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

by Joseph Berger

  The area was Dutch farmland until the early half of the nineteenth century, when William Douglas carved out an estate crowned by a Greek Revival mansion that now houses the Douglaston Club. After the civil war, New Yorkers began transforming Queens from such large estates into almost suburban expanses of single-family houses stretching along a lengthening railroad that allowed them to travel quickly into Manhattan. By 1866, the railroad's tentacles extended from Flushing to Great Neck and the Douglas family donated a farm building to serve as a railroad depot, asking only that the station and the growing village around it be called Douglaston. By the first decade of the twentieth century, their estate was chopped up into what today would be called a development tract, luxurious as it is. Douglas Manor, designated as a city historic district, has such touches of elegance as its own cooperatively owned marina and playing fields right on the shore. That's why residents over the years have included Ginger Rogers, columnist Hedda Hopper, and pianist Claudio Arrau. As late as the 1950s it was a white Protestant bastion where Jews, Asians, and blacks were largely prevented from buying.

  Little Neck, which straddles the Long Island Expressway, is more plebeian. Houses, sometimes attached, range in value from $300,000 to $850,000, and are arrayed on forty-foot-wide lots. There are plenty of parks, particularly the glorious forty-two-acre wetland of reeds and marsh grasses called Udalls Cove Park. In short, it too is an attractive spot where residents appreciate the trappings of suburban tidiness—and real-estate taxes half of those in next-door Nassau County.

  Asians have been drawn to Douglaston and Little Neck by these features but also, in stereotypical fashion, by schools that are ranked as the city's best. The neighborhood is in the heart of what used to be called District 26, where in the days of an otherwise lamentable decentralized system of thirty-two districts, more than 90 percent of students met the city's reading and math standards and 87 percent of teachers had a master's or higher degree. While all immigrants value schools, no groups seem to have put faith in their catapulting powers more than the Chinese, Koreans, and Indians, so District 26 is an irresistible magnet.

  In 1990, just 11.6 percent of the two neighborhoods' 23,000 residents were Asian. By 2000, that had doubled to 23 percent. The U.S. Census counted 2,656 Koreans and 2,115 Chinese, but by 2006 no one doubted that there were many, many more. Even the population of once-exclusive Douglas Manor had become 10 percent Asian, according to Bernard Haber, a former president of the community board. Haber, long the neighborhood's civic sparkplug and a civil engineer who helped build the Throgs Neck Bridge and the Cross Bronx Expressway, drove me around to show me the neighborhood's increasing Asian cast, and informed me about one Asian source—wealthy exiles from Hong Kong who left the British colony before 1997 as it was about to be taken over by the Communist Chinese.

  Yet, amid this breathtaking evidence of America's openness, there was also the uncomfortable brouhaha over the Korean signs. Along Northern Boulevard, the few Korean merchants I could find who spoke English made sure to tell me that Korean signs are not intended to offend anyone but reflect the reality that the customers are almost exclusively Korean. Young Kim, the owner of Ladykin Salon, a beauty parlor, told me in halting English that she tried to attract non-Koreans but ultimately her poor English requires American customers to show her magazine pictures of the hairstyles they want. “Our problem is English,” she said.

  Other shopkeepers said they would gladly put up English signs, but with each billboard or neon fixture costing an additional $500 or more, they would rather avoid the expense if what they sell is aimed mostly at Koreans.

  I spoke to several Asian scholars to try to understand what was going on. Dr. Pyong Gap Min, a professor of sociology at Queens College and a Korean immigrant, believes that Koreans can more easily avoid mingling with Americans and marinating in American life because they “are too strongly tied to their ethnic network.” Among Koreans, Christian churches are the center of Korean life as they are not among the Chinese, with 550 Korean churches in the New York area to choose from. Three out of every four Koreans go to church every week, and many attend twice a week. “So it's very difficult to get involved in American organizations,” Dr. Min said.

  Another barrier is the unifying Korean language. Chinese are fragmented by a wealth of incompatible dialects including Mandarin, Cantonese, and Fujianese. But Koreans speak the same congenial tongue—one whose grammar, pronunciation, and word order are even more different from English than are those of Chinese. Koreans are also better educated than average Chinese immigrants and, Min suggested, more comfortable in their own skins. Dr. Thomas Tam, director of an Asian research institute at Queens College, added another factor: Koreans sense the narrow-mindedness and suspicion that more established Americans feel toward them. In response, he said, “there are people who try to assimilate as much as possible but some who try to be even more isolated.”

