Kung Hei Fat Choy - Happy Chinese New Year from NYC

Travel is a fantastic way to open ones mind. If you set out on your journey of exploration with preconceived answers and expected observations, you will not benefit from the knowledge born of the experience. You don’t always need to leave your neighborhood to gain the same benefits that long distance travel can provide. Immerse yourself in the sights and sounds that emanate from your local community to expand your world. The above photo was not taken in Hong Kong but rather, during Chinese new year celebrations in Chinatown in New York City. Another example of why we encourage you to explore locally.

In the past, overcrowded Chinatowns in urban areas were generally shunned by the non-Chinese public as ethnic ghettos, and seen as places of vice and cultural insularity where "unassimilable foreigners" congregated. Nowadays, many old and new Chinatowns are considered significant centers of commercialism and tourism. Some of them also serve, to varying degrees, as centers of multiculturalism, if in a somewhat superficial manner.

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.

From the start, Chinese immigrants tended to clump together as a result of both racial discrimination, which dictated safety in numbers, and self-segregation. Unlike many ethnic ghettos of immigrants, Chinatown was largely self-supporting, with an internal structure of governing associations and businesses which supplied jobs, economic aid, social service, and protection. Rather than disintegrating as immigrants assimilated and moved out and up, Chinatown continued to grow through the end of the nineteenth century, providing contacts and living arrangements — usually 5-15 people in a two room apartment subdivided into segments — for the recent immigrants who continued to trickle in despite the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943), to date the only non-wartime federal law which excluded a people based on nationality, was a reaction to rising anti-Chinese sentiment. This resentment was largely a result of the willingness of the Chinese to work for far less money under far worse conditions than the white laborers and the unwillingness to "assimilate properly". The law forbids naturalization by any Chinese already in the United States; bars the immigration of any Chinese not given a special work permit deeming him merchant, student, or diplomat; and, most horribly, prohibits the immigration of the wives and children of Chinese laborers living in the United States. The Exclusion Act grew more and more restrictive over the following decades, and was finally lifted during World War II, only when such a racist law against a wartime ally became an untenable option.

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 knickknacks and sweets on torturously winding and overcrowded streets.

Of course, nothing is more unique than their unusual foods and remedies. A walk through the crowded aisles will expose you to a world of curious fruits, roots, and who knows what else!

Popular items many tourists like to shop for include authentic rice bowls, tea services, and chopsticks. Of course, this is all leading to the most popular aspect of Chinatown...restaurants!

With around 300 restaurants, Chinatown means food! A majority of visitors come down here for authentic cuisine amidst the exotic atmosphere. You'll find the majority of dining choices along the narrow, winding Mott and Mulberry Streets just below Canal Street. Today, Chinatown remains not only a popular tourist but also an important community containing over 30% of NYC's growing Chinese population.

Fresh fish finds its way from the new Fulton fish market in the Bronx, offering a distinctive Chinese style. Residents need to eat too and many of the markets cater to these hungry, hard-working families looking for dinner.

Kung Hei Fat Choy - Happy Chinese New Year
2009, the year of the Ox!