York's Chinatown Research Articles

Discovering, describing and digitising CCTV: Challenges and attempts of making New York Chinatown’s community television archive accessible

Archives created by and of ethnic minority groups play an important role in the preservation of cultural heritage. However, making such archival materials effectively and openly accessible is not straightforward, not least due to language barriers and the limitations of digitisation. Using the case of a Chinese American audiovisual collection housed at New York University, this article demonstrates the challenges associated with making a historically important archive more visible and accessible. As the article will show, digitisation does not necessarily lead to immediate accessibility. The article discusses ways to elevate archive visibility and accessibility, not simply through technical workflows but also outreach campaigning. Thoughts on granting more open access to ethnic minority archives are also included.

Becoming Culturally Competent in the Face of Diversity

Becoming Culturally Competent in the Face of Diversity

Social Support and Networks: Cardiovascular Responses Following Recall on Immigration Stress Among Chinese Americans

Social support has been shown to act as a buffer for cardiovascular responses to stress. However, little is known about how social support and networks are related to cardiovascular responses to immigration stress recall. The current study evaluated the impact of structural and functional support on cardiovascular reaction following immigrant stress recall provocation as well as the moderation effect of interdependent self-construal among first-generation Chinese immigrants. One hundred fifty Chinese immigrants were recruited in the New York Chinatown area. Participants completed questionnaires assessing their levels of social support and networks, and interdependent self-construal. Following adaptation, participants recalled a recent post-immigration stress-provoking situation. Cardiovascular measures were taken during adaptation, stressor task, and recovery period. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was performed. Social network size and type, as well as perceived emotional support were positively predictive of systolic blood pressure (SBP) reactivity changes. Instrumental support seeking was a positive predictor of SBP and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) reactivity. The moderation effect between instrumental support seeking and interdependent self-construal were significantly predictive of DBP reactivity and recovery, suggesting that perceptions about themselves in relation to others is a crucial factor for determining whether support seeking is beneficial or not. Social support was not a direct buffer on cardiovascular responses to stress among Chinese immigrants. Chinese values of interdependence and collectivism may partly explain the disconfirming results. Still, when interdependent self-construal was taken into account, Chinese immigrants who had less interdependent self-construal, but solicited more instrumental support, had faster adaptation to stress over the long term.

A Congeries of Lichee Nuts for America: Chinese Religion in Edgar Lee Masters’s New York Chinatown Poetry Collection

Abstract Active in several genres of writing and extremely productive, American poet Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950) became famous almost overnight with his earlier collection of free verse monologues, The Spoon River Anthology (1915). But as quickly as he rose in prominence, his fame declined thereafter. In the past decades, critics usually regarded The Spoon River Anthology as Masters’s best collection. This essay takes a step toward uncovering the value of Masters’s other work by examining one aspect of Lichee Nuts, a book-length collection of short poems published in 1929. This essay reveals that Masters, a prescient poet, not only displays sophisticated understanding of the composite and complex nature of Chinese religion, but also uses that understanding to construct a positive poetic image of the Chinese. In doing so he actively promotes cultural diversity in a time of racial hysteria and adumbrates the emergence of countercultural voices that transmit spirituality to a Western culture mired in materialism.

Community-based? Asian American Students, Parents, and Teachers in the Shifting Chinatowns of New York and Los Angeles

This article examines the experiences of children, parents, and teachers in the New York and Los Angeles Chinatown public schools, as observed by two classroom educators, one based in each city. The authors document trends among the transnational East and Southeast Asian families that comprise the majority in the local Chinatown schools and discuss some of the key intersections of communities and identities within those schools, as well as the pedagogies that try to build upon these intersections in the name of student empowerment and a more holistic vision of student achievement. Ultimately, this article seeks to bring forth the unique perspectives of Chinatown community members and explore how students, families, teachers, school staff and administrators, and community organizers can collaborate to actualize a more transformative public education experience.

