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

by Joseph Berger

  Filipinos socialize heavily through church. Unlike other Asians, Filipinos hail from a country that is 85 percent Roman Catholic, the religion of their Spanish colonizers. In Norwood, St. Ann's on Bain-bridge Avenue holds a service with Filipino liturgical flourishes on the first Sunday of the month. The choir is made up mostly of Filipino nurses. In heavily Filipino churches across the city, Filipinos take part in novenas—nine-day cycles of prayer devoted to Mary or other saints in the days preceding holidays—and they stage processions between churches. “Religion is still one unifying component,” Bert Pelayo, publisher of the Filipino Reporter, told me.

  Yet for these Filipinos beguiled by the American siren song, the price can be excruciating. When she came here in 1967 as one of the first Filipino nurses at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Washington Heights, Clemencia Wong left behind her parents, four brothers, and a sister in Quezon City. Egasan found herself so busy working nights that in 2003 she decided to send her daughters, Jewel, twelve, and Jamila, six, back to the Philippines to be cared for by her mother. She keeps in touch with them with phone cards and finds her longing for them only partly relieved by the news of how well they are doing at the schools she can now afford. “That's your consolation,” Egasan told me.

  A good part of their earnings, the nurses say, pays for regular trips back to their homeland and for gifts for kinfolk. “Every time we go home, it's Christmas for them,” Wong said. Still, the distance from family is a permanent ache and explains why Filipinos depend on compatriots, whom they call kababayans (fellow Filipinos). “There's a Filipino custom that everyone becomes your uncle and aunt,” said Leonora A. G. Dubouzet, a Montefiore nursing administrator. “For those of us who don't have relatives, the friends become our next of kin. The kids will call a friend of their parents Tita—aunt—or Tito—uncle—as if they were blood relatives.” And Wong added that “those who managed to have parents come here, those parents become the grandparents of all.”

  Wong and other nurses like her have remained close to the nurses they first got to know as greenhorns. “We were all single together, and we've had christenings, and now we're up to the weddings of our children,” Wong said. Indeed, the network of nurses is so tight-knit that many find their spouses among the relatives of other nurses. Egasan, known as Dottie, came here in 1989 and met her husband through his sister, a nurse at St. Barnabas.

  Sometimes the nurses' world seems a little too insular. Their spouses, the nurses say, complain that whenever Filipinos get together the conversation turns to shop talk: disagreeable patients, excessive paperwork, stressful workloads. One way they avoid the topic is by an evening of karaoke. Every Filipino home seems to have a microphone that allows friends to impersonate Sinatra and Elvis. It is another Filipino passion.

  The nurses pride themselves on not spending their time exclusively with other Filipinos. “If you come to a Filipino gathering, they are so diverse,” Dubouzet said. “I'm married to a Puerto Rican. Clemencia is married to a Chinese man.” Blending easily into other cultures, said Dubouzet, means sometimes “we don't know who we are.”

  Some erosion of cultural tics is intentional, an adjustment to American medicine. Compas has had to train Filipino nurses not to politely nod yes when they mean no or can't understand a request. Like people from many cultures in Asia and Africa, Filipinos are embarrassed to refuse. She has also had to caution Filipinos not to get insulted when American nurses summon them with a come-hither finger gesture. “Back home, using your finger to [say] come here is like calling a dog, so a person will resent that,” Compas said.

  But nurses do worry that assimilation and homogenization are re-shaping their lives. They are particularly concerned about who their American-bred children will become. Filipino youngsters, easily making friends in polyglot communities, are shedding Tagalog, the leading Filipino language, and picking up distinctly urban slants on life such as dressing in hip-hop clothing. The Filipino Express community newspaper reported in December 2005 on a conference of seventy mostly elderly Filipinas who met to talk about the displacement they feel in a country where kinship is not as valued as it is in their homeland. One retired nurse, Virginia B. Bersamin, who is on the teaching staff of the City University of New York, said that elderly parents find their American-raised offspring preoccupied with their own careers and with shopping for gadgets and luxuries. These grown children relate to their parents mostly as babysitters for the grandchildren.

