01.28.10
Posted in Down in Chinatown, Travel Log (N. America & Europe) at 3:02 pm by Benjamin Ross
Outside of the Middle Kingdom and Southeast Asia , there is probably no spot in the world more Chinese than New York City. When people think of American cities with heavy Chinese concentrations, usually San Francisco and Los Angeles are the first to come to mind. It often comes as surprise that New York City now has, by far, the largest Chinese population in the Western Hemisphere, and is the primary economic, cultural, and logistical center of Chinese life in the United States.
Throughout the 19th Century and the majority of the 20th, most Chinese immigrants to the continental United States came from Guangdong (the Cantonese province) and settled in California. In an era when ships were the dominant form of international transport, the West Coast was the logical destination for immigrants from Asia. Well into the 20th Century, even as air travel became increasingly feasible, most Chinese immigration still passed through the West Coast, since this was where the established immigrant communities were located.
Then in the 1980’s a dramatic shift in Chinese immigration occurred. Rural peasants from Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian province, just north of Guangdong, began emigrating en masse to the United States. The immigrants from Fuzhou did not share business and kinship connections with the established Cantonese communities in California, nor could they understand the Cantonese language, the lingua franca of most American Chinatowns at the time. Without ties to existing American Chinese communities, and with the ease of jet travel, the Fuzhou immigrants had little reason to settle in California, as previous generations of Chinese had done. Instead, they flocked to New York City, where a formidable labor vacuum was emerging out of the booming Chinese restaurant industry.
Since the 1980’s the Fuzhou population, and by extension the Chinese population of the United States, has grown by unprecedented numbers. With the quantity of Fuzhou immigrants long surpassing that of the Cantonese, New York has now become the main port of entry for Chinese immigrants in the United States.
Most Chinese immigrants in New York are not from the city of Fuzhou per se, but rather the small villages and townships in its rural periphery including Changle, Lianjiang, Fuqing, and Langqi Island. As someone who spent three years living in and around Fuzhou, the topic of Chinese immigration has always been of particular personal interest. So during my recent stop in New York, I made it a point to visit its various Chinese enclaves.
New York City has three primary Chinese communities, the Manhattan Chinatown on the Lower East Side, the Queens Chinatown in Flushing, and the Brooklyn Chinatown in Sunset Park. Excluding San Francisco’s Chinatown, each of the three New York communities on their own are more populous than any other Chinatown in the United States. The following is a photo essay from four days in New York. Enjoy.
曼哈顿 · Manhattan
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| Manhattan’s Chinatown is located on the lower east side within a massive tract of tenement housing blocks, not far from the former site of Five Points, the immigrant neighborhood showcased in the Martin Scorsese’s film “Gangs of New York.” For much of the 20th Century, the area which is now Chinatown was New York’s Little Italy. |
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| The swarming, raucous, and grubby atmosphere of Manhattan’s Chinatown exemplifies the perfect marriage between New York City and China. With pirated DVD’s, fake Louis Vuitton bags, herbal viagra, and 50 cent patterned Chinese “famer bags,” there isn’t much you can find in China which can’t be purchased in Manhattan. It’s also probably the largest concentration of Chinese restaurants in North America, and at night vendors crowd the sidewalks hawking 烧烤 (Chinese skewers), 麻辣烫 (ma la spicy soup) and other Chinese street snacks rarely found outside of the Middle Kingdom. |
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| As New York’s oldest extant Chinese enclave, more Cantonese is spoken in Manhattan than anywhere else in the city. The Cantonese still form a solid population base on the Lower East Side, however they are rapidly being eclipsed by the Fuzhou influx. |
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| Chinatown’s boundaries are clearly delineated by its housing stock. As the tenements lie upper middle class residential high rises, which vividly contrast the immigrant housing in their shadows. |
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| Although Fuzhou-ites can be found in all parts of Manhattan’s Chinatown, the commercial center of the Fuzhou population is East Broadway, aka 福州街 (Fuzhou Street) |
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| For a particularly native experience, I recommend a perusal through the East Broadway Mall. With shops hocking phone cards, electronics, suits, and rice cookers, and a rudimentary basement food court selling authentic Fuzhou snacks and niblets, the East Broadway Mall (88 E. Broadway) could just as easily be located on a street corner in downtown Fuzhou. |
法拉盛· Flushing
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| Hop on the elevated 7 train, and take it to the end of the line in Flushing. Disembark, and one is immediately transported into the most concentrated Asian population in the United States. To the east lies Koreatown, rather quiet and subdued compared with the massive Chinese colony to the west, which by most counts has now surpassed Manhattan’s Chinatown in population. |
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| In terms of Chinatowns, Flushing is about as diverse as they come. Fighting through the crowds, one hears the sounds of Cantonese, Fuzhou dialect, heavily accented Northern Mandarin, Taiwan Guoyu, and shouts of “ma-sa-gee, ma-sa-gee,” all permeating through the noise and commotion. |