Count on the Dietician, and Common Sense

Count on the Dietician, and Common Sense

Kung Pao Kosher: Jewish Americans and Chinese Restaurants in New York

AbstractSince c.1900, eating Chinese food has become a weekly routine, a Christmas tradition, and a childhood memory for many Jewish American families. In their adaptation to American society, Jewish Americans made eating Chinese part of their American identity. The evolution and change in Chinese food and Jewish eating habits took place almost simultaneously. While Chinese immigrants invented chopsuey and other popular Americanized Chinese dishes, Jewish residential proximity to New York Chinatown allowed many Jewish immigrants and their families to frequent Chinese restaurants and become familiar with Chinese food. Based on a review of articles published in newspapers and popular journals in New York and scholarly writings on food history, this article explains how and why Jewish customers were attracted to Chinese food, and describes the dynamic interaction between the two cultures in an attempt to addresses the complexity of American ethnic identity.

New York Chinatown Theatres under the Hong Kong Circuit System

According to film historian Zhong Baoxian, the Hong Kong film industry in the “Golden Age” of the 1970s and 1980s was dominated by three major theatre chains or circuits, which maintained their regular film supply by setting up their own production companies. As a case study in the international distribution of Hong Kong cinema during this period, this essay examines the business records of the Sun Sing Theatre in New York’s Chinatown, now in the collection of New York’s Museum of Chinese in America. The Sun Sing was not only an exhibition site, but also the headquarters of Gordon’s Film International, a company that distributed films from Hong Kong to theatres in North America in the 1980s. The author argues that the circuit system, which made a soaring industry possible in Hong Kong, has ironically contributed to the demise of the business and entertainment culture of the Chinatown communities in North America.

Memories of the 1982 ILGWU Strike in New York Chinatown

In June 1982, more than 20,000 immigrant women garment workers went on strike in New York Chinatown to demand a good contract. Their employers demanded deep cutbacks in wages and benefits, and threatened to withdraw from the union altogether if their demands weren't met. However at the sight of thousands of immigrant women workers marching through the streets of Chinatown, the employers quickly withdrew their demands, and within hours the workers and their union had won the strike.

SARS and New York's Chinatown: The politics of risk and blame during an epidemic of fear

This paper examines the production of risk and blame discourses during the 2003 SARS epidemic and responses to those messages in New York City's Chinatown, a community stigmatized during the SARS epidemic despite having no SARS cases. The study consisted of 6 weeks participant observation and 37 semi-structured, open-ended interviews with community members. Stigmatizing discourses from the late 19th century resurfaced to blame Chinese culture and people for disease, and were recontextualized to fit contemporary local and global political-economic concerns. Many informants discursively distanced themselves from risk but simultaneously reaffirmed the association of Chinese culture with disease by redirecting such discourses onto recent Chinese immigrants. Legitimizing cultural blame obfuscates the structural and biological causes of epidemics and naturalizes health disparities in marginalized populations. This research demonstrates that myriad historical, political, and economic factors shape responses and risk perceptions during an unfamiliar epidemic, even in places without infection.

A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York

George Washington Appo was a pickpocket, con artist, actor, opium addict, snitch, and frequent prisoner. Appo made no important discoveries nor did he found any great enterprises; he cannot even be considered one of Eric Hobsbawm's “primitive rebels,” prefiguring a strain of political resistance through his banditry. George Appo lived and died a minor criminal. So the first question that comes to mind when reading A Pickpocket's Tale is, Why should anyone, much less a historian, care about someone like Appo? In his painstakingly researched yet lively biography, Timothy J. Gilfoyle provides a convincing answer: Appo himself may have been insignificant, but he offers a valuable window into the shadowy world of crime and punishment in nineteenth-century New York. A Pickpocket's Tale is structured around a ninety-nine-page memoir that Appo wrote late in his life. Gilfoyle uses this source as a springboard. When Appo recalls learning his criminal trade on the streets of New York as a nine-year-old boy, the author launches into a description of the street life of the city and the world of “street arab” bootblacks, paperboys, and pickpockets. When Appo is arrested as a teenager, Gilfoyle describes the infamous House of Refuge where he was sent, and the harsh discipline, lax training, and sexual activities aboard the Mercury, the shipboard “reformatory” on which Appo ended up sailing the Atlantic Ocean. By accompanying Appo, we learn the techniques of pickpockets and cons such as the “green goods game.” We visit the “dives” and opium dens that provided the social life for Gotham's criminals and, since Appo was ethnically half-Chinese, we also learn something about the political structure of New York's Chinatown. Sometimes the connections are a bit tenuous. One chapter is devoted to the colorful street gangs of New York, in particular the Whyos and their leader Danny Driscoll. Appo's crimes demanded finesse, not strength, and he was never a member of a gang, but he did, in passing, mention Driscoll in his memoir, and that is justification enough for a detour.

