Katja Heinemann

DOCUMENTARY WORK: – chinatown baby boomers

A series I produced for AARP Photo's Instagram feed, portraying a changing Chinatown. Featuring New Yorkers, age 50 and older, who are sticking up for their neighborhood in their very own ways: artists, community organizers, volunteers, local business folks... iPhone only. 

  • One of New York Chinatown's original city blocks, Pell Street dates back to the late 1800s, when the historic neighborhood was comprised of only three streets. Follow us this week, as we’ll be showcasing portraits from the neighborhood. The baby boomer generation profiled in this series has experienced Chinatown’s dramatic demographic expansion after the immigration reform of 1965 lifted quotas on migration to the US from Asian countries, an influx that hasn’t diminished, although today’s arrivals will seek out other, satellite Chinese-American enclaves in Queens and Brooklyn. Eleanor Yung: “In the old days, when I was in Chinatown I could understand what's going on, but now there's a lot of dialects that I don't understand anymore. It's much more diverse than when we first came 40-something years ago. At that time it was mostly Southern Chinese, from Toisan area, and then there came more Fukienese, and more Shanghainese, and more Mandarin-speaking, and there's some Guangzhou people here too now, there's a large population of that. But it's very much a community because the basic cultural practices are the same, we still have the very basic common cultural identity.”
  • For decades, the restrictive immigration policies of the Chinese Exclusion Act, followed later on by strict quota systems, had barred Chinese immigrants from bringing their wives and children to the United States. The influx of new immigrants that began in the late 1960s transformed Chinatown from the bachelor society of the early to mid-1900s into a neighborhood of working families. Today, in addition to an older generation that has spent most of their working lives in the US, there is an increasing number of elders who join their sons and daughters in the United States through family reunification sponsorship after their own retirement in China, uprooting later in life to take care of their grandchildren, and spending their senior years in an unfamiliar city and society where they do not speak the language. No matter where in NYC they may live, Manhattan’s Chinatown and the many other new Chinese-American enclaves that have sprung up in Brooklyn and Queens can feel like home.
  • “I started this in 1986, all by myself. There was no Flushing Chinatown, no Brooklyn Chinatown, just Manhattan. It was just a lot of immigrant kids, bad influences, drugs, gang activity, just kinda really bad. I was focused on the boys, getting them off the streets. I would say in the last ten to twelve years you could see it change. Once that generation kind of moved on, and the next generation, their English is a lot better, they have more self esteem, they have more avenues available to them, so they don’t have to go into those illegal things.”“As long as we’re getting the immigrant population, we’re making a difference to help them, that’s what this is. This is just a vehicle. Bottomline, a feeling of family, of caring. I’m not a genius, I’m not gonna be able to get them grades and stuff like that, that’s not me. It’s all about, you have a group here that will help you if you need it. The older ones now help the younger ones with resume writing – on their own!“At age 53, Tom thinks of retiring: “I don’t want the second generation that’s been out in Jersey, they can’t speak any Chinese, I don’t want them. They’re okay. They don’t need us. And when I see that this dwindles, then I’ll definitely stop. I’m done. Personally, I’m done.”
