“They were very friendly people, I remember.” “Being a lawyer, completing forms was not a problem for me,” Sung says. So they handed him a thick application packet.

But while there were plenty of banks in Chinatown and plenty of deposits from Chinese-American businesses and workers in those banks, no one was interested in lending to Chinese immigrants and other Asian Americans. He went to ask about obtaining a charter for a new savings and loan association.Īs he told the Federal Home Loan Bank staff, the clients he had helped over the previous 20 years in his Chinatown law practice, with immigration issues and filing documents to incorporate their businesses, now needed loans to buy homes. Back in those days it was in the Twin Towers, not far from Chinatown. That same year, Thomas Sung took a different walk, to the offices of the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York. By the spring of 1982, 20,000 garment workers, nearly all of them Chinese-American women, marched down Chinatown’s Mott Street to Columbus Park and held a rally to demand that garment factories renew the contracts with their union. Many who landed in the neighborhood went to work in small-scale garment shops. The act was technically repealed in 1943, but strict quotas on Chinese immigrants didn’t go away till 1965, and that’s when Chinatown started to grow again. It was more than 100 years since the Chinese Exclusion Act put severe limits on Chinese immigration. The story of Abacus Federal Savings Bank is but one example of the persistence of all marginalized communities, including the Asian immigrant community, to invest in themselves in the face of structural and too often physical violence - and how that persistence has manifested and evolved over time.īack in 1982, Chinatown was starting to feel its growing strength. “It’s going to be a setback in terms of revitalization.”īut it’s hardly the first crisis that Abacus Federal Savings Bank has faced. “In some ways it almost feels like the violence is surpassing the pandemic because of the vaccines coming out,” says Jill Sung, Vera’s younger sister and CEO of the bank. And Chinatown has always been a larger draw, with people living all over the region coming every weekend to go out to eat or shop - weekly visitors now concerned about violent attacks against Asian Americans. In Chinatown and other Chinese immigrant neighborhoods across New York City, businesses that have barely survived their toughest year yet are now opening later in the day or closing earlier just so that workers feel safer commuting. Over the past year, Abacus customers have weathered not only the pandemic - which started earlier in Chinatown due to xenophobia and loss of foot traffic - but also fear of the rising wave of violent attacks against people of Asian descent in the U.S. That’s where our community is and that’s where they need to go to bank.” “It was never in our thoughts to not have a branch on Eighth Avenue. “We found a new space on a corner, which is actually nicer,” Sung says. That branch had been at the first location since 1993. The main branch made it through the year unscathed, as did all six branches of Abacus Federal Savings Bank - unless you count the fact that a dispute with the landlord over a rent increase at their Brooklyn branch forced them to relocate five blocks away during the pandemic. “I figured if something would happen we just saved the wood and all the materials just in case.” “I couldn’t fathom it,” says Sung, who is not technically an employee of the bank herself but sits on its board of directors.

Jill sung abacus federal savings bank