New York City’s Chinatown, the largest Chinatown in the United States—and the site of the largest concentration of Chinese in the western hemisphere—is located on the lower east side of Manhattan. Its two square miles are loosely bounded by Kenmore and Delancey streets on the north, East and Worth streets on the south, Allen street on the east, and Broadway on the west. With a population estimated between 70,000 and 150,000, Chinatown is the favored destination point for Chinese immigrants, though in recent years the neighborhood has also become home to Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Burmese, Vietnamese, and Filipinos among others.
Chinese traders and sailors began trickling into the United States in the mid eighteenth century; while this population was largely transient, small numbers stayed in New York and married. Beginning in the mid nineteenth century, Chinese arrived in significant numbers, lured to the Pacific coast of the United States by the stories of “Gold Mountain” — California — during the gold rush of the 1840s and 1850s and brought by labor brokers to build the Central Pacific Railroad. Most arrived expecting to spend a few years working, thus earning enough money to return to China, build a house and marry.
As the gold mines began yielding less and the railroad neared completion, the broad availability of cheap and willing Chinese labor in such industries as cigar-rolling and textiles became a source of tension for white laborers, who thought that the Chinese were coming to take their jobs and threaten their livelihoods. Mob violence and rampant discrimination in the west drove the Chinese east into larger cities, where job opportunities were more open and they could more easily blend into the already diverse population. By 1880, the burgeoning enclave in the Five Points slums on the south east side of New York was home to between 200 and 1,100 Chinese. A few members of a group of Chinese illegally smuggled into New Jersey in the late 1870s to work in a hand laundry soon made the move to New York, sparking an explosion of Chinese hand laundries.
When the Exclusion Act was finally lifted in 1943, China was given a small immigration quota, and the community continued to grow, expanding slowly throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s. The garment industry, the hand-laundry business, and restaurants continued to employ Chinese internally, paying less than minimum wage under the table to thousands. Despite the view of the Chinese as members of a “model minority,” Chinatown’s Chinese came largely from the mainland, and were viewed as the “downtown Chinese," as opposed the Taiwan-educated “uptown Chinese,” members of the Chinese elite.
When the quota was raised in 1968, Chinese flooded into the country from the mainland, and Chinatown’s population exploded, expanding into Little Italy, often buying buildings with cash and turning them into garment factories or office buildings. Although many of the buildings in Chinatown are tenements from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rents in Chinatown are some of the highest in the city, competing with the Upper West Side and midtown. Foreign investment from Hong Kong has poured capital into Chinatown, and the little space there is a precious commodity.
Today’s Chinatown is a tightly-packed yet sprawling neighborhood which continues to grow rapidly despite the satellite Chinese communities flourishing in Queens. Both a tourist attraction and the home of the majority of Chinese New Yorkers, Chinatown offers visitor and resident alike hundreds of restaurants, booming fruit and fish markets and shops of knick-knacks and sweets on torturously winding and overcrowded streets.
Sometimes it does seem like we haven't traveled all that far since the anti-Chinese riots and the Exclusion Act, since the internment camps of World War II. We think of Vincent Chin in Detroit. We remember the post-Rodney King plundering of Korean businesses in Los Angeles. We consider the Wen Ho Lee case. We read, with dismay, about a survey that finds that 25 percent of fellow Americans hold "very negative feelings" toward Chinese and Asian Americans. And this is not a poll taken in 1970. This was from a cross-section of people throughout the country almost exactly one year ago.
What to do about this? Among other things, like education and outreach, I say we celebrate. We take pride in ourselves and in each other. We raise our profiles and increase our activities in the community, in politics, in media and in the arts.
Chinese traders and sailors began trickling into the United States in the mid eighteenth century; while this population was largely transient, small numbers stayed in New York and married. Beginning in the mid nineteenth century, Chinese arrived in significant numbers, lured to the Pacific coast of the United States by the stories of “Gold Mountain” — California — during the gold rush of the 1840s and 1850s and brought by labor brokers to build the Central Pacific Railroad. Most arrived expecting to spend a few years working, thus earning enough money to return to China, build a house and marry.
As the gold mines began yielding less and the railroad neared completion, the broad availability of cheap and willing Chinese labor in such industries as cigar-rolling and textiles became a source of tension for white laborers, who thought that the Chinese were coming to take their jobs and threaten their livelihoods. Mob violence and rampant discrimination in the west drove the Chinese east into larger cities, where job opportunities were more open and they could more easily blend into the already diverse population. By 1880, the burgeoning enclave in the Five Points slums on the south east side of New York was home to between 200 and 1,100 Chinese. A few members of a group of Chinese illegally smuggled into New Jersey in the late 1870s to work in a hand laundry soon made the move to New York, sparking an explosion of Chinese hand laundries.
When the Exclusion Act was finally lifted in 1943, China was given a small immigration quota, and the community continued to grow, expanding slowly throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s. The garment industry, the hand-laundry business, and restaurants continued to employ Chinese internally, paying less than minimum wage under the table to thousands. Despite the view of the Chinese as members of a “model minority,” Chinatown’s Chinese came largely from the mainland, and were viewed as the “downtown Chinese," as opposed the Taiwan-educated “uptown Chinese,” members of the Chinese elite.
When the quota was raised in 1968, Chinese flooded into the country from the mainland, and Chinatown’s population exploded, expanding into Little Italy, often buying buildings with cash and turning them into garment factories or office buildings. Although many of the buildings in Chinatown are tenements from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the rents in Chinatown are some of the highest in the city, competing with the Upper West Side and midtown. Foreign investment from Hong Kong has poured capital into Chinatown, and the little space there is a precious commodity.
Today’s Chinatown is a tightly-packed yet sprawling neighborhood which continues to grow rapidly despite the satellite Chinese communities flourishing in Queens. Both a tourist attraction and the home of the majority of Chinese New Yorkers, Chinatown offers visitor and resident alike hundreds of restaurants, booming fruit and fish markets and shops of knick-knacks and sweets on torturously winding and overcrowded streets.
Sometimes it does seem like we haven't traveled all that far since the anti-Chinese riots and the Exclusion Act, since the internment camps of World War II. We think of Vincent Chin in Detroit. We remember the post-Rodney King plundering of Korean businesses in Los Angeles. We consider the Wen Ho Lee case. We read, with dismay, about a survey that finds that 25 percent of fellow Americans hold "very negative feelings" toward Chinese and Asian Americans. And this is not a poll taken in 1970. This was from a cross-section of people throughout the country almost exactly one year ago.
What to do about this? Among other things, like education and outreach, I say we celebrate. We take pride in ourselves and in each other. We raise our profiles and increase our activities in the community, in politics, in media and in the arts.
1 comment:
Thank you for this blog entry. I found it exceptionally informative and well written. I am an American of particualry mixed descent (the most dominant of which is African ancestry) from San Francisco. My mothers family still maintains amicable relations with our Chinese family in San Francisco where we're from. The current situation in San Francsico is an amazing tale from a historical perspective. As you mentioned in your blog, people of Asian ancestry endured rather tragic abuse on the West coast; however, they make up 70% of the cities populace and drive the lion's share of its economy today. It would appear that the Chinese fair relatively well on both coasts at this moment in time.
I digress, I really found the history of the New York Chinatown interesting because I had heard of it so often, but I, coming from San Francsico, could imagine no place as wonderously alive and interesting as the Chinatown in the city I grew up in. I see I may have been premature in my assessment. ;-)
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