“Closed Book”

Adam Ellick appropriately named the article in which he describes his failure to fully understand Jackson Heights, Queens “A Melting Pot, and a Closed Book.” I think it is his own fault that he found Queens to be a “closed book.” In my opinion, he didn’t really give the neighborhood a fair chance. Sure, he observed people from many different backgrounds, but he never really interacted with them. He claims that most of them were scared of him or shut him out, but I don’t really think he tried hard enough to get through their walls.

I understand how he may have felt “closed out” because it is hard to just introduce yourself and mingle with people with whom you don’t seem to share anything. In middle school, I was the only white girl in my entire class. Music was the most important thing to me yet I couldn’t talk about my love for Evanescence and Fall Out Boy with any of my classmates because they had completely different tastes in music. Because I was the minority, I decided to give their music a try. I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but I could at least follow their conversations and have something to discuss with them. I think it would have been beneficial for Ellick to do something like that. In the article he says that he thought he could “make Queens work” by testing his hobbies. He probably should have tried to make new hobbies that would be more similar to those of the people with whom he wanted to interact. I think Ellick was trying to make Queens work for him when he should have been trying to make himself work for Queens. He shut himself out by not trying hard enough to experience the people of Queens. I think he fell back too quickly on tasting the ethnic foods and gave up too easily on meeting the actual people.