  • At 83, Chan Kwai Ken, known as Mrs. Eng (pictured in front, left) comes to the Mulberry Street Senior Center twice a week to attend the singing and dancing group she founded 15 years ago. A former kindergarten teacher in her native Guangzhou, she found work in Chinatown’s laundry and restaurant business, and retired when her health began to fail. Sitting at home idly left her feeling depressed: “I used to love playing the piano, and singing and dancing with the children, and I wanted to do something for the community. So I thought, this is what I’m good at.” The Mulberry Street senior center is run by the Chinese-American Planning Council, a community-based organization dating back to the mid-1960s era of the War on Poverty and the unprecedented growth of NYC's Chinese community after the 1965 immigration reform. Located in the heart of historic Chinatown, across from Columbus Park, it serves 500 Chinese-speaking seniors daily. Over the years, Mrs. Eng’s group has grown from its initial 12 participants to over 50 members, mostly women. She can no longer move as easily and her eyesight is faltering, so she has turned over the leadership to someone younger – although she still likes to keep an eye on things and loves to sing the old folk songs. {quote}My body is disabled, but my heart is not. I am happy when I’m here.{quote}
  • “I’m not one of the boys, but I’m one of the team.” Agnes Chan (age 55) made history when she became the NYPD’s first Asian American female police officer, and when she served as president of the Asian Jade Society fraternal organization from 1991-1992. When she joined the force back in 1980, only three Asian American officers patrolled Chinatown’s 5th Precinct – and none of them were fluent in Chinese. “They would send anybody who has an Asian last name down to the Fifth.” Plan A had been law school, but an internship led to the police academy for the Hong Kong native who had moved to NYC with her family at age ten. “I actually didn’t tell my parents until the night before I graduated. So they were upset, but they respected what I wanted to do. My parents are pretty involved in the social clubs of Chinatown, and they would never tell anybody. Someone actually asked them one time, ‘is that your daughter?’ and they said, ‘no.’ They didn’t want to acknowledge it.”“As a woman on this job, we do have to do a little more to prove ourselves. You need to get respect. It's your presence when you’re on the scene that controls the situation, I learned that when I was a young kind in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, it was pretty tough. A lot of it is verbal judo, as they call it.”
  • This spring, Winnie Mui closed down her eponymous Chinatown establishment after 28 years, the latest casualty of the area’s gentrification. Long time friends and customers came to visit from as far as London and Paris to celebrate one last time. “Of course I’m sad. I’m sad. We sang together, and burst into tears. I will remember all my customers, because they are sincerely loving.” Those customers included a generation of neighborhood regulars who had come of age hanging out at Winnie’s and formed an extended family there – to them, the loss didn’t signify just the disappearing of yet another much mourned piece of New York authenticity, but of their sanctuary. A former Cantonese Opera performer, Winnie moved to NYC in the 1960s. The way she tells the story, she loved to drink and socialize, but never considered opening up her own place until a couple of her {quote}younger sisters{quote} suggested it because they were looking for a job: “After they asked me, I thought, ‘I could try.’” In recent years, a dive bar vibe and vintage karaoke machine attracted non-Chinese crowds, and it is a testament to Winnie’s personality and skill that she was able to navigate and bridge different worlds, creating a space where everybody felt at home – the 1990s street gang crew and the people from the courts and the D.A.’s office, the local latchkey kid and the NY fashionistas, the retired cops and the old timers and the gentrifiers…
  • “I was a college student during the bad old days in Chinatown, when mainstream media offered only lurid and racist misrepresentations of my neighborhood and its hard-working immigrants.” During those years, writer and poet Henry Chang commuted uptown by day, immersed in the academic world of theory and revolutionary politics of the 1970s, and then returned home at night to a working class neighborhood plagued by violence, where the stories he overheard in pool halls and bars and gambling dens would become his lifelong theme and inspiration as a writer of crime fiction.Henry grew up on Pell Street and still lives around the corner from his childhood home. At 64, he is surrounded by people he has known all of his life, and a community of artists and writers that has expanded over the years. Continued immigration and neighborhood changes have also transformed the world of organized crime featured in his fiction. “Chinatown gangland changed over the twenty years it took for 'CHINATOWN BEAT' to get published. Along the way, I wrote poems, essays, short stories and screenplays, watching the Chinese community spread out to Queens and Brooklyn. By the time my fourth crime mystery was published, I'd included the stories of those Chinatowns as well.” That fourth novel, DEATH MONEY, was published in 2014, and Henry is currently working on book number five in his Detective Yu trilogy.
