DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (25)

By: Wendy Chin-Tanner
June 30, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… late-breaking obsessions, avoided discoveries, and devotions delayed! Series edited by Adam McGovern.

A DREAM REGROWS IN BROOKLYN

In 1972, long before the area was gentrified, my parents opened a little neighborhood store in Downtown Brooklyn, WC Art and Drafting Supply Co, catering to the needs of local artists, college art departments, and students in the area. Though the business was named after my dad, Walter Chin, my mom Kam was the one who ran the daily operations while he still worked his day job as a lab technician at the CUNY school down the street. In 1976, I was born, and I was named after the store.

I’m an only child, but WC Art was like a demanding older sibling who took all my parents’ time and attention, the golden child to whom I had no choice but to defer. The store always came first. Our life revolved around it from 9:00 am to 6:30 pm, six days a week.

We didn’t travel or take family vacations. On their days off, if my parents weren’t too tired to leave the house, they took me with them to make deliveries or restock supplies at trade shows, manufacturers’ showrooms, and the plastic stores on Canal Street. Those were my favorite errands because they ended with groceries and treats from Chinatown; pineapple buns, egg tarts, and takeout dim sum eaten while wedged in the front middle seat of our beat-up brown station wagon.

When I wasn’t at school or my grandparents’ house, I was at WC, sticking price tags on merchandise and ringing up customers, counting out the change as fast as I could at the old-fashioned cash register. I watched my parents handle shoplifters and angry customers who, if they were denied a return, got the wrong change, or had to wait too long for help, would more often than not start hurling threats and racial slurs.

Scaling stacks of boxes, I made the stockroom into my own private jungle gym, but also a refuge where I barricaded myself to read and scribble furiously in the small spiral notebooks I carried in the back pockets of my jeans and the front pockets of my overalls.

In the mid-1980s, Forest City Metrotech unveiled a plan to develop the area, condemning eleven square blocks on the pretext of eminent domain. Marketed as “progress,” the project would effectively displace hundreds of residents and local businesses, including our store. The city considered Downtown Brooklyn a slum, but to us, it was our livelihood and our community. It was everything we had.

With our neighbors, we formed a resistance group called STAND, Stand Together for Affirmative Neighborhood Development, to stop the condemnation. After work, my parents and I attended countless meetings held in artists’ lofts where my dinner would be cheese and crackers, carrot and celery sticks served on wooden paint palettes and chipped thrift store plates.

After school and on Saturdays after ballet class, I zoomed up and down Jay Street on my Care Bears roller skates, begging passersby to sign a petition against the destruction of our neighborhood. Over the course of three months, I amassed almost three thousand signatures.

On June 16, 1987, STAND appeared at a hearing before the Board of Estimate. We held up dozens of protest signs I helped to make with oak tag and glitter puffy paint while we sang “We Shall Not Be Moved.” My dad and I both spoke before the Board, one after the other. I was ten years old, but I wasn’t afraid, I realize now, because writing and delivering that speech gave me a sense of control over a situation where we had none. I was far more afraid that my family would lose everything.

That night, we slept on the hard wooden benches of the main courthouse in City Hall, waiting for the Board to make their determination. In the early morning, they delivered the verdict. It was not in our favor.

The lawsuit raged on for seven long years before we finally reached a settlement. Most of our neighbors took the money and left the area, but not us. Instead, my mom insisted on purchasing a ninety-nine-year lease within the Metrotech Center. She was determined to reopen WC Art on the very grounds of the store they’d torn down.

Like many immigrant families, the last thing my parents wanted for me was a life like theirs. They never intended for me to take over the store. They put all their hopes and dreams into a self-Pygmalion project that would catapult me — and our family — to a social stratum far above the working-class drudgery of retail. They wanted my future to be genteel, where my labor would be intellectual and handsomely rewarded. Given my facility with the written word and my gift of the gab, they fantasized that I’d attend Harvard Law School and then become the Mayor of New York, with an office at City Hall and the power to prevent businesses and communities like ours from getting destroyed. In their minds, this was the American Dream.

As for me, I wanted to get as far away from Brooklyn and the store as possible. I applied for college in the UK and got into Cambridge University, which was prestigious enough for my parents to let me go. And there I stayed, across the Atlantic Ocean, for fifteen years.

Over the next thirty years, the art supply business grew tougher and tougher as technology made many of the tools used in advertising, design, drafting, and even fine art obsolete. My parents did their best to pivot, stocking toys, craft items, and books, but ultimately, online shopping made the profit margins nearly impossible to survive in retail. The store wound up looking like a five and dime, bursting at the seams with new merchandise shoved in among old products that nobody would buy, but that my parents couldn’t stomach throwing away.

Meanwhile, in 2005, I married my husband, Tyler. That same year, we started a business of our own, A Wave Blue World, better known as AWBW, an independent publishing company for socially conscious graphic novels. Over the last twenty years, we’ve been busy growing our family along with our family business, raising two children while making our books, and eventually moving back to the States in 2012.

For the majority of the 2010s, I pressured my parents to sell WC Art so they could retire in peace. But they just couldn’t let it go. When the pandemic hit in 2020, they were forced to shut down along with the rest of the city and I whisked them upstate to live with me during lockdown. The store has been closed ever since.

Now, after five years out of business and fifty-three years since its founding, Tyler and I are resurrecting WC Art, combining my parents’ mom and pop shop concept with our own. WC Art and Independent Publishing Resource Center will offer art supplies for comics and graphic novels, workshops, and fulfillment solutions for independent publishers. And just like my parents, Tyler, the spouse whose name isn’t over the door, will be running the daily operations while I work my day job as a novelist.

After decades of staying as far from Brooklyn and WC as I could, I’m going back. Back to where I began, to the place I was named after, not in resignation or defeat, but to honor what came before me while making it my own. To alchemize it in its second generation into something new. Though it wasn’t what my parents imagined, maybe this is the American Dream, too.

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (25)

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