Fat Choy is one of the only cats in the stories I never really saw.
I knew she was there. Everyone on the block did. The workers talked about her the way you talk about someone in the back room, present tense, like she might walk out any second. You could hear her before you could find her. A box shifting on a back shelf. Something moving behind the register that was not a person.
Wu, one of the workers, tried to help us find her. He called into the store and listened for movement. Fat Choy answered from wherever she had hidden herself.
"Let me out, let me out," he said, translating the complaint.
We went back more than once. We waited around feeding time, which the regulars swore was the surest way to catch her. Sometimes a paw. Sometimes an eye in the gap under a shelf. The staff moved things aside and tried to coax her forward. She gave us just enough to prove everyone was right, then disappeared again, deeper into the store, on her own schedule.
Her name works two ways. It echoes the Cantonese New Year greeting Gung Hei Fat Choy, the one about good luck, good fortune, and money coming in. It also points to the lucky-cat statues, the Maneki Neko figures that wave from counters and windows. In a Chinatown bodega, the name lands exactly where it should.
Most of the cats in these stories run the front of the shop in plain sight. Fat Choy does the opposite. Some cats belong to a store so completely that an outsider with a camera only ever gets a glimpse. She was never going to pose.
The cat who refused the archive.
From the StoriesFat Choy's story appears in the Bodega Cats of New York stories.
Published June 3, 2026
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