I read this article years ago and it has really stuck with me. Especially considering I now live blocks from East Broadway.  This article is the inspiration for Rivertown. Read it. I was just mining it for some numbers and came across this:

East Broadway became known as “Fuzhou Street,” and the Chinatown shorthand for new arrivals was “eighteen-thousand-dollar men,” after the snakehead rate in the eighties.

The New Yorker
A Reporter at Large
The Snakehead
The criminal odyssey of Chinatown’s Sister Ping.
by Patrick Radden Keefe

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/24/060424fa_fact6#ixzz1RKEyUZQv