  • Corky Lee poses with his 1982 photograph of striking garment workers, featured in the New York Historical Society’s exhibition Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion. “It was the largest Chinese garment worker rally in the history of NYC. 15,000 showed up to lobby for a new contract – it was pretty monumental. Fifteen, twenty years after that, the garment industry is no longer a viable employment source for the Chinese immigrant community, but back in the day, at least one person in the family had to work for the union, because that was the source of health insurance. Because there was absolutely no health insurance in the laundries and restaurants.” Corky was still in high school when he began noticing the absence of Chinese Americans in the media and newspapers around him – even the historic photograph of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, built by Chinese labor, didn’t have any Chinese workers in it. He has been committed to making his community visible ever since, photographing not only Chinatown but Asian America for more than four decades. The 68 y.o. Queens native has been the country’s self-appointed, undisputed, Unofficial Asian American Photographer Laureate for so long that even the post office agrees: a letter addressed to just this title in “Elmhurst, Queens” actually found its way to the photographer.
  • AAPI Heritage Festival on Mott Street in the historic heart of Manhattan’s Chinatown. Restaurant and laundry work was historically one of the few employment options available to Chinese men in the United States, while the 1970s saw the rise of garment workshops that were employing the rapidly increasing numbers of women in the neighborhood. Both the restaurant and garment industries suffered heavy losses after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Chinatown commerce ground to a halt while the neighborhood was cut off as part of NYC’s downtown frozen zone. The garment workshops, already on a decline during a 1990s era of international outsourcing, never bounced back. Former factory spaces have been converted to luxury lofts. Seamstress work has been replaced by the health care and nail salon industries as an employment source for new immigrant women.Today, restaurants and small businesses still make up a large part of Chinatown’s economy, but rezoning and rising real estate costs, accelerated during the Bloomberg administration’s focus on luxury developments, have made gentrification a real threat to the long term survival of the neighborhood as a home for working class New Yorkers and small business owners.
  • “Culture allows us to dream, to envision what is possible.” Fay Chiang – visual artist, poet, community activist – was one of the co-founders and a long time director of the Basement Workshop, NYC’s seminal Asian American cultural collective. One of the rallying points for her generation of activists were the NYPD’s excessive use of stop and frisk policies targeting young people of color, and the brutal 1975 police beating of Peter Yew. Twenty years later, a police bullet killed 16 y.o. Yong Xin Huang in Brooklyn. Over the past ten years, Fay has created more than 60 portraits of youths whose lives were lost at the hand of police.“I wonder as I am painting: what is the future for our children in this metropolis of glass towers and power and wealth? how can entire communities be decimated in its shadows, lives destroyed, eliminated and our children and youth of color are made to be puppets for that pipeline into corporate prisons....”“I keep painting these portraits because the stream of killings continue and their families ask me to; this is my way to honor those lives taken before their time; to honor their families who continue year after year to live with the absence of loved ones and continue their fight against injustice. they show us how we must continue the struggle for what is right and good and whole.”
  • Sister Emmanuel Shen talks with members of the congregation after Easter weekend services at Church of the Transfiguration on Mott Street. The two-century-old parish was founded by English-speaking German Lutherans in 1801, and saw its congregation change along with the neighborhood’s population, from Protestant Episcopal to finally Roman Catholic, serving Irish and Italian immigrants, whereas mass is delivered in Cantonese, English and Mandarin these days.A lifelong teacher and former school principal, Sister Emmanuel grew up in Shanghai and lived in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, before receiving her religious and professional training in Sydney, Australia. She joined the NYC convent of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary in 1997 and has been instructing Chinatown's new generations of immigrants in the Rite of Christian Initiation Process. She has provided pre-matrimony counseling to more than 100 young couples of the congregation. “Today’s parishioners are more active, and assume more responsibilities,” and lasting relationships are built with Mandarin-speaking new immigrant families from Fujian Province and the church, while former congregants who have moved to the suburbs return for services held in Cantonese.
  • Tak Wah Eng came to NYC from Hong Kong as a teenager to join his immigrant father. Chinatown turned out to be nothing like the America in the movies: “It was so old, and so dirty. At that time, it was the sixties, all the buildings so run down, old style, old tenements...” At 16, he couldn’t speak the language and was chafing against the strict rules of the father he had never known growing up. “My art teacher at Seward Park HS, he helped me a lot. He’s the one who cared.” He also began studying Shaolin Kung Fu: “Growing up, you have to survive and fight.” “Basically, I’m a NY boy. It’s like my home now. Hong Kong is too small, an island. New York is the center of the world. Everybody comes here. I grew up here, learning most of my art here.” Now age 65, he has taught old and young, movie stars and retired cops, masters who run their own schools and American-born Chinese kids from the suburbs. His Kung Fu studio in a walk-up tenement on the Bowery is so narrow that they had to trim off the ends of the weapons used for training – and still have to periodically patch up the holes in the drywall.
