tale of two malls
sinus problems in flushing
Recently, I went out to Flushing, to the Tangram Mall, named after a Chinese puzzle of seven, flat shapes that are moved around into various shapes. Sometimes, the game is to shift around the seven so they can be remade into a square, and at other times, the seven can be shifted to make another shape, like a dinosaur or a wolf.
My reason for going to the mall had nothing to do with what it offered. The real issue is that my sinus headaches have grown worse with the years, especially when the cherry blossoms light up. I recently spent a lot of money on a humidifier that keeps my sinuses humid and calm, but the machine needs to be cleaned so intensely and so often that it has created a new, stressful routine in my life. I don’t even want to use it half the time because cleaning it is so annoying. But if I decide to keep the machine off, I wake up the next morning with a headache.
It was on one of these mornings that I remembered this Flushing salon I used to visit when I was in my teens. I was a teenager, maybe 17, and I had started to get sinus headaches. I did not use the internet much for health stuff at the time, but my friend in high school assured me that I was not dying. Instead, she suggested that evil energy had blocked the channels in my face. Her mother would go to this one salon to clear her lymph nodes out, and she recommended that I try it.
Phone maps were not very useful in those years, so I committed the path she described to memory. Off the 7 train, past the underpass, to the left, opposite the library, a red door and a carved jade cat out front, right next to my pediatrician’s office (my pediatrician also went to my temple, so I hid my face when I was in the area during school hours). The trip was always worth it. The salon smelled lightly of ginger and had lots of signs describing the face’s various channels. One of three stern women would massage the pressure out of my face, and I would leave the salon with my head feeling as light as a sparrow’s.
I had been thankful for the relief, but I was also skeptical. I didn’t really believe that I had some energy blockage, and there didn’t seem to be much correlation between the massages and my health. The lymphatic system cleans and returns fluid from your blood, whereas the sinuses are like little branches above the cavern of your throat. They are two separate, but closely-placed systems. After some years, my headaches decreased, so I stopped going.
But age and headaches had returned me again to slight superstition, so I made the trip out to Flushing.
I texted my friend along the way to join me for lunch. At first, I suggested New World Mall, which was the first Asian mall I’d encountered in the area as a young woman. New World Mall had replaced the department store Caldor’s in 2011 after the building had stood empty for about a decade. Caldor’s had been like a church for us. It had everything: pressure cookers, long, flannel shirts, sweaters and pajamas, little hairclips. It was an important place for my family, a centerpiece of our shopping routine. The department store represented the variety of consumer objects we could desire, each slotted neatly into a different department that represented some facet of family life: the kitchen, the closet, the children’s room. I imagined, for many years, that I would eventually find the kitchen section very interesting.
Then, along came the New World Mall. It was nothing like Caldor’s. It opened in 2011 and was the first time I had seen an Asian mall in Flushing. I don’t think I’d quite registered that there was enough capital for foreign Chinese shops and small Flushing shops to cobble together and create something larger—on expensive New York land!—until then. This was not something that the Indians I knew in Flushing, who had lived there for several decades, had managed—or wanted—to do. And there were so many people at this mall, which was the opposite of every story I’d heard about malls shutting down across the U.S.
Still, the mall felt American in some ways. It followed some traditional mall logic. It has two main anchors: a grocery store and a restaurant. All across the top were flags, including an American flag, a Queens County flag, and a New York State flag. Some of the space inside felt a little unused, little corridors behind escalators, and the feeling in the space is that it has been repurposed from what it was before. And the food court was very good, full of dishes from across Chinese provinces, with food that I have never tried before. I have a favorite cold sesame noodle dish I like there, the noodles slick with peanut and sesame, bits of chili oil on top.
But I was now to be accosted with yet another change. When I got to Flushing, I found that my salon was closed. The glass door was dusty and a paper sign said TEMPORARILY SHUT. It looked very small next to the wide, fancy dry pot restaurant that had opened next to it. I wandered to New World Mall and found myself feeling something similar. The J-Mart was chaotic, and I knew of far better Asian grocery stores at this point. I saw a piece of spinach on the escalator. Had it always been so shabby?
I waited for my friend at the library. Someone next to me played music on their phone. I looked up the salon. They did not own the place. It was a rental property, owned by a local real estate developer. They were still listed as open, but I did wonder whether their closure had to do with rent, which has been rising in Flushing over the years. One reason is development: in 2019, a Flushing waterfront proposal sought to rebuild the land that faced the Flushing creek. For years, this sweep had been semi-industrial, patchy with dry grass, unglamorous except for the faint outline of Manhattan skyscrapers you could see from across the creek. The proposal was welcomed by developers and those who owned their places, but not so much by residents and commercial renters.
This was when I came across Tangram. The new mall in the area, opened in February 2022 on the old grounds of the Flushing Mall. The mall shared a developer with the Flushing waterfront, F&T, an American company that had partnered with SCG America, a big, publicly listed Chinese conglomerate from China to start the mall.
There are a few requirements written into Tangram’s lease that make it unique: tenants are required to display signs in both Chinese and English, the Orange Theory inside is the first in the country to offer classes in Chinese, and the movie theater must have bilingual Chinese subtitles. The food court is ever-shifting. It has a lattice that allows LED lights and structures to be moved, for restaurants to be made bigger and smaller. Many of the people making food are popular online first. Businesses can expand and stretch—and leave—as needed.
My friend and I decided to eat at Tangram, which we felt like we could circle forever. A cat cafe had several happy and hale looking cats inside. Private swimming lessons were being held in a glass-walled room, with children slapping their flippered feet against the thin class. At a live phone case-making class, three young girls were gluing different-colored emojis onto phone cases. At PopMart, I found blind box Labubus—surprise Labubus whose identity you don’t know until you open the box. They were shoved to the side, losing out to people’s new favorites, which were the Hello Kittys that were presented in various situations. The food court was clean, well-lit, and full of loud, confident branding. I couldn’t quite get excited about anything, so we decided on some ice cream—$10 each, mine a black sesame with mochi toppings.
My favorite thing is people hanging out together. That was the best part of Tangram. Groups of teenagers were laughing! And an old woman struck several poses next to a tri-color ring light. It might be the most popular mall I’ve been to in the U.S., but it also felt like the internet making land fall. It was as if I was doing a live walkthrough of the internet without the algorithm to sort me. Cat ears next to goth kids next to flower girls. LED arrows in various directions pointed us around the mall.
After some time, my headache grew worse. But I found no old Chinese medicine shops, no salons pointing out the importance of keeping the lymph nodes clean. Instead, I found a well-lit spa with seats shaped like silver beans. The services all seemed to be inspired by TikTok—upper bleph and buccal.
I left with my headache still lingering, and the feeling that the ground had shifted in my home once more; that maybe the heyday of “authenticity,” of superstitious salon services and malls with strongly-smelling grocery stores had ended too, that they had gone the way of department stores. China was richer now, and so were its diaspora’s malls. And it had all been done over the internet, which was bringing in really large political changes that are only now starting to land like hail.
Also "...doing a live walkthrough of the internet without the algorithm to sort me" is an intriguing - and perhaps demoralizing - image!
Did you watch the piece of spinach get ground up when it reached the bottom of the escalator?