Tag Archives: Chopstick Charley’s

The Many Ways of Knowing Beach and Peach Park

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Once, neighborhood kids rode horses here. Then motorcycles. Now they call it the best place in the city to ride mountain bikes. Each story of the woods once called “Mud Hills,” and now Beach and Peach Park, tells a different facet of human experience. The homeless man in the “hut” of stone slabs knows it differently than the neighbor with his scotch who relitigates fourth-down plays from his days as high school quarterback hero. Beach and Peach is Jax in microcosm.

Here he is, the original Chopstick Charley.

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I did not know, when I first published my story about Chopstick Charley’s, the oldest Chinese restaurant in the city, that it was his birthday. On August 18, 2017, John Ming “Chopstick Charley” Cheung would’ve turned 99.

Mai Hoo Cheung emailed me on Wednesday, February 27, 2019, solving mysteries and saying, “I knew the original Chopstick Charley. He was my father.”

2 New Year’s Stories: Remembering Kyle Marshall, DJ Chef Rocc, and New Life at Gator Lodge

Click below for either (why not both?) of the two full stories. Happy New Year’s! Here’s where we’ve been. Here’s where we’re going.

1. You shouldn’t die of congestive heart failure at 38 years old. Jacksonville loved F. Kyle Marshall. Some say he personified the city. I first met Kyle, where Rain Dogs is now, at Five Points Barber Shop, in 1931.

2. Lisa King learned to love people, coming and going, learned to love Jax when she first learned to walk at Gator Lodge. Never mind Haydon Burns and Aileen Wuornos. At her birthday party at this crossroads thrums the great untapped strength of the city’s diversity.

Who Was Chopstick Charley?

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It rains through the ceiling on the front corner booth. Everyone’s favorite is the woo dip harr, shrimp wrapped in bacon with sweet and sour sauce. It’s the oldest Chinese restaurant in the city.

“Charley” was “tiny” and “spoke very little English.” His wife, whose name Susan can’t recall, was a broad-shouldered white woman with dark curly hair who stood a head taller than Charley.