New York and elsewhere, the defendant Tina Asse did knowingly and willfully import into the United States from a place outside thereof a quantity of heroin, a Schedule one narcotic drug, controlled substance.

So this is a complaint against Tina.

Asse what situation is Tina in if they have this information?

So, like, first of all, it got an informant which said I delivered the packages to Dina, and I'm just quite interested in the last paragraph when they said that they had a recording between informant and the ultimate recipient of the drugs.

Tina is kind of like a middleman, just like someone caught in between who gave her the package and who she was supposed to give the packages to.

And apparently the prosecution had information from both ends, so Tina was kind of trapped in a situation like she can't get away with that.

At first, Tina just seemed like another low level drug smuggler.

She was one of about a half a dozen people federal authorities arrested.

This was after that Atcountant in Brooklyn got caught with that wired up package, setting this whole investigation off.

But as sure you and I went through the court documents, it started to look like Tina was actually at the absolute center of the government's case.

Without her, everything might have played out entirely differently.

She and I were desperate to talk to Tina.

She, like all the women who received mail packages, had never spoken to a reporter before about this time.

But I found what I thought was her address.

It was in Manhattan, and we rang her bell twice three times.

She was never home.

Then we showed up with a box of Italian cookies that we had picked up from a bakery nearby.

I know that sounds weird, but I thought it would seem friendlier than showing up with just a microphone.

It was a break apartment building.

Yeah, we entered a building, not knowing if Tina is in this room this time, but we went up to her floor, went to her door.

The door opened, this woman was standing there and I said nothing.

Yeah, I think I was the one who broke this silence.

Right, So we're the journalists that came here.

So I just wondered that.

If we can help.

So she hit about this project.

She's like, yeah, come on in, and whoever your impressions of her?

She looked cool.

She's got short haircut and she's got super thick eyeliners.

I would say, yeah, she had like black eyeliner.

And also she looks totally unbothered, even though we're clearly bothering her in her family, She's kind of like, well, Okay, they've been bugging me for long enough, let's just see what they.

Have to offer.

What do you remember about the apartment?

So it's very ho me, I would say, And there's a huge cage in the center of the living room, and that might be one of the very first things that you would notice once you step in.

It was an African gray parrot inside.

I think the first thing I said, right was tell me about your parrot.

Oh, that's a lucky bird.

And I had him full like twenty five years.

If he said something, I want to record it.

He knows she's a stranger, so you won't talk, but if you guys to know he starts to talk.

We weren't actually there to interview the parrot.

We wanted Tina's story.

She was born in the nineteen fifties.

She was living outside of Chinatown at a time when Chinatown was way smaller.

She was one of the few Chinese kids.

Her dad was Chinese and her mom was from was Portuguese.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we were like the first Chinese family.

I mean, not the first, but the few we used to fight.

We used to get picked on a lot.

Everybody that was Asian and used to get picked on one time or another, stupid kid's stuff like chingchwan, and then you know, you fight back.

It's weird now to think of a Chinatown without kids, but for a long time, there just weren't very many Chinese kids.

In the US period, the Chinese Exclusion Act made it hard for any new Chinese immigrants to come, and it took nearly a century until nineteen sixty five for Congress to finally ban immigration quotas based on ethnicity.

Tina was seven years old at the time when all these new Chinese immigrants started to show up and Chinatown was becoming a family neighborhood.

Tina talked about how it was so great to be included in this new world of all these kids her age, but still she felt a little different from them.

I think they were kind of little racist on me since I wasn't, you know, like because I'm only half Chinese.

There was a little racism, but that didn't stop me.

Yeah, So that's why I learned MJ mahjong, and you know, when I would play MJ with them, and I beat them.

Then I feel that they goad the joke sing.

It's pretty good and joke saying is someone who is who's American born Chinese?

Yeah.

As an adult, Tina kept playing majong.

She went to these special places that were kind of like speakeasies.

You had to know someone who knew about them and then they could tell you where they were.

Tina's favorite was on the second floor of a building on one of Chinatown's main streets, Canal Street.

It's like a Chinese green wallpaint uh smoky.

And a lot of majong noise.

Is there music playing or is it just people talking in the clock of the titles?

Yeah, I think it's it's just the clacking of the tiles.

People don't want to hear the music might disturb they're focused.

And what sort of people were there?

Oh?

People, young people, all kinds.

And how good did you get on like a scale one through ten?

I didn't have like really good skills, but I had.

Look, she was hanging out in these majong parlors and she was getting lucky.

Then her best friend from when she was little came up to her and said, you know, I have this proposal for you.

I was wondering if you could receive a package in the mail for me.

Don't worry about what's in the box, basically, but if you receive this box, it'll be worth your while.

All you got to do is receive the package.

Don't have to open it, don't have to do this, just accept it and that's it.

Shoo.

You do you remember if Tina ever broke the law before.

This happened, gambling, if that counts.

Yeah, she got into some fights, I think she said, yeah, but like street fights, yeah yeah, yeah, No, nothing serious.