  Paunon, who has a daughter, fourteen, and a son, thirteen, worries that Filipino culture is so malleable that its values will dissolve in its peculiar encounter with so colossal and ravenous a culture as America's. “We're very vulnerable,” he said. “Our kids have nothing to hold on to. We blend in so well with other groups, we forget we're Filipino.”

  NORWOOD

  WHERE TO GO

  Montefiore Medical Center (MAJOR NEW YORK INSTITUTION AFFILIATED WITH ALBERT EINSTEIN MEDICAL SCHOOL) 111 EAST 210TH STREET; (718) 920-4321; www.montefiore.org

  Philippine Food Center (SMALL MARKET THAT SELLS IMPORTS SUCH AS COCONUT GEL, LYCHEE NUTS, AND SKYFLAKES CRACKERS) 234 EAST GUN HILL ROAD; (718) 515-8405

  St. Ann's Church (CATHOLIC CHURCH THAT HOLDS FILIPINOTHEMED SERVICES ON FIRST SUNDAY OF THE MONTH) 3519 BAINBRIDGE AVENUE; (718) 547-9350

  WHERE TO EAT

  NORWOOD BOASTS ONLY WORKADAY RESTAURANTS, SO FOR GOOD FOOD HEAD SOUTH ACROSS BRONX PARK TO THE ARTHUR AVENUE/ BELMONT NEIGHBORHOOD AND TRY ROBERTO'S OR DOMINICK'S. FOR FILIPINO FOOD,

  Bamboo Grill (ACROSS THE GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE) 54 SOUTH WASHINGTON AVENUE, BERGENFIELD, N.J.; (201) 384-5951

  Chapter 14

  Bewildering Flavors in Richmond Hill

  WALK DOWN THE MAIN STREET OF RICHMOND HILL IN QUEENS— Liberty Avenue—and you might think you are in Bombay or Calcutta.

  Many faces on the sidewalk are the purplish bronze of the Indian subcontinent. The accents have a South Asian singsong. Saris drape the shop windows and the smell of curry is everywhere. But almost all the residents in this neighborhood are neither Indian, nor Pakistani, nor Bangladeshi—they are not even from the subcontinent—and more discriminating New Yorkers have come to know the difference. The Indians of Richmond Hill are actually from the South American country of Guyana or from the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago. They are the descendants of Indians who almost 200 years ago crossed the Indian and Atlantic oceans to plant roots in the Western Hemisphere, but in that time they have evolved a distinct culture. When that still-raw culture encounters the ancient Indian civilization on the alien soil of New York, the result seems to be a chafing uneasiness or at least a cool distance.

  This may surprise some New Yorkers. After all, immigrants have usually found their first foothold in the neighborhoods of their more established ethnic kin—even if the welcome mat was not always wholeheartedly rolled out. Irish-brogue newcomers moved into cloverleaf enclaves of the northwest Bronx, off-the-boat Italians went into a Bensonhurst adorned with front-yard Madonnas, and Soviet Jewish refugees found shelter among the knish parlors of Brighton Beach. But such an easy osmosis does not always happen. The Guyanese and Trinidadians of Indian descent have ended up living quite apart from their forerunners. Though they share a religion, language, and heritage, these Indo-Caribbeans have not felt particularly embraced by the more flourishing Indian communities of Flushing, Elmhurst, and Jackson Heights in Queens, nor have they made overtures to embrace the Indians. Instead they have cobbled together their own fragrant neighborhood of roti, sari, and gold shops among the row houses of Richmond Hill. “From my experience, we're not Indian,” Latchman Budhai, my cicerone to this flavorful neighborhood, told me. “We look like Indians, but we're not Indian.”

  He is a graying man in his late fifties with a broad salt-and-pepper mustache and the sturdy build of a policeman, which he was for many years in Guyana. His grandfather was born in India and made the journey to the northern coast of South America in 1880. In Georgetown, the Guyanese capital, Budhai wante
d to become a teacher and found his ambition frustrated. In a Christian-dominated government, such jobs were reserved for Christians. He came here in 1976 on vacation and decided to seize America's opportunities, working for many years as a security officer at the Mayflower Hotel on Central Park. He helped found the Maha Lakshmi Mandir, a Hindu temple whose members are Guyanese Americans, in 1983 and was for years its president. As such he got to know Queens politicians and became a go-between with big-wigs such as Helen Marshall, the borough president (whose mother is Guyanese), and the Reverend Floyd Flake, the former congressman. In greenhorn groups there is often one canny wheeler-dealer like him, someone who despite a foreign stamp manages to penetrate the Byzantine ways of power brokers. Yiddish-speaking immigrants might have called him a macher.