  • An incense coil burns in Sifu Tak Wah Eng's martial arts studio on the third floor of a Bowery tenement, where classic NYC security gates meet an oasis of calm and concentration. With the advancing years, his practice is changing: “As I get older, I learn how to use it more like yoga. The breathing is softer, like Tai Chi.”As a younger man, he had trained with a martial arts master whose story of teenage immigration and pent up frustration and rebellion mirrored his own; as guide and teacher, the older sifu taught the boy not only discipline but “our culture, bring me back to my roots, learn what Chinese look like. For me, it’s like treating movement like an art form. It’s like calligraphy. It’s all tied in together.”Today, the studio is seeing a new generation of young people, children of former students who moved out of the neighborhood: “Brooklyn, Queens, some Jersey, but their root is all from Chinatown. They migrate out, and they all come back here. They come each Sunday, like a Sunday church. And they learn here, become more Chinese. Most of them, they don’t even speak Chinese when they are away from Chinatown. All they learn is the basic culture, American.”
  • As a child, Brian Tom, now 52, was fascinated by Chinatown’s Lunar New Year celebrations. {quote}Lion clubs would come out at night, and it's amazing for the senses: all the lights, the sound, the beating of the drums, the fire-crackers going off. By the age of 7, 8, I could play pretty well. It started out with pot lids as cymbals and my mom’s cooking utensils: wooden spoons and chopsticks on the bottom end of pans. I was banging away morning, noon and night, I definitely drove my parents insane.{quote}The son of a fourth generation NYC family, Brian didn’t fit into the traditional Chinese mutual aid societies, and many Chinatown associations had ties to organized crime and street gangs. So he and his friends started their own children’s lion dance group. {quote}Back then, if you were not in a gang, you would be prey. The club ended up becoming a bit of a safe harbor: like a school of fish, we all stayed together. And the gangs sort of respected what we were doing, and most of the time left us alone.{quote}{quote}Bruce Lee was emerging when I was a teenager, you know, there was no Jackie Chen, or Jet Li or anything like that. So you're looking for things to identify with, and there's gotta be more to Chinese culture than stir fried food and dumplings. In my wildest dreams, we never went out to build something that was gonna last for over 40 years. We were just a rag tag bunch of kids...{quote}
  • “I retired early, because I always work night shift, in the Lutheran Hospital. Day time I help people that don’t know English well. And my husband worried. ‘Quit the job! Don’t work!’” Since leaving her job as a certified nursing assistant, Linda Chan (at left in yellow blouse) has been focusing on her community volunteer work through the Lin Sing Association, a 105 year old Chinatown mutual aid organization where her husband, York K. Chan, had served as president in the past.And she has dedicated herself to teaching dance. You can find Linda in a different neighborhood Adult Day Care Center every single day of the week, working with local seniors. Friday afternoons are reserved for the community’s retired ladies at Lin Sing, and on beautiful days there are impromptu exercise and music sessions at either Roosevelt or Columbus Park.“One day we were in the park, and people say, ‘Hey, we have this teacher.’ They make a group, so we joined. Fifteen years! So we all know each other. Teaching came later. You have to have a loving heart to elderly people. Like with the bamboo clapper dance, I always say, ‘Right side, left side!’ and then they can remember. Because they are not young people.”