She's not like a risk seeker.

I would say, like she will never voluntarily invite herself into troubles.

I think she needed money at a time, just trying to like support herself better.

It sounded like an easy deal for her.

We're poor kids, we don't have that kind of money.

So to have that kind of money, you take a chance.

And I think a lot of people would probably have take the chance.

So after she you know, told her friend she would do it, she waited a few weeks and then her friend called her and said, you know, the box is going to arrive like somewhere in these three days.

Yeah, when it came, I took it home.

I put it in my room and I put it in the closet with my clothes on top.

And then she called her friend and was like, I have the box.

What should I do?

They told me to open it.

So I opened it and there was like Chinese on the box.

Think they were tea boxes.

And her friend said, okay, take one of these tea boxes and bring it to this woman who lived like a seven minute walk away.

I wasn't scared because I didn't really know the magnitude of the danger.

So Tina kept accepting the boxes.

Sometimes they came through the mail.

Sometimes a friend brought them to her apartment and she would carry them on.

I was bringing down one box and it was kind of like open, so I like looked at it and it was like a like a brick.

When I touched it was kind of dusty, and I think I went like this and it went in my mouth and I said, oh my god, the taste well it was heroin.

Yeah, it was like seven million dollars worth of heroin.

Her friend gave her a like a pasta bag or a paper bag full of cash.

Yeah, it was a big brick of cash.

So like as of in a movie.

Getting the money.

It was fun.

I'm not gonna lie.

You don't think of tomorrow.

Just think of that day, you know, and what you could do with it.

It's like being queen queen for a day.

What's the first thing you bought?

Hmmm, I think what the most expensive food, like lobster and took it home and ate it all by myself.

You ordered a full lobster.

Yeah, I think I order double lobster.

And then you brought it to your apartment and then you just ate it by yourself.

Yeah.

I watched TV and ate it and your like, life is good.

Yeah, you could have this every day because I love lobster.

She hid all of the cash that she was getting in a drawer in her bedroom and used it for all sorts of stuff.

The dentist that's on Majong Jewelry.

Tina bought a car at BMW, and the pinnacle of all of this is when she and her best friend went on a trip to Asia together, the trip that would turn out to be a very big deal in the case later.

And on that trip her world kind of got expanded.

She got to see things she had never seen before in her life like.

She talked about how when she and her friend arrived in Indonesia, they saw this huge beach that looked like it was covered with black rock, But when she got closer, she realized those were actually crabs.

It's like a thousand of them, so it looked like the rock is black, but when you go there, it's white because all the crabs walk away.

It's like thousands.

Was this fun when you're like getting these packages, doing these trips?

It was fun.

I feel that if you take any ordinary person and you give them a trip, and you take them here, you can go shopping, nobody's gonna say no.

I mean, you know they're they're not gonna say they didn't have fun.

According to the court docs, Tina made about fifteen thousand dollars for receiving these boxes, and that's not including other perks like the plane ticket to Asia.

But while the money was fun, it wasn't drastically her life the way that she imagined it would.

And her friend was asking her to do more and more.

She was getting boxy.

Tina had a bad feeling.

Tina was right to be anxious about her luck running out.

This was the late eighties.

President Ronald Reagan had doubled down on the war on drugs.

We're taking down the surrender flag that has flown over so many drug efforts.

We're running up a battle flag.

We can fight the drug problem, and we can win.

In nineteen eighty six, Reagan signed the Anti Drug Abuse Act.

It created new mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, and that same year Congress began holding hearings.

Today will learn more about criminal groups of Asian origin operating in the United States.

Drug traffickers love a vacuum.

As traditional organized crime appears to be taking less and less of the market than other trafficking organists will move in, and it certainly appears from the intelligence we have that the Oriental traffickers are picking up a big piece of that action.

All of this was in the distant background of Tina Wong's life.

Her reason for wanting to quit the drug trade was closer to home.

She was worried that if she kept accepting these packages, she'd put her family in danger.

She had a husband and a one year old daughter.

When Tina Wong was twenty eight years old, she became a mom to a baby girl.

They cleaned her up and they put her in the little basket and they wrapped it up like a sumo, you know, because they got nails and she was like scratching.

She named her daughter Fallen after that TV show Dynasty, which had you heard of that TV show before?

I've heard of that, but I've never watched it.

Yeah, I had never heard of it, but yeah, apparently it was like a huge TV show in the eighties, like number one hit, and it was about this oil Tycoons family, and Fallen was the daughter, and she was like a rich, spoiled rat.

Your father's Whatdy's not a gift, it's a responsibility.

It is You want to feel guilty for being born rich?

I don't, But.

Yeah, Tina's daughter, Fallen was born into a different situation, right.

Tina had had the stream of being a textile designer, and she even got as a high schooler into this like special program at FT, the College in New York of Art and Design.

But then she was on a scholarship and both she was like sixteen seventeen, both of her parents got cancer one after the other, and she was the person who had to take care of them.

And then she missed so much school that she got kicked out of the program after her parents died.

