Good morning. It's Monday. Today we'll look at yesterday's cover story in the Metropolitan section: the tale of Tin Chin and Mo Lin, Chinese-speaking immigrants who met in a Brooklyn homeless shelter and became inseparable. |
We'll also look at an article by my Metro reporter colleague Ali Watkins on how a Harlem shootout highlights the deadly threat of illegal guns in the city, ahead of a possible upcoming surge in gun ownership following a Supreme Court decision last month. |
 | | An Rong Xu for The New York Times |
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Sam Dolnick is a deputy managing editor at The Times. But he began at the paper as a Metro reporter. He returned to those reporting roots recently by tracking down a tip and coming up with a New York story about friendship through hardship. |
First, there is Tin Chin, once a family man with a good job as an immigration officer. But by 2012 — after a prison sentence in a plot to scam Chinese immigrants out of their savings — he was living in a Brooklyn homeless shelter, where he met Mo Lin, an undocumented immigrant in poor health who spoke no English. |
The two middle-aged men passed the days by eating cheaply in Manhattan's Chinatown and visiting famous spots like Coney Island, Central Park and the Bronx Zoo. After Mr. Lin was beat up in 2014, Mr. Chin drew on his experience as an immigration officer to help him obtain a special visa. The story has further twists — you can read them for yourself — as the friendship lasted into the coronavirus pandemic. |
I asked Sam to discuss the story. (Don't worry, he didn't give away the ending .) |
This felt like such a hidden story. How did you find it? |
An unsolicited note submitted to The Times, in five sentences, suggested we write about a man named Mo Lin, a homeless immigrant from Chinatown. So I started poking around Mo's life, and it opened up into a much richer story than I had anticipated. |
This seemed perhaps mostly a story about a friendship, one forged on the margins of the city. Was there something about that world that captured your interest? |
Absolutely. A lot of this story takes place in homeless shelters, church basements and other foundational parts of the city. But if we're being honest, they're parts of the city that we don't often reach in a human way. We write about government regulations, homeless enforcement, immigration rules, but we don't often write about the human experience. |
Mr. Chin had a troubling background. Was he initially willing to cooperate fully with this story? |
I spent a lot of time with Tin from the beginning. He realized I was interested in Mo, and he wanted Mo's story told. As I began to press on Tin's own story, he opened up. |
Did your experience as a Metro reporter help inform the way you viewed this story? |
Deeply. I spent a lot of years reporting on New York City. I love New York. I live here. I'm fascinated by it, particularly by parts of the city I don't get to explore in everyday life. Being a reporter gives you a passport to the city. Writing this story took a lot of digging through court transcripts, and a lot of reporting, which you learn by doing. |
Many people have a notion of New York as Fun City, a glitzy place for people with money, influence and celebrity. Yet this story is about two men firmly at the bottom of society, whose unnoticed lives exist almost as shadows. I wonder why we hear so little about people like this. |
These people aren't powerful in the sense that we think about power. They could hardly be farther removed from it. What we often think of as news is often connected to power, and what interested me here was that big gulf in between. One thing that interested me with Mo and Tin was that they were really close friends who relied on one another. It made me think of my own friendships, and I hope everyone can relate to that. |
Talk about the narrative decisions that led to this story's cinematic feel, giving the reader hints of things to come while letting the events unfold on their own. |
I wanted to tell the story with a little bit of mystery and suspense because in some ways that's how it was experienced by them. Mo, for quite some time, didn't know Tin's full story. I wanted to create that same feeling. |
You oversee The Times's audio reporting, film and television, and other digital projects. You helped launch "The Daily" podcast. Can readers expect to keep reading deeper, longer stories like this? |
It's an incredibly invigorating moment in journalism. We can tell all kinds of different stories in all kinds of different ways. A generation ago, it was probably hard to picture a newspaper deeming a story of two homeless men as newsworthy, and I think it's incredibly exciting that the definition of newsworthiness is expanding right before our eyes. |
It's a sunny day near the mid-80s. At night, it's mostly clear with temperatures around 70. |
Suspended today (Eid al-Adha). |
 | | Evelyn Freja for The New York Times |
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13 guns were used in a Harlem shootout, underscoring a deadly threat. |
 | | Dakota Santiago for The New York Times |
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My colleague Ali Watkins reports a troubling development in an already shocking fatal shooting at a Father's Day barbecue in Harlem last month that left a college basketball star dead. |
The police determined that perhaps 13 guns were used in a wild shootout, and 53 shots were fired — a brazen display of violence as New York braces for what could be a surge in gun ownership after a Supreme Court decision last month overturned a law that made it difficult to own or carry a handgun legally. |
Soon, officers may not only have to determine whether someone is carrying a gun but also whether the weapon is legal. |
The shooting killed Darius Lee, 21, a Harlem native and standout for Houston Baptist University's basketball team. |
The Police Department does not keep figures on how many illegal guns it believes are in the city, but officers often estimate the figure at around a million. |
The police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, said last week that the department has in the last six months taken more than 3,700 illegal guns off our streets. |
It was Christmas season sometime in the 1970s. My sister and I, teenagers living in suburban New Jersey, were on a mission to find a special gift for our mother. |
We took the Public Service bus to Port Authority and set out from there. Hours of shopping yielded nothing, probably because of our extremely limited budget. |
Our last stop was Bergdorf's. It was dusk. The store was gleaming and filled with elegant shoppers. We clearly did not fit in. My sister was in overalls; I was wearing an ancient duffle coat. |
Nevertheless, we were determined. And there, in the shoe department, we found it: an elegant clutch in heavy black fabric with a simple silver clasp. It was perfect. It was even on sale! |
We counted carefully. We had just enough to make the purchase and pay our fare home. Then a horrible realization: We had forgotten about the sales tax. We could not afford it. |
Across the bustling salon, a salesclerk with silver hair and a trimmed mustache seemed to be watching our intense discussion unfold. He walked over to us. |
"May I help, ladies?" he asked, speaking to us as if we were wealthy matrons. |
We explained the problem. After regarding us thoughtfully, he suggested something we had never heard of. |
"Perhaps you might have the bag shipped to your home in New Jersey?" he said. "Then you will not have to pay the tax." |
Astonishment, then joy! He smiled as we tried to express our thanks. |
The clutch arrived on time, and our mother loved it. It became part of many special occasions in her life. After she died at 95, we found it among her belongings in perfect shape. My sister uses it now for special occasions. |
Glad we could get together here. James Barron is back tomorrow. — C.K. |
| Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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