Manhattan's Chinatown Research Articles

Promiscuous Care in Movement-Based Research: Lessons Learned from Collaborations in Manhattan's Chinatown


 
 
 Decolonial and feminist studies scholars have long recognised the intricate ways in which the personal and academic are deeply interwoven and that the co-production of knowledge is essential for social transformation. This article examines the cultural organising of the Chinatown Art Brigade, an intergenerational collective of artists, activists, writers, educators and practitioners driven by the fundamental belief that cultural, material, and aesthetic modes of production have the power to combat gentrification. Specifically, I situate the collective within a longer lineage of Asian American cultural organising in Manhattan Chinatown and draw from years of movement-based research as a member of the collective. Incorporating personal reflection and interviews conducted with brigade members, this article speaks to how the themes of power, temporality and affectivity show up in movement-based research. How can we think more capaciously about academic and non-academic collaboration, to push the boundaries and explore new possibilities that honour the time, expertise and trauma of directly impacted communities? In reflecting on my work with the Chinatown Art Brigade, I discuss the nuances of intergenerational co-production of knowledge and interrogate how a feminist ethics of promiscuous care can uncover new possibilities for collaboration between cultural workers, organisers and movement-based scholars within and beyond the neoliberal academy.
 
 

19455 The impact of long-term construction on the health of older adults in New York City™s Chinatown

ABSTRACT IMPACT: This poster will demonstrate how a community issue from a CTSI Community Advisory Board member organization initiated a collaborative, community-engaged project to identify priority areas of concern and culturally appropriate mitigation strategies. OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Little is known about the health and psychosocial impact of construction on older adults living near construction sites. We applied a mixed methods approach to identify evidence-based strategies to mitigate community prioritized health and psychosocial concerns related to long-term construction on older adults in NYC’s Manhattan Chinatown. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: In Chinatown, where approximately 20% of its residents are seniors, many are poor, have a disability, and experience ambulatory difficulties. We used a mixed methods approach including: 1) a high level scoping review of the published literature on the health impact of long-term construction for older adults; 2) key informant interviews with stakeholders; and 3) a two-part community-engaged modified Delphi process to identify priority topic areas related to construction and older adults and evidence-informed, culturally-relevant mitigation strategies. Using priority areas identified through the modified Delphi process, we conducted a literature review on the health and psychosocial impact of construction on older adults. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: We identified five priority topics: construction site emissions; noise; outdoor nocturnal lighting; neighborhood changes; and relocation. Long-term construction is associated with environmental and psychosocial consequences with greater negative impacts on vulnerable populations. Current NYC mitigation policies are based on general population and need revisions to consider impacts for the most vulnerable, e.g. older adults and children, to mitigate adverse health outcomes. Findings were shared with City Council members and resulted in enacting specific recommended mitigation strategies, e.g. double paned windows, etc. Seniors are highly susceptible to the effects of air pollution, noise, and environmental changes, with exposure associated with higher morbidity, mortality, and social isolation. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF FINDINGS: Long-term construction may pose serious health implications for seniors residing near construction sites. Standards and guidelines for the general population may not protect them. Community-driven coalitions, like community-academic partnerships, can successfully advance community priorities and inform strategies to protect the elderly.

Chinatown Invisible: Hybrid-mapping and making-do

Abstract This article is a proposal to address visual mapping as a means to reveal the interrelationships between a place represented, a place lived and a place perceived. A form of critical cartography called hybrid-mapping is used to interrogate the combined sociocultural and biophysical legacies of the continually changing landscape. This approach expressly facilitates a focused interpretation of the everyday lives of urban dwellers and the nuanced connections between landscape, history and culture. Offering to a larger conversation about landscape representation, this article introduces, situates and analyses the application of hybrid-mapping in a creative research project entitled Chinatown Invisible about Manhattan's Chinatown. The Chinatown Invisible project uses hybrid-mapping to interrogate the quotidian practice of 'making-do' to adapt existing urban structures to fulfil everyday needs. Capturing and understanding making-do is vital because it sheds light on the ways in which residents informally claim space and how they shape the ongoing physical evolution of their neighbourhood, establishing their 'right to the city'. Chinatown Invisible shows how hybrid-mapping unveils the dynamics between culture and landscape in an urban setting, bridging critical geography and landscape representation to examine multiple ways in which we can interact with the processes of real, imagined and perceived space.