  By contrast, Chinese immigrants have been more willing to wade into the American mainstream. In addition to language, Chinese are separated from one another by geographical and political origins; they hail from either Taiwan, or Communist China, or Hong Kong and are influenced by the bitter legacies of those divisions. The forces compelling them to meld with other Chinese are thus weaker and more splintered than they are for Koreans. Moreover, the Chinese are a more established immigrant group, and many Chinese who do well enough to make it to such places as Douglaston and Little Neck are already second- or third-generation Americans. One descendant of Chinese immigrants, Sandra K. Lee, an insurance broker in Great Neck whose grandparents emigrated from China to Chinatown, told me that Chinese Americans tended to be more eager to fit in, sometimes to a deferential and obsequious extent, whereas Koreans, as a cultural group, are “more assertive and outspoken.”

  Oddly enough, it was four Chinese American students driving in a Lexus along Douglaston Parkway who were the victims in the summer of 2006 of one of those special New York brews of youth, resentment, and racism, ending in the kind of beating that, as long as anyone can remember, had never occurred in this part of Queens. Two blue-collar white men, one a twenty-year-old resident of Little Neck, were quickly arrested for viciously punching and kicking two of the students, one of whom was hit with a Club steering wheel lock. They were heard using slurs against the Asian students in a beating reminiscent of attacks against blacks in Bensonhurst and Howard Beach.

  Whatever the specific reasons, conflict of the sort between the Koreans and the longer-rooted descendants of white European immigrants crops up not only in New York but even more heatedly in parts of the United States where the experience of assimilation is not built into the genome. Authorities in Fremont, California, in the seemingly enlightened San Francisco Bay area, tried to get Sikh teenagers to stop wearing little ceremonial swords around their necks; they compromised by requiring only that the swords be blunted and wired to their scabbards. In 2003 I visited the faded mill city of Lewiston in Maine, a state where 97 percent of the inhabitants are white. The small city of 36,000 had an unexpected immigration crisis, and some leaders at Bates College, the major institution there, thought my book Displaced Persons, which tells how Holocaust survivors like my family adapted to America, might offer lessons to help the city cope.

  What was the problem? More than a thousand Somalis from Africa had suddenly moved in over two years, finding their way up north from Atlanta, where they had been settled as political refugees by federal immigration authorities. Lewiston's fraying downtown was sprouting Somali women in colorful head scarves, but hardened Lewistonians did not seem to appreciate this exotic touch in their midst. Moreover, jobless Somalis were straining welfare services and schools.

  Lewiston's mayor at the time composed what was at best an insensitive letter to the Somali community, pleading with them to ask compatriots in Atlanta to stop coming. “Please pass the word,” he wrote. “We have been overwhelmed and have responded valiantly. Now we need breathing room. Our city is maxed-out financially, phys
ically, and emotionally.” Jim Spencer, a former 7-Eleven employee and petition-circulator interviewed by my colleague New York Times correspondent Pam Belluck, sounded like some Little Neck residents when he warned that the Somalis think “they're basically going to take over our city.” Somali elders called the mayor's letter bigotry, and they pointed out that Somalis were patronizing struggling stores and occupying apartments that would otherwise be vacant.

  Even the distress triggered by foreign-language signs is not peculiar to Little Neck. Palisades Park, New Jersey, responded to the signs posted by its Asian shopkeepers with a law insisting that half the space of any sign displaying words in a foreign language be in English.

  In Douglaston and Little Neck, there are non-Korean shopkeepers who think the Koreans are largely misunderstood. Jacques Amar, who runs a small French café on the boulevard, stocks four brands of Korean vodka because many customers are Korean. “They're hardworking people; they're ambitious,” he told me.

