The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York

by Joseph Berger

  Sunset Park was a neighborhood I had never visited, though reading some census studies told me it was among the city's most polyglot, with 49.2 percent of its 120,464 residents born abroad, 19,451 of those in China. So with an explorer's relish I took the subway there and walked around streets that I soon discovered were fragrant with the smells and flavors of Latino products on the west and Chinese products on the east. In that eastern half, among the pastry shops, fruit stores, and fish shops along Eighth Avenue, I found Maggie Leung's cluttered and narrow uniform shop. It is practically a directory to the kinds of jobs the neighborhood's residents hold. A refugee from Chinatown, she sells burgundy vests for waiters, smocks with orange piping for beauticians, pink aprons for manicurists, blue tunics for supermarket cashiers, and heavy cotton coats for meat handlers and noodle factory workers. Those heavy cotton coats are even suitable for the neighborhood's growing cadre of doctors. And Leung, who has known for a long time that Chinese garment sweatshops have been closing and that laid-off women need uniforms for such next-rung jobs as home health aides, sells white dresses for nurses' aides as well. “The customers teach you what you should carry,” Leung, a slim, dark-haired woman of forty-eight, told me, smiling at the cleverness of the thought. “They ask for it and you know you can sell it.”

  Leung, a native of Hong Kong, got into this odd business by canny calculation. She was selling handmade tea bags in her father-in-law's kitchenware shop in Chinatown and noticed how many restaurant owners were asking whether the shop sold chef's aprons and white shirts for kitchen workers. “They didn't have in the store,” she said. “So, I think, I should make it!”

  The business did so well that she decided to start her own shop near her home in Sunset Park. Fortune Restaurant Uniform and Supplies Inc., on Eighth Avenue at Fifty-second Street, is a shining example of immigrant resourcefulness, the kind that spots an unfilled niche created by the influx of fellow newcomers and makes profitable hay. So well known has Leung become that she now gets orders from as far away as Nebraska and Wyoming, often from Sunset Park residents seeking their fortunes in the hinterland. “No matter where, there's always a Chinese restaurant,” she said, her eyes glinting merrily.

  The business, which includes a small factory in the nearby Fort Hamilton neighborhood, is a family affair. Leung's sister Jenny sews and embroiders; another sister, Margaret, cuts fabric; a third sister, Connie, takes care of bookkeeping; and a fourth, Shirley, helps with packing. Leung's son, Lenny, twenty-five, a student at New York City College of Technology, arranges shipping on a computer, and her daughter, Angela, twenty-four, a student at Brooklyn College, has put customers' contact information in a database. Leung's eighty-seven-year-old father, Yukyuen Lam, occasionally drops by for a few hours to wrap finished uniforms in plastic. “Even if we don't make a lot of money, I enjoy it so much because the family works together,” Leung said.

  By contrast, Zhong mends shoes on his own. He is a poised, slender man with once-delicate fingers blackened by his work. He is diligent and rigorous, not the shiftless kind of person who often ends up in such seat-of-the-pants work and that the pushcart-era peddlers of the Lower East Side might have called a luftmensch—literally a person who lives off air. He was sixty-six years old when I spoke with him, yet he worked seven days a week from nine or so in the morning until seven at night.

  Zhong had spent most of his working life as a farmer in a village near Canton. His wife, Zu Zhoa Ho, had relatives who had immigrated to the United States, and, pining for them, she eventually joined them here. In March 1997 Zhong came here to live with his wife and took a first job of pressing clothes in a sweatshop. One day he noticed a very old man fixing shoes on the sidewalk near the corner of Bayard and Mulberry streets, just across from the neighborhood's merciful patch of green called Columbus Park. The spot is alongside a 112-year-old building built as a public school that today houses cultural and social groups whose officials do not seem to mind the peddlers on their doorstep. (By contrast, the neighborhood's storeowners often charge peddlers on their doorstep for sidewalk space—a presumably illegal rent for an illegal tenant.) He asked the old man, Chou Szeto, whether he needed help, and after a few such entreaties, Chou took him on as an apprentice. A year later, Chou turned the business over to Zhong, though when I last saw Chou he was eighty-six years old and still dropping by to give his student postgraduate pointers.

