After the taxi had left, Lawrence Winters stood under the cement lamp post by the street, taking a look at the famed Chinatown.
The architecture here gave a strange sensation of time travel.
It was like stepping back to the commercial streets of an inconspicuous county town in China during the 1980s.
Dusty cement ground, with empty mineral water bottles, milk cartons, and colorful plastic bags piled up in the grooves by the street.
The buildings on both sides of the street weren't tall, still the local 19th-century three or four-story European-style buildings, their red brick facades exuding a sense of historical wear, summed up in one word, old.
All the ground floors of these buildings were shopfronts, displaying a variety of small goods, from baseball caps with "New York" written on them, to crudely made women's lingerie, counterfeit branded bags, and restaurants with signs that read "Roast Meat."