Made in Chinatown: Bridging Cultures and Evolving Identities in Modern Dance

American modern dance history frequently overlooks Eleanor Yung and H. T. Chen. This presentation explores how these choreographers shaped the dance scene in New York's Chinatown, a venue for the many Asian dancers and choreographers who come to train and perform in New York City.

The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s. By Joyce A. Madancy. [Harvard and London: Harvard East Asia Monograph, 2003. 430 pp. $50.00; £32.95. ISBN 0-674-01215-1.

Visiting New York's Chinatown, it is surprising to find there a memorial statue of the legendary anti-opium hero, Lin Zexu, instead of the more usual statue of the father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen. Perhaps Lin deserves his place in New York's Chinatown: it is generally believed the history of Chinese migration into the New World was a chapter of humiliation, resulting from the evil opium and the opium trade. Until very recently, the conventional wisdom has been that it was the opium trade that ended the house of Qing, and that opium had turned China into a nation of hopeless addicts, smoking themselves to death while their civilization descended into chaos (a view challenged by Dikötter, Laaman and Zhou in Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China).In her book The Troublesome Legacy of Commissoner Lin, Joyce Madancy argues that, like opium, Lin Zexu was turned into a potent symbol of nascent Chinese nationalism (p. 5). Like opium, the legacy of Lin continued well into the 20th century. In his native Fujian, for instance, Lin “came to represent the vitality of elite activism and the complex links between provincial, national, and international interests. Lin Zexu's character and mission embodied the themes and motivations of Fujian's late Qing opium reformers – the righteousness of opium reform, pride in country and province, and a none-too-subtle slap at foreign imperialist greed.” Accordingly, during the late Qing/early Republican anti-opium campaign in Fujian, “reformist elites, and officials presided over the apotheosis of Lin Zexu, whose image loomed, literally and figuratively, over their efforts and shaped the rhetoric and tone of suppression” (p. 5).

