My personal history with Chinatowns begins here, where we have wedding banquets, christenings, grocery shopping, daily life with my extended family of aunts, cousins, great-uncles, fake-uncles. But it's not where we go to be Chinese - Manhattan's Chinatown is. I never get a chance to build loyalty for my first Chinatown before we hit school age, our parents move us to Long Island, where good public schools are a selling point. It's around this time, at the end of the 1970s, that economically depressed Flushing starts to change, departing from its roots as an Italian and Greek neighborhood to become, eventually, its own Chinatown. My family's first apartment is a dingy affair with a leaky ceiling, and my brother is careful to pull me away from the drips. When I come here today, I'm keenly aware that it's their route I follow. I picture a set of footprints marking a path from Queens down to Lower Manhattan, traceable on a map of the New York City transit system.
Every night they brought home fresh vegetables bought from street vendors they'd come to know. 7 subway train to the 6 train to Canal Street, where my grandfather worked in a fortune-cookie factory and my grandmother was a seamstress. Every morning they took the Q26 bus and the No. Even after moving to another Chinese enclave in Flushing, Queens, they kept going back, like clockwork, to their old neighborhood. Traveling halfway around the world from Hong Kong, they settled in Manhattan's Chinatown in 1960. It started, I suppose, with my grandparents. Some people unpack when they first arrive in a city. May be incomplete or contain other coding. Sample text for Library of Congress control number 2008055095 Sample text for American Chinatown / by Bonnie Tsui.īibliographic record and links to related information available from the Library of Congress catalogĬopyrighted sample text provided by the publisher and used with permission.
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