So my name is Brian Wang, and I’m (yet another) biomedical engineering major. I was born in Elmhurst and lived in Flushing until I was four. Then, my mom and I moved to Bayside where I lived until I was ten and finally to Williston Park (Long Island) until I moved out into The Towers for college. Having lived in the New York Metropolitan area for so long, I’ve gotten used to and appreciate the diversity the City has to offer. There’s practically no other place where I can hop on a bus for half an hour and see the demographic of the immediate area around me change drastically.

I’m a first generation ABT – American-born-Taiwanese. Most people use the term ABC for American-born Chinese, but since all of my family was born and raised in Taiwan, I prefer the term ABT. Both of my parents earned their Bachelor’s degrees in Taiwan, and my dad later earned two Master’s degrees here in New York. While growing up, I definitely was influenced by my parents’ immigrant roots, but living in New York City kind of blended those roots with everyone else’s experience, so I’ve grown to be open-minded.

Some of the things I like to do for fun include watching sports, playing Ultimate Frisbee, reading books and blogs, blogging, playing guitar and piano, and exploring the city. I love the freedom that my college life has given me and I look forward to a semester taking Peopling of New York!

IMMIGRATION VIDEO

BLOG POSTS

Five Blocks Away But A World Apart

Last Friday (March 1^st) was the first time I’d ever been to visit the Tenement Museum. Although I can’t claim to know everything about early 20^th century immigration and life in a tenement building from a quick tour, the tour did open my eyes to how cramped and drab life was back during the early 20^th century. Immigrants came to the United States to start a new life and/or to escape persecution. However, they more often than not found equally as bad conditions in the United States; only a small amount of people actually managed to expand their fortunes. Jews were especially pressured because they often could not return where they came from because they were persecuted in their home country. After leaving the tenement museum, I had such a mixed and hard-to-describe variety of emotions. So, I thought that the best way for me to share my reaction to the museum visit is to describe a day of life a hypothetical Jewish immigrant living in a tenement building during the early 20^th century.          

It’s five am on a Monday morning, and you slowly begin to wake up as the sunlight peeks in your tenement building. As you sit up in bed next to your still sleeping wife, you glance around your room hoping to see something other than clothing to be sewn and cleaning to be done. You get disappointed as you see that nothing has changed since last night. This is the life you’ve come to accept as a first generation Russian-Jewish immigrant living in the tenements of the Lower East Side in the early 20^th century.

As the rest of your family – your wife and three children – begin to wake up, you begrudgingly force yourself to begin the workday. As you look at your work order for the day, a frown creeps on your face. Your boss has indicated that you will be hand delivering your crop of dresses to the store at the end of the day, requiring you to walk up past the riches of Fifth Avenue. “At least I’ll be getting some fresh air,” you say to yourself as your employees begin to arrive for a ten-hour day at work.

Your day passes as usual – a combination of meticulously stitching dresses together to meet your boss’s stringent standards and longingly staring out the window at nowhere at particular, wishing that you could be living somewhere else with a less stressful lifestyle.

As the day draws to a close, you pick up the dozens of dresses you and your employees made during the past week and head out the door. As you walk crosstown to Fifth Avenue, your surroundings morph before your eyes. Gone are blocks upon blocks of crowded street markets and tenement buildings. In their place, you find blocks of high end department stores – Bloomingdales, Macy’s, and Sak’s on Fifth Avenue. Gone are the streets packed with immigrants and in are wealthy men and women strolling through the streets shopping for expensive luxuries. Most of these people have never set foot in, let alone seen, a tenement building, yet they ironically are wearing and shopping for clothing people like you make for a living. If you ever do make it out of the tenements, you hope that you can teach your children to live modestly and not be as oblivious as the people you’ve seen today.

I really found the tenement museum to be a portal into how immigrants during the early 20^th century lived like. Although my parents were immigrants themselves, they flew over from Taiwan on planes and both had college degrees; in other words, they didn’t have to struggle with living in tenement buildings for most, if not all, of their lives.