Melancholic Remains: Domestic and National Secrets in Fae Myenne Ng's Bone

At first glance, it would appear that we could read Fae Myenne Ng's novel Bone as a sequel of sorts to Louis Chu's novel Eat a Bowl of Tea. If Eat a Bowl of Tea charts the tumultuous transformation of New York Chinatown from bachelor society to family community in the middle of the twentieth century, Bone would seem to represent the late-twentieth-century result of that transformation. Eat a Bowl of Tea portrays the waning years of Wang Wah Gay and his fellow Chinatown "bachelors,"1 men whose labor was recruited by the United States and who ended up unable to establish families in the US. The homosociality of this bachelor society, whose members are past their productive years, is marked in Chu's novel by acts of gambling, gossiping, joking, and cursing. The settling of Wang's son Ben Loy with his new bride in Chinatown represents the hope of renewal for a community previously unable to reproduce itself through conventional family formation: the old men wait anxiously and collectively for a grandchild to signify a sense of future they have otherwise been denied. Bone features Leila Fu, just such a grandchild of an old "bachelor," as its narrator.2 Moreover, Ng's novel is set in San Francisco, the city where the newly married couple of Eat a Bowl of Tea must relocate to start anew. Rather than a site of regeneration, how [End Page 110] ever, San Francisco's Chinatown proves to be the site of loss and melancholia. In Eat a Bowl of Tea, family represents the potential for moving forward into the future; in Bone, family and narrative remain haunted by, and move back into, the past. Therefore, rather than reading Chu's and Ng's texts according to a logic of sequential, historical time, in which the present naturally follows and fully replaces the past, I propose instead a temporal paradigm based on the notion of text as palimpsest, as multilayered surface. Bone's narrative is structured palimpsestically, in a chronology that moves back in time to reveal what lies underneath the events that Leila narrates in the novel's beginning. This palimpsestic structure is characteristic of melancholia, a condition in which an object that should be relegated to the past is instead psychically kept alive in the present. By comprehending how time is layered such that the past is not erased but remains in the present, a palimpsestic reading practice offers an alternative to modern conceptions of time as horizontal and continuous. Benedict Anderson, quoting Walter Benjamin, observes that this "homogeneous, empty" (Benjamin 262) time of modernity is also the time of the nation and that subjects of the nation are constituted within the horizontal simultaneity of this national time. In this essay, I show how Ng's melancholic temporality critiques modern notions of subjectivity and history, especially as formulated by the nation-state.3 Ng's novel reveals what is in excess of the national symbolic, what remains after national history and national subjectivity are narrated through modern trajectories of development and progress. The subject of modernity and nation is defined by a certain kind of relationship to time: she participates in recalling the collective memory that has been narrated as national history. This memory is selective, consisting of that which provides ideological support for the nation, so that, as Ernest Renan suggests, she is also obligated to forget.4 Remembering—that is, "remembering to forget" (Khanna 12)—is a process of incorporating the past into the symbolic of national history. Psychoanalytic theory teaches us, however, that the process of symbolization always produces its remainder or surplus—in this case, the forgotten. Unassimilated and unresolved, the remainder always returns to haunt the symbolic. Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok build upon Freud's theory of melancholia to elaborate on this haunting of the remainder. According to Freud, melancholia is the condition...

The Church as a Surrogate Family for Working Class Immigrant Chinese Youth: An Ethnography of Segmented Assimilation

Based on ethnographic data collected in a New York Chinatown church, this paper explores how ethnic socialization and upward assimilation work together, a primary theme of the segmented assimilation thesis, among working class immigrant Chinese youth who convert to Christianity. These youth are much more bi-cultural and more at risk than the Asian American youth who have received most of the attention in the immigrant religion literature. This study shows that the church facilitates youth socialization by being a nurturing surrogate family that compensates for the weakness of immigrant families and the lack of parental resources. This study suggests that working class immigrant Chinese conversion to Christianity involves a re-authoritization process in which the new authorities in the Western Christian world, as represented by the pastor's role as a foster father, replace the old ones embedded in traditional Chinese families and create an emotionally open culture for the marginalized youth. This emotionally open culture of the church places immigrant youth's adaptation in a supportive context.

Creative Use of Focus Groups: Providing Healing and Support to NYC Chinatown Residents After the 9/11 Attacks

ABSTRACT This article describes the mutual aid group process that took place in focus groups conducted with the elderly, dislocated workers and children in the New York Chinatown community who were severely affected by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The group worker's role and approaches as well as group dynamics are discussed from a culturally-relevant perspective. Illustrations are made to underscore the therapeutic value of the mutual aid group process despite variations of cultural norms in communications and interactions.

Ideological Deportation: The Case of Kwong Hai Chew

Kwong Hai Chew was a Chinese seaman and the first Chinese elected official of the National Maritime Union. When he returned from a trip to Asia during the Korean War, he was detained and excluded by the Attorney General on national security grounds as a subversive. After he was detained two years, the Supreme Court in 1953 ruled he could not be detained without any notice of the charges against him. However, it took fourteen years of litigation to reverse the Attorney General's determination. He was finally naturalized by court order in 1967. His case illustrates the dangers of the use of secret evidence in immigration proceedings. This case study is part of a larger legal historical work that examines McCarthy era political repression in New York's Chinatown. That repression occurred principally through the medium of immigration law enforcement.