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| The center of the Flushing Chinatown is at Main Street and Roosevelt, the third busiest intersection in New York and the busiest outside of Manhattan. It is chaotic, cramped, and crowded, even by Chinese standards. Flushing has a plethora of authentic Chinese restaurants and street food, making it an ideal spot for adventurous foodies. Like many ethnic neighborhoods in New York, one can easily consume an entire meal in Flushing without ever sitting at a table or using utensils. This is Chinese street food at its best, as many vendors and storefronts offer a multitude of Chinese finger food, much of it unavailable anywhere else in the US, and all at bargain prices. |
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| After several rounds of street food grazing, I settled down to a meal at “Four Choise and Soup All Day Lunch Box.” |
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| “Four Choise and Soup All Day Lunch Box” follows a formula common among New York Chinese dives: 4 servings are chosen from a buffet, plus a scoop of white rice and a bowl of soup, all for the low price of $4.95. The fare at “Four Choise” was was a unique blend of authentic Chinese 快餐 (fast food) and Fuzhou-style American Chinese food, which I found surprisingly tasty, albeit in small doses. |
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| Owing to its comparatively low degree of commercialization and tourism, Flushing represents a less adulterated ethnic enclave than Manhattan’s Chinatown. With direct subway transportation to Manhattan, Flushing is an ideal destination for any traveler wanting to experience the Middle Kingdom on American soil. |
布鲁克林 · Brooklyn
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| With so many ethnic pockets in the city, even many New Yorkers don’t realize that one of the largest Chinese communities in North America is located in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. Of the three Chinatowns, Sunset Park is the least touristy, and the most completely and utterly Fuzhou-ified. Passing along the main drag, 8th Avenue, the glottal sounds of the Fuzhou dialect fill the surroundings with hardly a word of Mandarin, Cantonese, or English spoken at all.***
Sunset Park is the place to go for the most uncensored Chinese experience New York City has to offer. As the youngest of New York’s three main Chinatowns, Sunset Park is home to a higher percentage of new arrivals than the other two Chinese enclaves. And without bona fide “tourist attractions,” Sunset Park’s Chinatown is NYC’s least frequented by outsiders. Businesses such as fish markets and 网吧 (internet cafes) appear to have been lifted right off the ground from Fuzhou and transplanted into South Brooklyn. Most restaurants serve an array of authentic Fuzhou cuisine and snacks, making it quite possibly the only Chinatown in America where one would be hard pressed procure that famous chicken of General Tso. And most shop owners don’t even bother to translate the Chinese characters on storefront signs into English.
To reach the Sunset Park Chinatown, take the D train to 9th Avenue and walk one street west to 8th Ave. Chinatown runs north and south from 42nd Street to 68th Street.
***It is a common misconception that the Fuzhou population residing in New York (and all over the US) does not speak Mandarin. While the Fuzhou dialect is the preferred language, since the linguistic reforms of the 1950’s the vast majority of Fuzhou children have grown up bilingual, speaking both Mandarin and the dialect. Only a tiny percentage do not speak Mandarin, and this percentage is likely lower than that of those who speak Mandarin but no dialect. |
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| I stopped in for a meal in Sunset Park and you can probably imagine the novelty for the wait staff upon encountering a 6-foot white guy who can speak about 10 sentences in the Fuzhou dialect. After exhausting my limited arsenal of dialect, I chatted in Mandarin with the staff and several of the other diners, who were able to provide me with a detailed update on the constant state of construction in my old neighborhood in Fuzhou. Being several thousand miles away from your former home, and encountering a room full of complete strangers who recognize down to the address exactly where you used to live and work is an odd sensation to say the least.
The food served at the restaurant was typical Fuzhou fare. On the left are wontons, which in Fuzhou are referred to as 扁肉. The broth has a unique flavor which tastes quite different from standard wontons, or 混沌. Interestingly, the word 扁肉 is generally not understood outside of Fujian province, and the only place outside of Fujian (China included) I’ve seen it on a menu is New York.
On the right is a 包子 (bao), a steamed dumpling, common throughout China, but regionalized such that there is flavors vary from province to province (and country to country). The Fuzhou style 包子 is filled with sweetened pork, although quite different from the more common Cantonese 叉烧包 (cha shao bao), frequently served in most American Chinatowns. |
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| Similar to the “Four Choise and Soup All Day Lunch Box,” many restaurants in Sunset Park also offer 中国式快餐 (Chinese fast food). 快餐 is common throughout China, and can be thought of as the Chinese buffet which is actually Chinese (as opposed to your typical US Chinese buffet which is about as American as Hot Pockets). Also, 快餐 restaurants rarely offer “all you can eat” deals (another very American concept), and instead either charge per serving or offer a package such as 4 servings plus rice and soup for a set price. With stir-fried green veggies, pork fat, squid, and whole fish, this Sunset Park buffet looks just as it would back in Fuzhou. |
With its three bustling Chinatowns, each swelling larger every day, the Chinese are increasingly expanding their stake in the ethnic mosaic of New York City. Even in neighborhoods which have not been traditionally inhabited by Chinese, it can be difficult to find a street corner in New York where the sounds of Mandarin, or Cantonese, or the Fuzhou dialect cannot be heard. Much has been written about the Chinese (and specifically the Fuzhou) immigration pipeline into New York City, and further reading, I would recommend The Snakehead by Patrick Radden Keefe (which I reviewed in July) or The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee. I still have more to report from my recent trip to the East Coast, and I’ll try to have additional posts in the weeks to come.
