Their friends call them the Chinatown kai doy — Taishanese for “bad boys.” They shot pool, rode motorcycles, and wanted to be James Dean. People would cross the street when they saw them, finding them just a little too rambunctious for comfort.

It has been a while since the bad boys of Chinatown made anyone nervous. The hair they used to grease into pompadours has turned white; and instead of cigarette packs, they carry photos of their grandchildren.

On a recent Saturday the gang — or what remains of it — was gathered at Yee Li, a restaurant at Elizabeth and Bayard Streets, reminiscing about the old days. They were there at the behest of the original kai doy, Danny Moy and Soy Chu, who for the past 17 years have organized annual reunions at the restaurant.

Mr. Moy and Mr. Chu have been friends since before they hung out at pool halls, growing up in the area during the 1940s and ’50s. In those days, Chinatown was small, just 10 or so blocks around Mott, Pell, and Doyers Streets. There were only about 5,000 people in the neighborhood, and everyone knew one another. Children were often left unattended.

“I lived in 56,” said Larry Lau, 76, a retired commercial artist, referring to 56 Mott Street. “Danny and Lungie lived down the hall. We ruled the first floor. When other kids had to go in or out of the building, they used to run past the first floor, hoping to not bump into us.”

Mr. Lau, like those squeezed around the banquet tables in Yee Li, felt a strong connection to Chinatown, though most of them had moved away during the 1960s. Some had driven in to the reunion from Connecticut, or New Jersey, or even Virginia; Mr. Moy flew in from California. One fellow, 77-year-old Sammy Lum, had stayed in the neighborhood. He made the trip from across the street.

Over 10 courses of Cantonese food — jellyfish and roast pork; fried shrimp and gai lan — they traded memories of childhood exploits. How they played kick the can on Pell Street and stickball by the Tombs prison. They knew all the underground tunnels in Chinatown; got in fistfights with the kids from Little Italy. Sometimes, they trekked up to Central Park to go fishing. “And do you know where we got the worms to go fishing?” Mr. Lau said. “We dug them from the mayor’s front lawn.”

Mr. Moy, 76 — an energetic talker with a booming voice known among friends as “the mayor of Chinatown” — pointed out people in the crowd. This was Constance, he said, indicating a woman seated to his left; they dated when he was 17, but her father forbade her from seeing him. That was Tracy, whose father used to own this restaurant; before that, it was a bar. George Kwong was called “Sleepy,” for how he looked after a few beers, and Donald Chin was “the Duck.” That was Lungie — Henry Eng — nicknamed after the Taishanese word for “dragon,” because he was the best dragon dancer. Mr. Moy and Lungie were especially close because they were both mixed-race and adopted. Once as children, they got in trouble after they bored a hole in the wall between their apartments, hidden behind the couch, through which they used to talk.

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.

Mr. Moy, Mr. Chu and most of his friends were part of the first American-born generation in their families. Mr. Chu’s parents immigrated during the 1920s from Taishan in what was then called Canton — the region in southwestern China where, until the 1950s, a vast majority of Chinese in America came from.

In Chinatown, Mr. Chu’s father worked as a cook, supporting seven children and a wife, squeezed into a one-bedroom apartment on Division Street. “We grew up without material things, and learned from growing up in the streets of New York City,” said Mr. Chu. He attended Stuyvesant High School, where he was one of just a few Asians at a school that is now 70 percent Asian. He went on to found a software company called New Year Tech and retired in Virginia.

Mr. Moy was adopted as a baby by a prominent Chinatown couple. His father was the head of the influential On Leong Merchants Association, and his mother, who was born in Shanghai in 1919 and sold at age 6 to a traveling circus troupe, had performed as an acrobat with Barnum & Bailey Circus. After the Army, Mr. Moy spent 45 years working for a steel company called the Earle M. Jorgensen Company, becoming a vice-president of marketing, and eventually retired in California.

Now once a year, Mr. Moy and Mr. Chu and their friends conjure the Chinatown of their youth. The impetus, Mr. Moy said, was 9/11. “I was living in California and I’d seen the towers come down, and it bothered the hell out of me,” he said. “I thought, ‘Well anything can happen.’ So I called up my buddy Soy and said we should get together. And I’ve made an effort to get everyone together every year since.”

Over time, the logistics have changed as people have aged. Cancer, strokes, and other ailments have taken their toll; many of their friends are dead. “We’ve probably lost eight or nine guys who used to come to these,” said Mr. Moy. He himself had to delay this year’s reunion (it’s usually held in September) because of a hip replacement.

Yet, even on a cold December evening, nearly 50 people made the effort to come out to Yee Li. Over the last course of the meal, Mr. Moy struggled to recall another game from his childhood: “I’m forgetting — what was it called in Chinese? The thing you kick, with the feathers on it? We used to make them out of newspapers and chicken feathers.”

A waiter, passing by, called out in Taishanese, “That’s called gai mo yin.” It was a feather ball, also known as shuttlecock or Chinese hacky-sack.

“That’s right!” said Mr. Moy, who looked satisfied. It was another piece of the past, restored.

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