Transnationalism, Religion, and Immigration

With the centrality of processes of globalization-economic, political, religious, and cultural-transnational fieldwork, once a clarion call for reform by anthropologists, has increasingly become common in many detailed and focused ethnographies, such as James Watson's 1975 seminal study of the emigration patterns of a Cantonese lineage in Hong Kong and London or Ellen Oxfeld's 1993 study of Chinese entrepreneurs in Calcutta and Toronto. Kenneth Guest's study of Chinese transnational religious communities is a good example of such a transnational ethnography, spanning Fujian province and New York City and the movement of people in-between. The Chinese immigrants who journey to the United States in pursuit of their visions of the good life rely, as Guest concludes, on social networks generated by immigrants through their participation in transnational religious communities. Religious communities serve as the primary area for the mobilization of social capital necessary for people's survival of the immigration process through the exchange of information and financial support in the United States. As a result, religion is a major factor in the identities of Chinese immigrants to the United States. In this ethnography, Guest starts his exploration of the role of transnational religious communities on the social and economic survival of undocumented Chinese immigrants in New York by examining the people involved in a variety of religious communities (Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist, and Daoist) and their connections with communities in China. While the scope of Guest's study is ambitious, he brings in the detailed particularities of these transnational processes by bringing out the voices of these immigrants who live globally, demonstrating the heterogeneity of the so-called ethnic enclave that is usually singularly identified as Chinatown. Immigration and Heterogeneity in By relating the individual experiences and life histories of a number of recent Fuzhou immigrants to New York's Chinatown, Guest situates both the contemporary situation of immigrants (legal and illegal, men and women) from China and the history of in the wider context of American immigration history. Although the social solidarity of an apparent shared Chinese ethnicity helps immigrants survive in a foreign land, Guest documents how the internal dynamics of a socially-stratified community, with its dense networks of social obligations for the immigrants, also serve to establish a socioeconomic hierarchy-a hierarchy where recent immigrants find themselves at the bottom. is not a harmonious place for these recent immigrants, a gateway for them to pursue the American dream; instead, it is a highly-stratified community where differences of regional origin, language, educational background, and other socioeconomic and political markers serve as mechanisms with which elite economically exploit these highly vulnerable newcomers. Herein lies both the weakness and strength of Guest's ethnography in general. Guest clearly states that his focus on immigrants from Fuzhou serves to give voice to the social category most exploited in the process of immigration, as is seen in his critique of the elite aspect of Ong and Nonini's (1997) and Ong's (1999) studies of Chinese transnationalism in chapter two; Guest asserts that Ong and Nonini's focus on the business elite masks the diversity within the social experiences of transnationalism. While Guest convincingly demonstrates the difficult plight faced by immigrants by giving voice to these marginalized newcomers, he does a less thorough job with what he labels as the elite-those more wealthy residents of who had emigrated from other Chinese communities such as Hong Kong or southeast Asia, or had immigrated earlier. For example, while Guest demonstrates the heterogeneity within Chinatown, I was surprised at the relative lack of discussion of Cantonese or Hakka immigrant experiences, and other than allusions to differences in regional association and language, the experiences of these immigrants were homogenized as Chinatown elites. …

Clinical, social, and service use characteristics of Fuzhounese undocumented immigrant patients.

This study was a chart review and clinician survey of social, clinical, and service use characteristics among all Fuzhounese patients at a mental health clinic in New York's Chinatown from 1998 through 2000. Of a total of 216 clinic patients, 63 (29 percent) were Fuzhounese, and 32 (51 percent) of them were undocumented immigrants. This group, relative to comparison groups of 31 documented Fuzhounese patients and 62 documented non-Fuzhounese Chinese patients, had higher rates of hospitalization and rehospitalization, lower treatment compliance and insight into illness, and many social disadvantages, indicating a strong association between undocumented status and poorer mental health outcome. The authors suggest potential changes in treatment and health policy.

A short guide to the art of dining, slumming, touring, wildlife, and women for hire in New York's Chinatown and Chinese restaurants

Journal Article A Short Guide to the Art of Dining, Slumming, Touring, Wildlife, and Women for Hire in New York's Chinatown and Chinese Restaurants Get access John X. Christ John X. Christ Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Oxford Art Journal, Volume 26, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 71–92, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/26.2.71 Published: 01 December 2003