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Alec
said,
January 29, 2010 at 4:00 am
Interesting the amount of Fuzhou food, Fuzhou dialect and Fuzhou influence New York is having without even realising (most NYers I imagine wouldn’t distinguish Fuzhou and other Chinese food etc).
Wondering if you know why if there are so many Fuzhou people in NY, traditional characters seem to dominate over simplified. Perhaps to accommodate HKers, Taiwanese and more affluent Chinese-Americans who use traditional characters?
Benjamin Ross
said,
January 29, 2010 at 8:35 pm
@Alec
I found myself asking the same question. Here’s my take. Since most Chinese communities in the US were established long before the founding of the PRC (and the introduction of simplified characters), they just continued using the traditional ones even though Mainland China switched over. Even though the majority of the Chinese immigrants in New York grew up in the Mainland, the Chinese community in New York is still over 100 year old. Changing an entire writing system (especially in regards to the physical printing presses, signs, etc.) is an enormous undertaking, especially when you don’t have a national government behind it.
Around the world, to my knowledge there are few Chinese communities outside of China which use simplified characters. Singapore is the notable exception. Adapting to traditional characters is not extremely difficult for somebody who grew up using the simplified ones, and I’m guessing that logistically, changing over simply required more effort than anyone was willing to coordinate.
Steve
said,
January 30, 2010 at 9:45 pm
If someone was planning a trip to NYC and only had time to visit one Chinatown, which one would you recommend?
Fabrizio
said,
February 2, 2010 at 10:05 am
Great post, you found your way to Doyer street (the amazing little curved street with post office) which is one of my favorite spots in the city. I completely agree with your explanation for the predominant usage of traditional characters. There is an excellent historical work by Yu Renqiu called “To Save China, To Save Ourselves”, focusing on the Chinese hand laundry business as it developed in New York. It has some good discussion of the initial development of the Chinese community within the New York region.
Anonymous said,
March 5, 2010 at 8:34 pm
DOES ANYONE THINK BROOKLYN’S CHINATOWN IS BECOMING LITTLE FUZHOU?
After waves of Cantonese settled in Manhattan’s Chinatown and formed their own community, later on in the 1990s an influx of Fuzhou immigrants began coming in as well and established their own community next to the Cantonese. After they established their own community within Manhattan’s Chinatown, the increasing Fuzhou influx shifted into Brooklyn’s Chinatown and now they are increasing faster over there than Manhattan’s Chinatown or in any part of NYC and they are replacing the Cantonese faster in Brooklyn’s Chinatown than Manhattan’s Chinatown.
Since Brooklyn’s Chinatown is a lot smaller than Manhattan’s Chinatown and is getting more Fuzhou immigrants than other parts of NYC, Brooklyn’s Chinatown is now starting to replicate the Little Fuzhou on East Broadway and is also beginning to surpass the Fuzhou population in Manhattan’s Chinatown as well.
Hung-nguong
said,
March 9, 2010 at 12:00 am
Ben, you are the first American I’ve ever known who has so much knowledge on Fuzhou! As ethnic Fuzhou, I really appreciate your effort to learn some Fuzhou language. Just wonder how many young Americans can speak Fuzhou nowadays, maybe less than 10.
NYC is such a wonderful city. I have some relatives in NYC, so it is not difficult for me to find out the Fuzhou language in NYC develops many new words different from that spoken in Fuzhou region of China. These new words were translated directly from English to Fuzhou by pronunciation, without the interference of Mandarin which is becoming inevitable today in China.
Nemo
said,
March 31, 2010 at 8:38 am
wow,you are so familiar with this whole thing!I didn’t know there’s such a history in Chinese immigrants.
Priced Out of New York’s Chinatown | Chinatown Stories - Overseas Chinese Communities on 6 Continents
said,
June 7, 2010 at 9:39 pm
[...] the recent arrivals are from Fujian province (rather than Guangdong, like previous immigrants), as Ben Ross notes. The hipsters have [...]
Katie said,
June 23, 2010 at 11:38 pm
Great article, and very informative too. Having lived in New York’s Chinatown for almost two years now (although I’m originally from California), I would agree that NYC Chinatown is probably the most authentic Chinese experience you can have this side of the Pacific. Sometimes I have the strange feeling of deja vu, like I am actually back in China!
If you’re ever in the Los Angeles area, though, I would recommend checking out San Gabriel or Monterey Park instead of Chinatown downtown. L.A. actually has a very large population of Chinese from the Mainland, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in particular that have settled in suburban areas sometimes referred to as “New Chinatowns.” You can get some pretty good dim sum in these areas.