Chinatown folk work to defend signage

Authorities have reduced the number of bilingual street signs in New York City's Chinatown district, but with many of them having been in place for more than 50 years, a campaign is underway to restore them.

Manhattan's Chinatown has had bilingual street signs－with Chinese characters in addition to English－since 1969. Today, 101 out of about 155 of the signs remain across two dozen streets in the area.

Many of the signs were written in characters reflecting the Cantonese dialect spoken by the first Chinese immigrants in New York. Tan Bingzhong, a local calligrapher, wrote the characters on the signs by hand.