  Yet he talked candidly about the belittlement he has often felt at being thought not quite up to the standards of New York's Indians. He tried to form a civic association with Sikhs and other Indians and failed. He has not been accepted by Sikh credit unions. “I was totally excluded, [or] should I use the word ‘ostracized,’” he said. “The Indians from India stick together.” His best illustration concerned his wife, Serojini. In 1983, she won a beauty pageant for Indians sponsored by the United Nations, but she was never awarded the top prize, a trip to India. The organizers, Budhai said, had learned she was Guyanese.

  I heard other stories like that not only in Richmond Hill, but just about the same time I gave a talk on ethnic New York to a journalism class at Baruch College in Manhattan, and one student, Priya Mahabir, a twenty-nine-year-old senior, happened to be Guyanese. She was born in Georgetown, and her family has a copy of their ancestral pioneer's Indian birth certificate. In her case it is that of her great-grandmother, issued in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous. She told me that Indian friends of hers sometimes distinguish between East Indians and West Indians, and have told her she's “not really Indian.”

  “I would be really offended by that,” she said. “Indian people have to be better than you are. People from India think of us as being coolies, and that's something we find very offensive. Indian people are very much into status, so they sort of look down upon people that they feel [are] beneath their status.”

  To appreciate the chasm between these kindred communities requires an understanding that actually long-settled immigrants and their raw cousins have not always gotten along. Historians have noted how, during the late nineteenth century, German Jews, a comfortable generation removed from Europe, kept less-polished Jewish arrivals from Eastern Europe at a condescending arm's length, although many created the institutions that helped the newcomers assimilate. Cubans who fled the island after Castro's revolution were sometimes less than welcoming to the refugees of the 1980 Mariel boatlift.

  “Certainly the major impulse is to help the less fortunate parts of the community,” John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research, told me. “But, at the same time, people giving help are the more assimilated, whereas people who need help are at the bottom and don't have the prestige and status. There's more of a tendency of the more established people wanting to distinguish themselves from the newcomers.”

  My family too felt that some of the lower-middle-class Jews, while almost always warm and friendly, needed to maintain a relationship of mentor and protégé, of expert and novice, with us. They were children of Eastern European immigrants and we were actual immigrants. Any signs that we were exceeding our ranking—by buying too pricey bar mitzvah suits, by gaining admission to the Bronx High School of Science—might have prompted compliments, but ones laced with a touch of resentment.

  Most Guyanese, and the smaller number of Trinidadians in Richmond Hill, are descendants of Indians who were contracted to work on Caribbean sugar plantations in the decades after slavery was outlawed in the British colonies in 1838. They were poor, lower-caste people mainly from the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. While they planned to return, they often found that their families had disowned them as tribal defectors and did not want them back. Spurred on by rumors of fortunes made, the influx of penniless indentured laborers persisted into the first decades of the twentieth century.

  There were so many Indians, they eventually formed a majority in Guyana, the former British Guiana, and 40 percent of Trinidad and Tobago. They also became prominent leaders. Cheddi Jagan was elected Guyana's president in 1992 in what were regarded as the first free elections since independence in 1966. Rohan Kanhai became a legendary cricketeer. V. S. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize for his novels, including A House for Mr. Biswas, which portrayed in darkly comic fashion the sometimes hapless culture of ethnic Indians in Trinidad trying to break free of ironbound Indian traditions.