  The Hans Christian Andersen of Chinatown carries his entire enterprise in a two-foot-long wooden box bound to a portable luggage caddy. Every night he drops off the box, decorated with sketches of a panda and a goose that he drew himself, at a relative's on Elizabeth Street before taking the subway home. As he mends shoes, some customers sit on a second makeshift stool and wait while others just drop their shoes off. His clients are not just local Chinese, but whites and blacks who work in the nearby courts and jails. On one of my visits his customers included the chauffeur of a passing limousine and a smartly dressed professional woman. Zhong, speaking with me in Cantonese through Keith Chong, a guide from the Museum of Chinese in the Americas, told me how he patched forty to fifty pairs of shoes a day, charging, for example, $2 to replace a small heel on a woman's pump and $15 for a leather heel and sole on a man's shoe. He said he averaged $180 a day in income, all of which he keeps.

  “Basically, there's no cost of doing business,” he said.

  Zhong told me his wife worked five days a week as a dishwasher a three-hour-drive away in the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut. She sleeps over there during the week and he stays in touch with her with a silver cell phone holstered to his belt. He spends the few hours at home alone reading a Chinese newspaper or watching television, absorbed by the filmed clips on news shows even though he does not know English. But mostly, he said, he gets pleasure just fixing shoes seven days a week. “I'm old,” he said. “I can't do anything else. But I can fix shoes.”

  It is one of the harsh prices of immigration that the couple are separated by great distances from their three grown children, all of whom live around Taishan, China, and can afford to stay in their homeland. Their son, Zhong Siao Pang, is a taxi driver; another son, Zhong Zhung Yi, is a fishmonger; and a daughter, Zhong Siao Nei, is married to a harbor official. The Zhongs take one trip a year home, usually during the Chinese New Year or at a Chinese memorial day in the spring. Zhong told me that he doesn't want to return to China to live with his children because he couldn't get as good a job there. By the standards of life in China, he feels flush here. “I'm not really prosperous,” he said, “but a two-bedroom apartment is prosperous.” When he is too old to work, he said, he may return to China for good.

  When I first met Zhong, his business location had one crucial feature to recommend it. It was covered by scaffolding, and had been for the past ten years, because the old school building has been undergoing exterior repairs. The scaffolding acted as an umbrella in winter and a shade tree in summer, and provided one less reason for Zhong to actually buy his shop. When I returned to visit Zhong in the summer of 2005, the scaffolding was gone. The city had finally pointed the cracked masonry and sandblasted the building, leaving a stately redbrick castle for all to see. The museum was happy that tourists and passersby would no longer neglect it, thinking its home was under construction, but Zhong was not pleased by the loss of his roof. Still, he did not spend his time grousing. He bought a beach umbrella for $18 to shade him against the summer sun and augmented that with a black rain umbrella that he strapped to a banister of the stoop. For a finishing flourish, he planted a white straw sombrero on his head, looking quite the dude. He did not think wintery weather would deter him, except for the most brutal snowstorms and downpours. A propane-fired heater helps ward off the chill of the coldest days.

  “If it's a heavy snowstorm or rain, the customers won't come anyway,” he told me, smiling.

  Like most peddlers, Zhong does not have the required $200-a-year city license, but he does not seem to have incurred the wrath of the cobbler at Get Sun Shoes
on Elizabeth Street, a man in his mid-fifties named Ma Wenwei, who owns a legitimate shop equipped with antiquated sewing and polishing machines and who pays $2,000 a month in rent as well as taxes. “It doesn't affect business,” Ma, who came here twenty years ago from Canton, told me genially. “We're using a machine and they're using hands, so it's not as good.”

  But Zhong said he thought it was the machines that were not as good, and he does not charge as much as Get Sun's $28 for replacing a leather sole and heel. Of course, the shoes in the Elizabeth Street shop await their owners neatly arrayed in designated cubbyholes. But Zhong, whose customers' shoes are kept in plastic bags or scattered on the sidewalk, does not think he has to be that organized.

  “If it's not your own shoes, you won't take it,” he said.

