The Chinese restaurants on Eldridge Street just below Canal do a brisk lunchtime business with their fish-ball soup, duck noodles and dumplings laced with leeks. But the commodity exchanged most in this part of Chinatown is labor. Employment agencies line the narrow block, and even the one shoe store doubles as a jobs center.

Lacking English signs to mark them, the Eldridge Street agencies are impenetrable to non-Chinese speakers. Yet they supply Chinese restaurants throughout the Eastern United States with a limitless stream of cheap labor. An immigrant can walk into an agency on Eldridge Street one day, and board a bus bound for a job in Ohio or Minnesota the next.

"One of the things that's probably true is that the Chinese restaurant in your community or your suburb - there's a chance that person working there got their job in Chinatown," said Robert Weber, director of the Rebuild Chinatown Initiative, an economic development project. Since the Chinatown economy slowed after Sept. 11, many more of the listings have been for out-of-state jobs.