  • Bob Lee (“just over 70”) and Eleanor Yung (”right below 70”) met at the Basement Workshop Collective in the 1970s, when both gravitated to New York City’s Chinatown as an East Coast center of Asian American arts and activism. Bob had been raised in Newark by parents who had immigrated from China in the early 1930s, while his future wife had come to the US from Hong Kong to study. Eleanor was a dancer and Bob… “What was I? I was looking for friends. I was looking for who the hell I was.” An art historian, he founded and still runs the Asian American Arts Centre and Archive, while Eleanor moved from dance and choreography to the healing arts, teaching Taichi Chuan and Qigong, and practicing acupuncture.Eleanor describes her husband of 41 years as a visionary: “He's very thoughtful in a sense of thinking deeply about different things and tying them all together to make it very comprehensive.” Bob: ”She's always been my inspiration. When I first saw her dance I was blown away. I think it's a vision of who we might be. Who we could be if the country opens up to the diversity of what other cultures bring to the United States. And I still try to get her to dance... She doesn't listen to me. If I could get her to dance more... Even if it's only an exercise now.”
  • Philip Seid (65) founded the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory in 1977. “In the old days, things were simpler. There weren’t that many ice cream places, and we thought we’ll put something a little more exotic, more a neighborhood type of place. At that time Green Tea, Red Bean in Japanese restaurants were already there, and we also put some flavors that the Chinese are familiar with. Like Lychee, Sesame, Mango.” “I think we’re doing well, but small businesses, they have to sell so much because of the rents, real estate, water fees… You know, a building in Chinatown is like 15 million now. We still have a decent length in the lease, but we’ll see what happens in the future. It’s really complicated. Some of the finest little places, they serve good food, they do have a certain amount of business, but they get pushed out because rents – it’s very difficult.”Philip’s daughter, Christina, helps him run the family business. “She’s a people person. I’m more private. Nowadays, you have to have a personality to sell products, like if you watch tv, all those cooking channels, these people all look like movie stars. Christina connects with people, and she’s good with the internet, and that helps a great deal. It’s a different world. I grew up when Chinatown was only like two, three blocks. But now it seems like it’s a global village in America.”
  • “I grew up during the civil rights period. Ostensibly I worked to get something for Asians, but the more interesting piece was just working cross-community.” Don Kao honed his organizer’s skills in the Asian-American studies movement of his UW-Madison college years. San Francisco’s Chinatown was next, but the group he was involved with were “kind of socialist-communist types. And then word got out that ‘Don Kao is really great, but because he’s gay, he could never be a communist.’ So I got red-listed.”For the past 38 years, Don, now 63, has been making his home in NYC. As director at Project Reach, an organization that began as an anti-poverty and anti-gang initiative for Chinese youths, he opened the doors to young people of all backgrounds, focusing on anti-discrimination and social justice issues. “I was constantly trying to get Asian young people to recognize the importance of being people of color instead of being classified as ‘white.’”“I think that my job is probably what everybody else should be doing, which is to build communities across difference and discrimination wherever it exists. I think it’s important to work on getting young people, adults who work with them, families, communities, to look at the world the way it is, not the way people want it to be… Because it’s a contradiction to live in a world that is not just, but you talk about liberty.”
  • A scene on Mott Street north of Canal, a neighborhood that was historically considered Little Italy. New York’s ethnic Chinese demographic continues to grow, to just over half a million residents in 2011, or 6% of the city’s overall population. But many younger Chinese-American families have been moving away from Chinatown to the outer boroughs or suburbs, leaving behind a life of cramped tenements. Instead, the neighborhood is seeing an influx of single-person households and white residents, the usual harbingers of gentrification. Almost three-quarters of Chinese New Yorkers are foreign born, i.e. first generation immigrants. In the last few decades, narratives of the Asian immigrant striver have taken hold in the media and popular imagination, and the myth of the model minority is obscuring much more diverse lived experiences and complex realities. Especially among older Chinese New Yorkers, many are struggling with being linguistically isolated from the English-speaking culture they are surrounded by, and poverty levels are significantly higher than among the rest of the city’s seniors (at 30.5 percent for people over age 65, vs. 18.2 percent of the general population.)