She was like trying to get steady work.

So she would like go to bars to work there and have to bring Fallen and then people would be like, you're a bad mom for bringing your kid to a bar.

Sometimes when people call me and say, oh, we need a bartender or a waitress, you know for the week or the day, I fill in.

But it wasn't, you know, often because I had to take care of her because I was still like young, and so I was like not really a best mother, but you know, I try.

You know, you got to think about what you're doing.

So I try to work and you know, make ends meet.

And her husband was working as a cook and sometimes in some kimbling parlors.

He works like super long shifts and long hours.

I think at a certain point, like they had to send a baby to her grandparents who were in.

Canada at a time, thick you of her.

So that like Tina could go out to work while people were where the baby was being taken care of by someone.

They sent fil into Canada to be with her grandparents, her husband's parents, so she knew that Falen would be safe.

As Tina tried to find study work and figure out her life.

You know, Tina doesn't speak Chinese, but if she was with her grandparents.

Then Fealin could pick up some Chinese.

Wall Did you say she that your parents did the same thing.

Yeah.

I got through basically the same thing as Falin.

My extended family is like very closely like supporting each other.

So they also sent me back to my grandparents when I was about like ten months old.

Months, yes, about the same time.

So Tina knew that Fallen was being well taken care of as she and her husband tried to sort out how to provide for her, and after feeling like she had been doing a bad job, Tina felt like this huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

Were you enjoying it or were you like sad because you were missing her?

Both?

Truthfully, I was enjoying it.

It was after her daughter was sent away that Tina started accepting these boxes and then she could feel her luck running out.

She told her friend she wasn't going to do this work anymore.

Five months went by, then came the sting, the day DA agents raided that house in Brooklyn.

As we already heard, agent Pete Mtesser found that accountant, the mother of two, standing in front of an open box of stuffed animals.

She was very upset, crying, and your goal is.

To try to calm the situation down as soon as you can and then hopefully move up the ladder.

This woman led the agents up the ladder to the woman who had recruited her, and that woman gave up the names of Tina's best friend and Tina.

On March first, nineteen eighty eight, an arrest warrant was issued in the Eastern District of New York Forteina Wong for importation of heroin.

That approximately nine pm, Wong was arrested at her residence.

That was the moment that she realized that she was not really being paranoid and everything she did has a consequence.

Tina's worst fears were now coming true.

They took my daughter's picture off the refrigerator.

They go, is this your daughter?

I said yes.

They go, oh, you may not see her for like twenty five years, you know, like that was kind of a low blow.

I don't think they should have did it like that, but that's their way.

So their way was to keep building a case against whoever was at the top, the person really behind the boxes of heroin.

To do that, they needed Tina to tell them everything about what she had done and who else was involved this time though.

It wasn't going to be so easy.

Was there a part of you that's like, I'm not going to cooperate.

Yes, that I wasn't going to cooperate.

No, I wasn't going to cooperate with them.

Tina had much more valuable information about this scheme than the account, but she also had no intention of sharing what she knew, and that was going to be a big problem because she and all the women like her were now in the crosshairs of a young and determined federal prosecutor.

Her job was to bring down a drug kingpin, and she saw all these female witnesses in custody as a huge opportunity.

It was fairly early in my career as a prosecutor, and it was like one of those cases that I started in general crimes and then took with me to narcotics as I worked my way up the chain.

Her name is Beryl Howell.

She's the reason I'm able to report on this case.

I've known Beryl for years.

She's my boyfriend's mother.

These are briefs that I file the governments always blue.

Was that more Toronto book stuff?

Witness list?

Oh my god, Beryl.

Beryl is the one who gave me that suitcase full of court documents, year's worth of filings, interviews, openings, closings, rebuttals.

There are notepads full of her sprawling cursive all about illegal saga were almost nothing when according to plan, the case that started with the Chinatown Sting would change Beryl's life and Tina Wong's life and Chinatown.

And it was just getting underway, coming up on the season of the Chinatown Sting.

When people came here, there were strangers in a foreign land, and they didn't speak the language, didn't read English, and so this was the one place they could go to for any kind of assistance.

Once you join a gang, you feel like you have the whole gang behind you.

I always know that a good friendship nothing can break it.

There's a difference between hearing things and thinking you're not hearing the truth versus thinking you're not hearing the whole story.

I wasn't sure I was ever hearing the whole story from Tina Wan.

The Chinatown Stang is written and produced by Me Liddy Jin Kott and reported by Me and Shu Yu Wang.

Our senior producer is Emily Martinez, additional production by Sonya Gerwit.

Our editor is Julia Barton, with additional editing by Karen Shakerji.

Our story consultant is wrong shau Ching.

Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.

Our music was composed by Johnson Sound Design and additional music by Jake Gorsky.

Our fact checker is Kate Furby, and our show art was designed by Sean Carney.

All voiceover work by Telly Leong.

For more information about this episode, check out our show notes or visit Pushkin, dot fm, slash Chinatown.

The Chinatown Stang is a production of Pushkin Industries.

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