It's hard not to like Ting's Gift Shop, the bright red oddity at the corner of Pell Street and Doyers.
When, on a recent trip to Chinatown, my son was growing ever more bored by the minute, I knew where to head: Ting's cramped storefront, where there's just enough room to turn yourself around in a survey of all the quirky little thingamajigs your scant money can buy. Back-scratchers, finger traps, squirting toy slot machines, joy buzzers, little pieces of ceramic statuary, tiny Buddhas, plastic snakes, yo-yos, old Chinese newspapers, paper fans, tons of incense, paper lanterns. Just shelves and shelves of weird, weird, weird. And all for 15 cents, 65 cents, a dollar, a dollar fifty. The really expensive stuff will set you back three dollars.
It's all crap, of course. But when you put so much colorful, oddball crap like that together in a tight space, it's wondrous.
I love this place SO MUCH! I had to find straw finger traps for a play back in the late 80s and even way back then Ting's was the only place that still carried them. I can find all the favorite cheap souvenirs of my childhood, like the shells that you drop in water and they sprout tiny paper flowers.
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