  • “My family had a restaurant on Mott Street, and it was a Steak and Chops House, not a Chinese restaurant. I was so young, I didn’t really appreciate what we had at that time. On Sundays we’d meet up with other Chinese families from the same village. And so the kids would play and the mothers would yack away and the dads would go off on their own.” Today’s Chinatown feels less like a village: “It’s grown so much, and the language has changed. The things that are lost are still in my memory. It’s nostalgia, I think, as I’ve gotten to a certain age, but maybe that’s me, too. I’ve always had a tendency to really enjoy the idea of looking back.” Fay Chew Matsuda (66) worked with the Chinatown History Project, later the Museum of the Chinese in America, and now serves the neighborhood’s senior population as program director at Hamilton-Madison House. “My husband and I, we’re actively talking about retirement, and so I take note of what successful aging might look like. Social engagement in any form is really the best way to keep yourself from aging in a negative way. It’s amazing to me: those who come out every day – they look good! They’re active. They’re not complaining about this illness or that illness, they are thinking about other things. You know, life goes on. I’m looking forward to actually not having to do the nine-to-five grind. As much as I enjoy my job.”
  • Columbus Park in the heart of historic Chinatown functions as an informal senior center not just for people living in the neighborhood, but those who have moved away and are stopping by to chat, play cards or Xiàngqí, Chinese chess. CPC's Chinatown Senior Citizens Center across Mulberry Street offers free meals and programs, but while the weather allows, the park will be buzzing with activity and the sounds of competing opera groups.Fay Chew Matsuda works with seniors at Hamilton-Madison House, another neighborhood program that serves many first generation Chinese immigrants who came to the U.S. as working adults and who have aged in place. Other elders might have arrived more recently through family reunification: “finally, because it took so long to actually ‘stand in line’ so to speak and get over here. Working families love to have their grandparents here so they can help take care of children. But it has created some problems, too, because what happens when those little grandchildren grow up? We’ve gotten to hear about situations where people feel like they were useful at a certain point, and then when the grandkids no longer needed them, feeling exploited. We’re finding that elder abuse is something that we have to be very aware of in the community as well, whether it’s financial, emotional, possibly physical, too. So I think there’ll always be a need for people to be able to find services in their own language, that they feel comfortable with, and where the meals are culturally appropriate.”
  • Nighttime view along Madison Street. Initially anchored around three blocks in downtown Manhattan, Chinatown expanded for years into parts of Little Italy and the Two Bridges/Lower East Side neighborhood. More recently, that trend has begun to reverse. Brian Tom, of the Chinatown Community Young Lions club: “I see Chinatown changing significantly now. It'll change even more in ten years. We probably won't recognize it – it'll be a row of restaurants, and made-over tenement buildings to look like condos and co-ops. You're not gonna have a lot of Chinese people living in Chinatown, because the Chinese people are not able to afford it, not the old-timers, for sure.”“It's a buyer's market. So you have these tenement owners that are saying, ‘you know what, if I patch a few holes in the walls, I paint over the apartment, instead of getting 400, 500, 800 dollars a month, now I can get 1,600, 2,200.’ It's the almighty dollar that wins at the end of the day. They're pushing out the old people, they're pushing out the people that have lived in Chinatown for years, they are pushing out people that have had apartments for generations, raised generations of children. You'll have that second, third generation, maybe, who wanna stay there. At those prices, you could live anywhere you want to live. I think kids coming up in the area now have a difficult enough time of identifying with their heritage, with their culture, and it'll get to a point where, I think there will always be a Chinese New Year's celebration, but it'll be worn down significantly.”
  • “The building’s new owner cut the gas line, but my grandson intervened and they reconnected it.” An immigrant from Toisan who came to the US in 1974, Kam Fung Mak raised six children, all of whom have moved out of Chinatown. At age 83, she has difficulty climbing the stairs to her rent-stabilized apartment but lives independently, relying on daily help from a home attendant. The 1910 tenement building at 43 Essex Street that she has called home for more than 30 years was sold last December, and neighbors soon began noticing unlicensed work in the vacant units and store front. By the time the tenants organized and took their landlord to court to stop harassment and illegal construction, they had lived with no heat, cooking gas or hot water for over a month. Thirty-one violations classified as ‘immediately hazardous’ were on file with the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.Attorney Donna Chiu of Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE) has seen a familiar pattern repeat itself in the quickly gentrifying neighborhood. New building owners will at first try to incentivize rent-regulated tenants to leave by promising relocation bonuses; if that doesn’t work, often next steps include coercing people out of their homes by illegal means and intimidation. There is a perception that Chinese immigrants who speak only limited English will be afraid to fight back or be less likely to defend themselves in Housing Court, but many tenants know to turn to community based organizations for help with legal matters.