  CHINATOWN

  WHERE TO GO

  Columbus Park (CHINESE CHESS, TAI CHI, AND A FLOWER MARKET) MULBERRY AND BAYARD STREETS

  Mahayana Buddhist Temple (SIXTEEN-FOOT BUDDHA) 133 CANAL STREET AND MANHATTAN BRIDGE PLAZA

  Museum of Chinese in the Americas (ARTIFACTS OF CHINESE AMERICAN LIFE AND HISTORY) 70 MULBERRY STREET; (212) 619-4785; www.moca-nyc.org

  WHERE TO EAT

  Chinatown Ice Cream Factory (GREEN TEA, AVOCADO, BLACK SESAME) 65 BAYARD STREET; (212) 608-4170

  Mei Lai Wah Coffee House (TRY THE EGG CUSTARDS AND STEAMED RICE BEEF NOODLE) 64 BAYARD STREET; (212) 925-5435

  Moon House (UNASSUMING BUT DELICIOUS RESTAURANT) 67 BAYARD STREET; (212) 766-9399

  Chapter 5

  Signs of the Times in Douglaston–Little Neck

  WITH ITS BOUILLABAISSE OF NATIONALITIES AND ETHNICITIES AND its 8 million ambitious, sometimes clawing personalities squeezed into a rather cramped 309-square-mile patch, New York is a city in perpetual conflict. The big surprise is that there isn't more open warfare. So whenever someone waxes lyrical about how well such a Babel of peoples gets along, raise an eyebrow or two, because there are more than a few exceptions.

  Take the prosperous, overwhelmingly white neighborhoods of Doug-laston and Little Neck in eastern Queens. The number of Asians living there has more than doubled in fifteen years as the city's Korean and Chinese immigrants become doctors, bankers, hospital administrators, and entrepreneurs and leave their original beachheads in Chinatown or Flushing. A visitor to these parts can hear many tales of how the American mill of assimilation is working its special grace. I discovered a champion ballroom dancer from Seoul who is giving tango and rumba lessons to the neighborhood's longtime white residents. I found a Fujianese immigrant who opened a kosher Chinese vegetarian restaurant, availing himself of the help of Jewish neighbors in getting a rabbinical certificate. I learned that on Sunday afternoons, the area's leading Episcopal church rents its sanctuary to a small Korean congregation. I learned of a nine-year-old Chinese violinist, Aaron Huang, who has performed at the White House and in front of the pope and is being taught by Anna Heifetz, a distant relative of Jascha, who was himself an immigrant. Yes, I thought at one point, inhaling these delicious whiffs, America's melting pot is bubbling briskly.

  But it would have been wrong to conclude that there weren't any substantial lumps in that bubbling gruel. This area of graceful old homes on a serene bay of Long Island Sound scalloped by golden marshes is being rattled over something unimaginably mundane, the kind of small but viscerally crucial matters that make up the web of daily survival in New York. Many of the established white residents told me they no longer feel welcome in most of the stores along Northern Boulevard, the boulevard they have strolled along and shopped on for generations. The stores there were once owned by people like them—Irish, Italian, German, and Jewish merchants. But those merchants flourished so well that they sent their children off to colleges and graduate schools, where they were launched toward careers as professionals, not shopkeepers. The aging merchants had to sell their shops to the highest bidders, and these turned out to be the latest flock of newcomers with a knack for mercantile trade—Koreans, who now own most of the shops along this stretch of Northern Boulevard.

  What chafes at the old-timers is that the Korean storeowners are not beholden to the venerable rules of retailing, particularly now that an increasing number of the new buyers of those graceful houses on Long Island Sound are also Korean professionals and businesspeople. The signs the Korean merchants have been putting up above their stores are in large Korean ideograms that non-Koreans do not understand—in many cases with no hint in English of what is being sold. Walk down several blocks of Northern Boulevard between Douglaston Parkway and the eastern boundary that divides Queens from Long Island's Nassau County and you'll think you're in the city's newest Koreatown, not along the spine of what into the 1950s used to be an exclusive WASP enclave on the northern side and a Jewish-Italian-Irish preserve on the southern. Take a typical example, the Little Neck Janchi Maeu, a grocery store on the corner of Glenwood Street, right near the Nassau County line. Its signs have lots of blue, red, green, and orange lettering in Korean, but except for a single line with the store's name in English, there is nothing to inform an English-speaking passerby what it sells, which should not be surprising since its stock—products such as cabbage kimchi, eel, sea mustard soup—is aimed at Korean tastes.

