Blight Flight

Sometime in the next 75 days, Wong knows he will have to close his restaurant of the last 18 years and move on. When exactly will that be and where he will go?
“I don’t know,” says Wong, the owner of Feng Lin Chinese Restaurant located in Church Creek Plaza at the corner of Ashley River and Parsonage roads.
Wong prefers not to give out his full name, but will allow that he is originally from Fu-Jian, in Western mainland China.
On Feb. 11, a judge issued an order that gives the owner of the shopping center, Michigan-based Martin Scholnick, just 90 days to demolish the moribund buildings and remove the weeds from the property.
County officials had been pressuring Scholnick for years to do something, anything, to improve the property. Once a thriving strip mall, it has since fallen into serious disrepair.
City officials had reached out to Scholnick, too. One City Councilman
tried to connect him with a potential commercial tenant for the site without success.
Locals put together a petition to have the center razed.
Warnings are now posted on a former grocery store’s windows. Backdoors to several businesses are kicked open, with spray paint augmenting the filth that has been left behind.
Out back, in contrast, the shopping
Back in May of last  Scholnick said his company was optimistic about the strip mall’s future, but hadn’t settled on plans. He said at the time that the only reason Feng Lin had been allowed to remain there was because his business was being “gracious.”
None of the parking lot’s cratered potholes have been filled in since then. Cars still pull through, with drivers looking for something that’s not there anymore.
“My English no good,” Wong repeats apologetically several times during an interview with a West Of reporter, whose Mandarin is equally as rusty.
What comes through is that he will miss “everybody” knowing him and coming into his restaurant for the past 18 years.
When English words fail him again, he squats down at the counter, physically telling the story of one of his first customers coming in as a child, reaching up to pay for dinner.
The other day, that same customer, now “henn dah” in Mandarin, which roughly translated means “very big” or “all grown up” in English, called on the phone to say hey to Wong one last time.
Wong pauses after he tells the story in two languages and action, and seems wistful.
Will he reopen in another place, moving the business?
“I don’t know.”
Will he close the business and do something else?
“I don’t know.”
How does he feel about having to leave? What is his biggest worry?
“My English not good.”
“No work … no make money.”
Wong has to go. He doesn’t want to talk anymore. He zips up his thin winter jacket, with food stains on it from cooking, and walks out to his car.
Not too far away, another woman who runs a different Asian food restaurant shakes her head. “This is not a good time. Food is one times, two times as expensive than before.”