  • NYC’s Chinatown in Lower Manhattan is intertwined with the nearby fabled immigrant enclaves of Little Italy and the Jewish Lower East Side, not only geographically but as part of our shared imagination of who we are as a city and a nation, a tapestry woven by the stories of earlier Americans who sought a new beginning in this country. We understand these neighborhoods as stepping stones to a better life: necessary to a newcomer’s survival in the New World, places where a shared language and regional or kinship networks allow new arrivals to find their bearings, left behind as families rise to middle class status. And in many regards, that trajectory is borne out by the experiences of successive generations, until the flow of migration changes, and the Lower East Side becomes Latino, Little Italy turns Chinese. And yet, the American Dream as shorthand for guaranteed upward mobility glosses over more complicated realities of first generation immigrants stuck in dead-end jobs, suffering wage theft and lack of basic labor protections. A cheap labor economy relies on their physical strength to remain employable, which might turn into downward mobility as people age and suffer from work-related injuries. Historian Peter Kwong likens the immigrant enclave to a “warm bath tub – comfortable to get into, but cold long before you want to get out.” In the end, what sustains that first generation is the hope that perseverance over hardship will pay off not for themselves, but that the next generation will be able to prosper.
  • “How is it to be bold when you get older? Only five years ago I was feeling very old. I'm 63 today. I thought, with all these young people, two generations now in front of me, maybe there is no place for me. It's a different time period, and what Chinese Americans want to see is different. I wasn't sure if what I am doing has any relevancy.”Margaret Yuen found her voice in dance as a child of immigrant parents who struggled to express herself in the English language. Her Red Silk Dancers company is firmly rooted in the folk and classical Chinese traditions, but her latest series features contemporary works: “I want to express about the role of women, traditionally. Women in the past had no voice. My mother was in an arranged marriage. In one generation, the contrast, it's huge! When I was younger, all the stories, the Chinese legends, don’t have a real nice woman model. Until Mulan. Finally! She’s not depending on a man, wait for a prince to come by, to rescue her or to have a life”“I decided that at this age you have to think back to where you were when you were in your twenties. I was 25 years old when I got this space. People looked at me like, ‘You're nuts.’ This space was not livable. I mean, there was no heat, half the windows were cracked, the mouse situation was so bad. I didn't have a lease.... But then, I wasn't crazy, I was just bold. I didn't know better. So now I'm going back to being bold. And that's so satisfying!{quote}
  • We’re back on Pell Street, one of NYC Chinatown’s historic streets. This week we took a look at the changing Lower Manhattan neighborhood and some of the people who call it home – New Yorkers who stick up for their community in their very own ways and by utilizing their unique strengths and talents. About half the people featured in this series are American-born Chinese, with the other half coming to the city as children or young adults. Some are alumni of the initial Asian American movement. Many found their calling early; others embarked on a second career chapter later in life, or began serving their community in their retirement years. They somehow manage to run a volunteer program after hours, or have built businesses that became gathering points and neighborhood beacons. A few made their careers in community service, whether as police officers, social workers or youth counselors. It’s an eclectic mix: each participant recommended the next person. We kept it super grass roots by staying clear of elected representatives or people at the helm of established neighborhood institutions. A few people featured here are too advanced in age to be baby boomers, but everyone is over 50. And of course, this list in all its idiosyncrasies could never be complete, as there are a myriad ways to stand up for one’s community or be a good neighbor. Time will tell how Chinatown will fare in the years to come, and how the next generation will make it their own, but for now: thanks for stopping by!
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