You can use one hand to count the number of visitors at EJ Realty on Chinatown’s East Broadway in the past year who were not Chinese, said Yu Y. Wong, the owner. Hold up that hand and make a circle.

But that has not stopped a young, non-Asian burglar from prowling the building’s hard-to-reach corridors.

On March 30, Ms. Wong and her husband, Jason Dong, closed up the business — it is a real-estate office and a Western Union outlet, but primarily a travel agency catering to Chinese vacationers — at the usual time, 5 p.m. They took the elevator from the fifth floor to the ground-floor exit on the busy block of East Broadway. Just south of the Manhattan Bridge, this is blocks away from the widely known Chinatown, with its tourists and the peddlers with fake purses on Canal and Hester Streets and cheap buses on Chrystie. This is where workaday Chinatown buys groceries, medicine and wedding dresses and plans trips abroad. Ms. Wong and Mr. Dong, both 43-year-old immigrants from Fuzhou, opened the office just 10 months earlier, in May 2011.

The burglar arrived within the hour of closing, at about 5:50 p.m. He jimmied his way into a back office by way of a rear staircase, getting past the cheap lock. He stepped over Mr. Dong’s little executive putting green, staring right at a surveillance camera.