As teenagers in the ’50s, Mr. Moy and his friends formed the Jade Club on East Broadway, in a space now occupied by the Golden Unicorn Restaurant. It was a place to host record hops and dances, closer to home than other socials hosted by the Chinese student associations at Hunter College or Columbia University. They played rock ’n’ roll records, and practiced Latin dancing — there was a craze for Latin music sweeping the city back then. Young people from other Chinese communities — in Washington, D.C., or the now-long-gone Newark Chinatown, or from as far afield as Jamaica or Cuba — came to their dances.

Over the next decade, most of the crew left Chinatown. Mr. Lau and Mr. Moy joined the Army in 1961. (“I think every person in Chinatown was glad when we joined,” Mr. Lau said.) Others went to college, or found jobs, or they married and moved to the suburbs, settling in Long Island or New Jersey or Connecticut. But through the years, a sense of having experienced something special during their childhood in Chinatown has kept them close.

The Chinatown they were born into was on the cusp of transformation. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which virtually ended Chinese immigration, was repealed in 1943, around the time the boys and their friends were born. For decades the act effectively kept Chinatown’s population frozen at around 5,000 people. Slowly the repeal ushered in a wave of acceptance for Chinese in America.

When the last vestiges of the Exclusion Act were fully rolled back in 1965, Chinatown’s population exploded — some estimates put it as high as 150,000 — as new immigrants came from Hong Kong, Vietnam, Fujian Province in southern China, and elsewhere.

The little Cantonese village became a melting pot.

For this crowd, those changes are something to celebrate — a reflection of the improved status of Chinese immigrants. But they also mean that what made their childhood special — the intimacy of a tiny Chinatown, frozen by exclusion, where everyone knew your name — is largely gone.