Shop Talk and Everyday Sites of Resistance to Gentrification in Manhattan's Chinatown

Shop Talk and Everyday Sites of Resistance to Gentrification in Manhattan's Chinatown

The Economic Impact of Commensal Rodents on Small Businesses in Manhattan's Chinatown: trends and possible causes

Given the history of well-documented rodent infestations in New York City we were interested in assessing the economic impact of rats and mice on small businesses in The Lower East Side of Manhattan. Via mailed surveys and on-site interviews , we quantified damage to structures, loss of saleable goods and merchandise, the cost of pest-control professionals, and/or self-applied poison/traps. Overall, 16% of business (n = 76) responded to our queries. To those businesses reporting some level of rodent damage, average losses included $513 in merchandise, $726 in pest-control fees, $371 in repair costs to structure, and $125 in do-it-yourself deployment of poison and traps. Average annual loss to those business owners that reported rodent infestations was estimated at $1104. Our observations suggest that commensal rodents in New York City have remained persistent pests that are capable of inflicting noteowrthy economic losses. Given the significant effort by the City of New York in the fight against rodent infestations we suggest that persistent environmental degradation and possibly even genetic resistance to 2nd generation rodenticides have enabled city rodents to persist and flourish despite the various campaigns to thwart them.

This Is Part of Our History: Preserving Garment Manufacturing and a Sense of Home in Manhattan's Chinatown

This article explores attempts by labor and community advocates to retain a garment industry base in Manhattan's Chinatown after 9/11. Specifically tying the viability of such proposals to ongoing processes such as gentrification, transnational capital investment, local development, and broader anti-manufacturing urban policy, I argue that strategies for appropriate and sensitive community development that are rooted in sectoral preservation or development need to take into account the specificities of place, class, and ethnicity. In particular, the concept of a valued cultural or home space adds urgency to the advocacy of such proposals beyond the generic economic rationale of manufacturing retention.

Fuzhou Chinese Speech Group and Associations: Online Debates over the Landmarks of Manhattan Chinatown after 9/11

Abstract After the terrorist attack of 11 September 2001, both the Cantonese and Fujianese immigrants in New York City’s Manhattan Chinatown felt the need for the reconstruction of their communities. Fuzhou migrants put up their hometown website, Fujianese.com, when the City Government provided a relief fund and initiated certain projects for the rebirth of Chinatown. Discussions relating to the shaping of the webscape and landscape can be gleaned from their online debates over the cultural landmarks of Manhattan Chinatown built with the 9/11 funding. In analyzing Fujianese.com, we find a sub-ethnic awareness emerging from among the Fuzhou migrants concerned about their community participation in the host society. This website has nurtured a sub-ethnic sentiment and strengthened the identity of its members. The online discourses are important sources of information for studying the issue of dialect grouping and territorial association.

Chinatown Then and Neoliberal Now: Gentrification Consciousness and the Ethnic-Specific Museum

This article explores the intersection of cultural tourism, gentrification, and urban development in the neoliberal period by examining the complex and ambivalent relationship between an “ethnic-specific” cultural institution and a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. Through a case study of the Museum of Chinese in America's (MoCA) profile, history, and community involvement in Manhattan's Chinatown, this article suggests that small to midsize ethnic-specific museums relate to the social and spatial transformations inherent in gentrification through a mechanism called gentrification consciousness. This mechanism helps to explain how an institution whose history, mission, and politics might indicate a resistance to gentrification is confounded and constrained by the larger neoliberal landscape. Offering little in the way of substantive alternative funding and space, neoliberal urban development touts tourism and culture as key routes to economic development with gentrification as a “natural” and beneficial by-product of such development for both the surrounding neighborhood and for individual cultural institutions. An analysis of the unique relationship of smaller ethnic-specific organizations to gentrification processes complicates discussions about museums and gentrification as well as potentially identifying methods and measures of institutional success that do not rely so heavily on neoliberal logics and policy prescriptions.

Strategic Self-Orientalism

Although Manhattan's Chinatown bears few traces of it today, from 1950 to 2005 local elites attempted to use city planning schemes to fashion an urban space that exploited exoticized notions of the quarter and its residents. Three ultimately unsuccessful proposals exemplify these “strategic self-orientalizing” endeavors: “China Village,” a Title I urban renewal proposal (1950-1954); Chinatown Revitalization Plan, an effort to alter Chinatown's streetscapes (1975); and The Unity Arch, an ornamental gate (2002-2005). Examining these proposals revises the history of Chinatown-planning nationally while revealing a story of cold-war machinations, changing immigration patterns, and the rise of identity politics.