  Quite contrary to what people may think, they like life. They are not as dull as people perceive them. They're charming. If you remember, in New York every new group comes to this country and puts signs up in their language. That's because they identify their business to their own people. If a Korean did not see Korean writing, he doesn't know that the store is Korean. And maybe he's looking for a Korean place. It gives him a certain comfort to go in. Like any group, they want to be with their own people. They have no animosity toward Americans. If you love them, they will love you. If you don't love them, they won't love you, which is absolutely natural. They do have a hard time trying to mix, so it will take a long time and effort from both sides.

  But Amar is relatively new to the boulevard. For the old-time merchants and residents, who cling wistfully to sepia-tinged pictures of the neighborhood, Northern Boulevard's transformation has been especially upsetting. Frank Mockler, seventy-five when we spoke in 2003, owned Patrick's Pub, a restaurant that specialized in corned beef and shepherd's pie, and the Claddagh Shop next door, which carried Aran sweaters, Donegal shawls, Dublin kilts, lace, crystal, and other Irish imports. In the mid-1960s, when he started out, half the neighborhood was, as he put it, “Irish and English,” mottled with police officers and firefighters. In Douglaston, the residents included an Irish Catholic former air force officer, John McEnroe, who was single-mindedly preparing his hot-tempered son, John Jr., to be a tennis champion.

  In his salad days, Mockler used to sell 5,000 Irish coffees a week and 1,400 pounds of corned beef on St. Patrick's Day. But the Irish moved on to fancier suburbs—his own daughter lives in Huntington, Long Island. When I interviewed him, he was selling fewer than 1,000 Irish coffees a week. “You don't get the local people,” he said. “The people coming into the neighborhood are not assimilating into the society.” He allowed that eventually the Koreans would adapt and learn American ways. Maybe they would even patronize his pub. But he ran out of time. Two years after we spoke, the pub closed, and not too long after so did the Claddagh Shop.

  Paradoxically, the neighborhood's whites have been more than willing to sell their homes to middle-class Koreans and other Asians and have not scorned them as neighbors. Indeed, whatever misgivings the longtime residents feel seem to crystallize around the picayune everyday issues of getting along, which may barely smolder but can emit lots of smoke. Parking, for example, is another source of neighborhood tension. Korean churches have been popping up all over the neighborhood, and their strikingly fervent members fill the pews on Sunday, gobbling up parking spaces and making it difficult for families who live near a church to invite friends over for, say, a barbecue. When I visited the neighborhood, Eun Hae Presbyterian, a congregation that had worshiped in Flushing for fourteen years but had outgrown its sanctuary, was trying to build its new home in Little Neck. It had plans for a sanctuary that could hold 494 worshipers. What disturbed neighbors-to-be was that the church fathers had designed an adjoining parking lot with just thirty-two spaces. Michael W. Song, the church's lawyer, played down the everyday impact on parking, arguing that the church was filled mostly on Sundays and was not “the hub of the immigrant population.” Still, he said, to appease its neighbors, the church was trying to negotiate a lease for an additional fifty spaces at a nearby mall.

  Despite these conflicts, there are many wisps of congeniality between old-timers and newcomers. White Protestants have been a shrinking presence in northern Queens (even the once-exclusive Douglaston Club now counts Jewish and Asian members), and that explains why mainline Protestant churches rent space to Korean Protestants or sometimes change over entirely. Douglaston's Zion Episcopal Church rents its sanctuary on Sunday afternoons to a Korean Presbyterian congregation of perhaps forty families, the Great Commission Church, for $12,000 to $14,000 a year. A footnote at the bottom of Zion's signboards alerts passersby that a Korean congregation is “also worshiping here.” The Reverend Patrick J. Holtkamp, Zion's rector, told me that the church rejected the Korean group's request for a separate sign in Korean. Zion wanted to project the image of a congregation on the rise, as it stubbornly is, rather than one that is biding its time before selling out to its Korean tenants. Indeed, Zion's congregation has doubled in twelve years to 200 families, largely as the result of programs that appeal to young Episcopal families. It has tried a number of approaches to embrace its Korean tenants, even holding several joint services. But in our chat Father Holtkamp admitted that such overtures were inadequate in overcoming the language barrier and had produced little social interaction.