BOOK REVIEW

Joseph Berger, author of The World in a City, has seemingly always had affection for New York City culture and diversity. At the ripe young age of eight, Berger stumbled upon a guidebook of New York City and decided to take a day trip, walking ten miles back and forth across Manhattan. The memories of the city’s diversity, richness, and allure has never left Berger, who now works as a neighborhood correspondent for the New York Times. In fact, he spent three years trekking across New York City as an adult, interviewing people and gathering information on the post-1960s-immigration New York City for a book, A World in a City. By writing this book, Berger hoped to show the history of and capture the dynamic New York City landscape before it changes again.

When writing about dense topics such as history, immigration, and culture, it can be easy for an author to present his findings in a textbook or research paper-like manner. However, Berger writes out his work to be like a written documentary. Like a documentary, The World in a City follows a logical progression and presents an argument with supporting evidence from start to end. Berger started off with a neighborhood of interest – Astoria – and slowly got around to exploring and analyzing other areas in New York, ending with the Lower East Side. He also throws in a chart at the end of each chapter that gives the book a reference guide-like feel, listing important sites in each neighborhood and pointing out places of interest. However, he doesn’t write about every neighborhood in New York City; rather, he specifically chose neighborhoods with defining characteristics that became significantly altered by immigration starting in 1965.

By focusing on such neighborhoods, Berger was able to present his theory that neighborhoods in New York City are constantly changing with each new wave of immigrants in and migrations out, supporting his claims with evidence from interviews and observations (just like a documentary would). The evidence he uses doesn’t just support his argument, however; it often provides insight into what life is like for people living in neighborhoods during and after a time of drastic ethnical and cultural change.

As a documentary-style book, I found that The World in a City did a remarkable job of presenting a wealth of information in an engaging manner without being overwhelming. At no point did I feel lost or felt that too much information was being presented. Part of the reason I felt that way was because each chapter was almost an independent reading. If I had so desired, I could begin reading at any chapter in the book and not feel lost as long as I had read the introduction. Furthermore, Berger seamlessly integrated interviews, statistics, and observations in showing both how life have changed for neighborhoods after immigration as well as the different lifestyles people in each neighborhood take.

As Berger tours Ditmas Park, for example, he notes the diversity of the area after the immigration waves –Whites, Blacks, Asians, and Latinos living in the same area. Diversity is usually received in a positive light, but resident Paul Feldman complain that all the diversity leads to a lack of diversity; people only want to associate and socialize with people of their own race and background, leading to a lack of cultural integration. On the other hand, Afghans who settled in Flushing seem more willing to integrate American culture into their lifestyles and let their own culture seep into Flushing itself, building mosques and starting shish kebab stands. Coming from Afghanistan, most families stress the importance of women being married off at a young age and not seeking higher education. However, as they spent more time in America, they started to realize the importance of education in moving up in American society and have allowed daughters to attend college. Furthermore, women are starting to find their spouses on their own – through school or other means – and get their families to set up the marriage so that it looks like the marriage was arranged, showing an integration of American dating culture with their own culture. With so much firsthand information, Berger doesn’t need to state any of his claims that I mentioned before; it’s obvious how neighborhoods have changed from immigration.

As well as Berger manages to present his findings, however, I question whether presenting his findings in a single, 300-page book split into multiple chapters is the most effective way of getting his points across. Such a method of presentation has its upsides to causal readers and publishers – the book can be read in a single sitting or split across multiple readings since each chapter is almost self-sufficient and it is easier for publishers to print and sell at a reasonable price point. However, for people who may be interested in learning more about New York City’s immigration history, a series of books, each touching upon a selection of neighborhoods sharing similar characteristics, such as demographic profile, would have been more effective at presenting Berger’s argument. At many points while reading the book, I felt that Berger could have written more about a specific neighborhood. For example, he didn’t talk about Flushing’s largest population – Chinese-American immigrants! While this was a one-time occurrence (missing a part of a neighborhood), it led me to believe Berger had so much more to tell, especially since he spent three years researching New York City and interviewed dozens of people in each neighborhood he visited.

Weighing both the pros and cons of The World in a City, I would recommend anyone from a casual tourist to a New York City history buff to read the book (with a note to the latter audience to seek more detailed material). The book does a great job at it’s goal – showing how New York City has the diversity of the world after the immigration waves of the mid 1900s, and it’s especially a useful pick-up read for tourists looking to learn about a neighborhood before or after visiting one.

GREENWICH NEIGHBORHOOD VIDEO