A Clinical Trials Recruitment Education Program for Immigrant Chinese Americans

This study was designed to develop and evaluate a community-based education program to facilitate enrollment of immigrant Chinese into clinical cancer screening trials. The program included workshops with culturally tailored health education materials. It was piloted to recruit persons into an ongoing lung cancer screening trial from a senior citizen center in Manhattan's Chinatown and compared with a control program at a second senior center. Survey results from a convenience sample of seniors showed that the workshop raised awareness about cancer screening and clinical trials. However, it did not change attitudes towards cancer screening. The results highlighted prior focus group findings in which factors influencing participation in cancer screening and clinical trials are similar. Important facilitative factors include doctor recommendation, friend/family recommendation, the belief that early detection could “save lives,” no cost, and having an-interpreter.

Fuzhou Flower Shops of East Broadway: ‘Heat and Noise’ and the Fashioning of New Traditions

Along East Broadway in Manhattan's Chinatown, many homes and businesses, once predominately those of Cantonese-speaking immigrants from Hong Kong and South China, are being replaced by those of recent arrivals from the Fuzhou region of Fujian Province—a province on China's south-east coast just north of Guangdong. A local New York industry has arisen to cater to the ritual needs of the Fuzhou emigré population. Within a single block of East Broadway, four businesses, advertising themselves as ‘flower shops’ (huapu or huadian), compete with one another to provide ritual services, paraphernalia, and personnel for events of social significance. This paper explores ways in which the ‘flower shop’ industry creatively fashions new traditions and why the people to whom it caters—the Fuzhou people—find a greater need for traditionalist activity than do their neighbours, the Cantonese.

Clinical deterioration in pediatric asthmatic patients after September 11, 2001

Background New York City residents were exposed to a variety of inhaled substances after the collapse of the World Trade Center. Exposure to these substances might lead to an increase in asthma severity, with residential distance from Ground Zero predictive of the degree of change. Objective We sought to assess the effect of the World Trade Center collapse on local pediatric asthmatic patients. Methods We retrospectively reviewed the charts of 205 pediatric patients with established asthma from a clinic in lower Manhattan's Chinatown. Clinical data were obtained for the year before and the year after September 11, 2001. Measurements included numbers of visits, asthma medication prescriptions, oral corticosteroid prescriptions, weekly doses of rescue inhaler, and peak expiratory flow rates. Residential zip codes were used to compare the asthma severity of patients living within and beyond a 5-mile radius of Ground Zero. Results After September 11, 2001, these children had more asthma-related clinic visits ( P = .002) and received more prescriptions for asthma medications ( P = .018). No significant differences in oral steroid or rescue inhaler use were noted. Those living within 5 miles had more clinic visits after September 11, 2001 ( P = .013); the increase in clinic visits for patients living more than 5 miles from Ground Zero was not significant. Mean percent predicted peak expiratory flow rates decreased solely for those patients living within 5 miles of Ground Zero during the 3 months after September 11, 2001. Conclusions Asthma severity worsened after September 11, 2001, in pediatric asthmatic patients living near Ground Zero. Residential proximity to Ground Zero was predictive of the degree of decrease in asthma health.

Clinical deterioration in pediatric asthma patients living near the world trade center after 9/11/01

Rationale Residents of Manhattan were exposed to inhaled substances after the collapse of the World Trade Center. Exposure may lead to an increase in asthma severity, with residential distance from the disaster site (Ground Zero) predictive of the degree of change. Methods We retrospectively reviewed the charts of 205 established asthma patients from a community health center in lower Manhattan's Chinatown. Clinical data were obtained for the year before and the year after September 11, 2001. Measurements included: number of patient visits, asthma medication prescriptions, oral corticosteroid prescriptions, weekly doses of rescue inhaler, and peak expiratory flow rates (PEFR). Residential zip codes were used to compare the asthma severity of patients living within and beyond a 5 mile radius of Ground Zero. Results After 9/11, all patients had significantly more asthma-related clinic visits (mean 3.79 pre-9/11 versus 4.69 post-9/11, p=0.002), and received significantly more prescriptions for asthma medications (mean 2.05 pre-9/11 versus 2.33 post-9/11, p=0.018). No significant differences in oral steroid or rescue inhaler use were noted. Those living within 5 miles had significantly more clinic visits post 9/11 (3.95 pre-9/11 versus 5.10 post-9/11, p=0.013); the increase in clinic visits for patients living greater than 5 miles from Ground Zero was not significant. Mean percent predicted PEFRs declined solely for those patients living within 5 miles of Ground Zero during the three months following 9/11. Conclusions Asthma severity worsened after 9/11/01 in pediatric asthmatics living near Ground Zero. Residential proximity was predictive of the degree of decline.