  A more charming illustration of ethnic bridging was Yihung Li's restaurant on Northern Boulevard. Li, who is known by all as Charlie, immigrated from China's Fujian Province in 1978 and opened a Chinese restaurant in the Ridgewood neighborhood along the Queens-Brooklyn border, and by the late 1990s he and his wife and three children had done well enough to buy a house in Little Neck. They were attracted by the neighborhood's safety and tidiness, and by such schools as PS 221, where 100 percent of the students meet the math standards and where their youngest son Peter would go. (A daughter, Mei, was in medical school; another son, Shing, at Cornell.) Li found that his neighbors, many of whom turned out to be Jewish, were quite cordial, if not quite intimate. “Our block is very friendly,” he told me. “If my alarm goes off, they call me, which is nice. We help each other.” In 2001, at the age of forty-three, he decided to open a Chinese restaurant nearer his home. As a Buddhist worried about high cholesterol, he decided to make it vegetarian and called it Zen Pavilion. He also had a brainstorm. Northeastern Queens still has many Jewish residents, and he figured that making his restaurant kosher would lure many of them from rival Chinese restaurants. ( Jews historically have had a particular affinity to Chinese food, not only because dishes such as wonton soup have their Jewish counterparts—chicken soup and meat-filled dumplings known in Yiddish as kreplach—but because in their immigrant days a Chinese restaurant was one place they might be treated with respect, Cynthia Lee at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas told me.) So when he needed the information, it was Charlie Li's Jewish neighbors who told him where he could find kosher suppliers and a rabbi willing to certify a restaurant that stays open on the Sabbath. Now his Jewish neighbors enjoy his meatless Sesame Veggie Chicken, Moo Shu Fantasia, and Chunked Veggie Lamb Stewed in Casserole. So immersed is he in the American ethnic blender that in the summer of 2002 the restaurant played host to a Jewish naming party for a Chinese baby girl adopted by two gay men.

  Despite such shimmering stories, the American Mixmaster goes only so far. Most of Li's friends are Chinese, immigrants like him who may live in Flushing and Chinatown. His American friendships are still rather superficial, extending no farther than the occasional chat. “We get together, talk to each other; it does not really go deeper,” Li acknowledged. But he is not downhearted about this state of things. “If you help each other when you need it, that is good enough,” he said.

  In 2002, Sehyoung Jang, a Korean, opened a dance hall, Tri-State Hal
l, in what had been a Northern Boulevard furniture store, to teach neighborhood residents everything from the fox-trot to the tango to salsa. He and his dance partner, Evelyn Basak, are a striking tale of assimilation all by themselves. She is a fetching young Polish immigrant who met Jang in a Manhattan dance school and became Jang's partner and fiancée. Jang, twenty-eight years old when we spoke, is a tall, slender man who grew up in Seoul. As a young man, he was taken under the wings of a Puerto Rican ballroom dancer and her Chinese dancer husband. They legally adopted him and helped shape him into the dancer he is. When I visited, I was treated to Jang and Basak gliding across the hall's hardwood floor, embracing in a steamy clutch, jaggedly breaking off, pirouetting like a top, then showing off their individual flourishes. This pair often enters top-flight amateur competitions where the entry fees are more than $1,000 and the costumes cost $3,000—and sometimes take top titles. They could probably make a full-time career out of competition, but Jang devotes much of his energies toward the dance hall. They teach the gracious forms of ballroom to the old-timers' children and Korean children and on Sunday morning organize a dance club for Koreans and longer-rooted Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. “I want to put Korean and American people together,” Jang told me. “If they can dance together and hold hands there will be more relationships. When you dance you don't care about country or culture.”

  Many neighborhood residents think it's a matter of time and conditioning before Koreans are woven into the area's fabric just as Jews, Irish, and Italians were decades ago. “We're simply not used to dealing with a wave of immigrants because it hasn't happened in our lifetime in this area,” Eliott Socci, a retired software consultant who is president of the Douglaston Civic Association, told me.

  And Sam Furgang, owner of a cluttered antiques shop on Northern Boulevard, predicted that even the tempest over the signs, which at bottom he said was silly, would pass as future generations adapt and blend in, just as his Yiddish-speaking parents did. “My father came here and settled on the Lower East Side,” Furgang said. “I see pictures of that time and the signs were all in Yiddish. But the Jews got out of there. So go find me a Yiddish sign there now.”