HAND & FOOT TAILORING AND THE CANTONESE HEM RULE

Auntie Lai has been hemming pants on Irving Street since 1994. She speaks Cantonese, Mandarin, and a working English. She has alterations in by Thursday for $14, the same price she charged last year, and the year before that.

The tickets are stapled to a corkboard above the second sewing machine and they are all in Cantonese. Auntie Lai keeps a separate notebook in English for the new neighbors who started showing up in 2019, when the block began to turn. The notebook is mostly empty. The corkboard is full.

Hand & Foot Tailoring has been on Irving Street between 25th and 26th since 1994, when Auntie Lai opened it with money her sister wired from Hong Kong and a sewing machine she carried from her old apartment in three trips. The shop has two machines now. The newer one is from 2003. The older one she has been using for thirty-one years. Both work fine. The newer one is faster for hems. The older one she trusts for buttonholes. She uses the right tool for the job.

The hem rule is fourteen dollars. It has been fourteen dollars since 2014, when she raised it from twelve. She raised it then because the rent went up. She has not raised it since. The rent has gone up again, twice. The price has not. When asked why, she explains it like a math problem. If she raises the hem to twenty, half the regulars stop coming. If half the regulars stop coming, she loses more than she makes from the new price. The whole shop is structured around the regulars. Strangers walk in for one alteration. Regulars come back six times a year for twelve.

The neighborhood used to be entirely Cantonese. It is now mostly not. The new neighbors bring in linen pants and silk dresses and tell her about the influencer they follow who recommended her shop. She nods and writes the ticket in Cantonese and tells them Thursday. The work comes back Thursday. The seam is straight. The hem is even. The price is fourteen dollars. The new neighbors are surprised. The old neighbors are not.

Her granddaughter is twenty-two and works two blocks away. The granddaughter has been telling her she should raise the prices, just on the new customers, the ones who do not know the neighborhood rate. Auntie Lai has heard this argument for nine months. She has not changed the price. She has not been convinced by the argument that there is a different neighborhood rate. There is one price. It is fourteen dollars for a hem.

The shop is open Tuesday through Saturday, ten to six, except for the two weeks at lunar new year when she visits her sister, who still lives in Hong Kong. She has done this every year since 1996. The corkboard fills up before she leaves and is empty when she returns. Her granddaughter watches the shop the first three days back and makes coffee for the regulars while they wait for Auntie Lai to pull out the older machine for buttonholes.

She is not opening a second location. She is not raising the price. She is not putting the menu online. She is hemming pants for fourteen dollars on a machine from 2003, and a hundred regulars from the old block and the new block are putting in tickets each week in the language they showed up in, which she reads either way.

“I do not raise the price. The price is for the neighborhood. The neighborhood is why I am still open.”

AUNTIE LAI, OWNER