  “The perception is that these businesses are serving their own people,” Paula Gerber told me as we sat schmoozing in a real estate office on Northern Boulevard. “They're not realizing that when you're on the street you're supposed to be serving everyone.” She is the office manager of an agency that employs four Korean agents, but she shows the changed neighborhood to a broad spectrum of home buyers.

  Sol Winder, who for forty-five years has owned Scobee Grill, a diner popular with residents of both Little Neck as well as ritzier Great Neck, was even more blunt in letting me know how older neighborhood residents felt toward the Korean newcomers. “They feel they're taking over the area,” he told me.

  It is a not uncommon irony that Winder is an immigrant himself, for some of the most ardent complaints often come from immigrants who feel they worked their way up by sticking to the old rules and wonder why the newcomers shouldn't do the same. His aggravation demonstrates a hard and paradoxical truth about American assimilation: An immigrant past gives one no special sympathy for a newcomer's blunderings. Born in Lvov, Winder came here as a teenager in 1948 after an odyssey that entailed fleeing the Nazis for frigid Siberia and spending two years in the displaced persons camps in Germany. He graduated from a technical college, opened a coffee shop, and was thirty in the 1960s when his father-in-law helped him and two partners start Scobee Grill, which was named after a rough approximation of his father-in-law's Polish hometown. Even though his encyclopedic menu includes matzo ball soup and gefilte fish, he wanted to build an American diner, and the cuisine is standard diner fare of hamburgers and eggs over easy. He can chronicle what happened to Little Neck and Douglaston better than a sociologist. “Forty-five years ago, they were young people raising families,” he said. “Now they raised their families; their children married and moved away. The children aren't looking in Little Neck. They're looking in Westchester and on the Island. The older folks are going to Florida or dying out.”

  The new Koreans in the neighborhood stop in at his diner on weekends. Some even enjoy the matzo ball soup. “They're hardworking people—you have to give them that,” he said. But he knows the neighborhood he has worked in and been an iconic part of for forty-five years will never again be what it was.

  Underneath much of the ferment about the signs is a feeling that Koreans are somehow defying the bedrock American imperative to blend in. The United States, as a nation built by immigrants beginning with the Mayflower Pilgrims and Jamestown settlers, has prided itself on displaying a more welcoming outlook toward foreigners than the rest of the world. But there has also been an unspoken bargain—that the newcomers adopt the ways of the country whether they want to or not. “We welcome everybody,” Markian Duma, chair of a local civic group, the Little Neck Pines A
ssociation, told me. “This neighborhood is made up of a lot of ethnic groups. I happen to be Ukrainian. There are some Irish, some Italian in our group. We already have an ethnic mix. All we would like people to do is don't stand out. We try not to tell anyone to blend in, but we're one country.”

  While many of the dynamics are true of the cosmopolitan city as a whole, neighborhoods such as these in Little Neck and Douglaston are especially worth watching because they are laboratories for the second stage in the cycle of absorption set off by the immigration law of 1965. Asian and Latino strivers started out in crowded tenement ghettos working dawn-to-midnight jobs in restaurants and garment factories. Their first move up was to the more decorous apartment houses of neighborhoods such as Flushing. They are now doing well enough to penetrate the city's leafiest—and whitest—precincts.

  Little Neck and Douglaston, on the eastern edge of Queens, are right across a small cove from Long Island's Great Neck, the model for F. Scott Fitzgerald's nouveau riche West Egg in The Great Gatsby. Douglaston could have served as either Egg because it too is rich—nouveau and old money. It is a peninsula where some houses can cost $4 million. The wealthiest section, Douglas Manor, is an enclave of 600 homes set among winding, hilly roads, including Queen Annes, colonials, Mediterraneans, Tudors, and arts and crafts creations by the cherished nineteenth-century designer Gustav Stickley. There is even a 600-year-old white oak on Ar-leigh Road that is among the city's oldest trees.