  Indo-Caribbeans began immigrating to New York not only because of the liberalized immigrations law of 1965 but also because of political and economic upheavals in Guyana and Trinidad. Indians from Asia had settled in New York slightly earlier and in larger numbers, but the economic and educational divide between these groups—the Indians tended to be doctors, engineers, and chemists, the Guyanese babysitters and blue-collar workers—made bridging their diverging civilizations all the more formidable. “While these two groups share a common ancestry, their historical experiences and the timing and nature of their immigration set them apart,” Khandelwal, the Indian immigrant who directs the Asian American Center at Queens College, told me.

  For most Guyanese, even those who remember their India-born grandparents, the passage of time has chiseled away much of their Indian character. It has diminished their fluency with Hindi and given their English patois a more rhythmic lilt and sense of humor. A Guyanese might say “Yuh can't suck cane and blow whistle” as a way of avoiding two tasks at the same time, or “When you want fuh swim river yuh gat fuh plunge inside furss” to encourage taking a risk. Guyanese curries are less spicy. A shop that serves the flat roti bread filled with meat is a distinctly Caribbean conception; Indians eat curries with a tortilla-like bread to accompany their main course or to sop up the gravy, not as a filling. Guyanese and Trinidadian music, while Indian influenced, is marked by a faster West Indian style that has come to be known as chutney soca.

  Tofayel Chowdhury, owner of Fabric Depot and one of a handful of shopkeepers on Liberty Avenue who actually come from India, observed that virtually no Guyanese wear saris every day as many Indian women do. Guyanese wear them on ceremonial occasions and their palette is more pastel than vivid. Even Guyanese names are distinguishing, with last names often derived from Indian first names, an artifact of the de-meaning way British planters addressed their Guyanese workers.

  While Guyanese parents limit their children's dating choices to serious suitors, they do not insist on choosing spouses, something many Indian parents still do. This is particularly true for young women. Mahabir, the Baruch student, told me that “your parents wouldn't want you to have five or six guys before getting married—one or two at the most. With women, parents want to know the intention of the person dating. We've gotten away from arranged marriage, but it's not quite there.”

  The 2000 census identified 24,662 people in Richmond Hill who were born in Guyana and 7,384 who were born in Trinidad—numbers widely regarded as gross undercounts. These figures also do not include the Guyanese and Trinidadians born here. In Richmond Hill, almost all the Guyanese and Trinidadians are of Indian descent. But in wider New York many Guyanese and Trinidadians are black, and they have chosen to live in West Indian neighborhoods of Brooklyn such as Crown Heights, East Flatbush, and Canarsie, showing that a racial divide is alive in the West Indies as well. In all, the census counted 130,496 Guyanese-born residents in all of New York City, 43 percent of whom were black, and 88,794 from Trinidad and Tobago, 78 percent of whom were black. Racial data for Indo-Caribbeans is quite misleading, however, a numerical reflection of their ambiguous position. The main census form gives Guyanese only a few racial categories to choose from, and Indian (as opposed to Native American) is not one. Guyanes
e, though, would find it strange to identify themselves as Asian, white, black, or Hispanic.

  This confusion about ethnic identity is apparent in Richmond Hill. It is a 150-year-old neighborhood on Jamaica's southwestern edge that is filled with flamboyant Victorians and the high-stooped wood-frame and brick row homes known as Archie Bunkers. It is those houses that draw Guyanese to this Queens pocket, for in Guyana, everyone owns a home, however humble. Until thirty years ago, most occupants of those houses were descendants of Irish, Italian, and German immigrants. The latter's presence was evident in the Triangle Hofbrau, a 150-year-old hotel and tavern on a triangular piece of land that was patronized by Babe Ruth and Mae West and the last time I looked was still there, but as a medical building.

  There is much that to an outsider appears Indian. The main temple, Budhai's Maha Lakshmi Mandir, which opened in 1994 in a warehouse on 101st Avenue, is indistinguishable from a typical Hindu temple in its assortment of divine statues and paintings of the elephant-headed god, Ganesh, and the four-armed goddess of wealth and beauty, Lakshmi. Every Sunday Guyanese and Trinidadian Hindus make offerings there of fruits and flowers placed on elaborate altars. The temple offers evening classes in the sacred language of Sanskrit and in Hindi dance and music. Budhai even thinks Guyanese are more devout than Indians. “We keep the religion more than they do—this is a fact,” he told me.