New York’s Chinatown is the largest Chinatown in the western hemisphere.
New York’s Chinatown houses half of the 300,000 Chinese living in New York.
The heart of Chinatown is the eight blocks bordered by Canal Street to the
north, Baxter Street to the west, Bowery Street to the east and Worth
Street and Park Row to the south. The area is nestled among courthouses,
and is neck-to-neck with Little Italy and the Lower East Side.
Although few Chinese were present in New York prior to the late 1800s,
they were already established in California where 25,000 arrived in 1852.
Most worked in Californian goldmines and later on the railroads linking the
west to the east. The 75 Chinese immigrants who lived in New York in 1870
were largely those who jumped ship and established ethnic groups. By 1890,
New York’s Chinese population had grown to 12,000. Most were railway
workers who traveled across the continent from California to settle in New
York.
In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited further Chinese immigration
into the US. The outbreak of World War I perpetuated the isolationist
stance that paved the way for the immigration bans in the 1920s. Mass
immigration as seen in earlier decades came to an end.
Change came first in the late 1940s, when women who were wives of
veterans and Chinese men with American citizenship, flocked to join their
husbands. Then in 1965, limitations on Chinese immigration were lifted, and
throngs of immigrants settled in from Taiwan and Hong Kong.
The Chinese in New York Today
The Chinese in New York were quick to assimilate into their new
environments, and embraced American ways in no time. Whether in
business or academia, the Chinese-Americans are among the top achievers
in the country.
In the mid-60s, the young and educated Chinese ended a century of
isolation by taking up the cause of the disadvantaged in New York’s
chinatown by setting up institutions like the Basement Workshop, in
conjunction with other ethnic groups like the Jews, the blacks and the
Italians.
The New York Chinese today can be broadly divided into two large groups
today: the working-class Chinese who work within Chinatown, and the
middle-class Chinese who live away from it.
Resources:
Chapter 15 (Chinatowns), Sons of the Yellow Emperor: The story of the Overseas
Chinese secker & Warburg, 1990 Lynn Pan
Reconstructing Chinatown: Ethnic Enclave, Global Change by Jan Lin: an
ambitious effort to ground the definition of globalization by examining the
conflicts and interactions of labor, capital, community and state in a
specific urban space---Chinatown---within a global metropolis, New York
City.
Chinatown No More : Taiwan Immigrants in Contemporary New York
(Anthropology of Contemporary Issues) by Hsiang-Shui Chen
Chinatown : The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave
(Conflicts in Urban and Regional Development) by Min Zhou
http://www.chinatown-online.com/nychinatown.htm
Cultural Identity
Impact Of The Model Minority Image –
http://www.itp.berkeley.edu/~asam121/model_minority/impact.html
New York Before Chinatown : Orientalism and the Shaping of American
Culture, 1776-1882 by John Kuo Wei Tchen
Economic Impact of Sep 11 Attacks on New York’s Chinatown
http://multimedia.belointeractive.com/attack/economicimpact
Organised Crime and Gangs
Chinatown Gangs : Extortion, Enterprise, and Ethnicity
(Studies in Crime and Public Policy) by Ko-Lin Chin
| Compiled by Willie Hsu |