Week 2

Ellick’s failure is both predictable and mortifying. He comes to the community on the idea that he can simply stroll into an established community and become one with all of the ethnic enclaves he sees. However, Ellick never makes an attempt to connect with the culture. He describes himself bike riding, jogging, and photographing (well, attempting to photograph) the neighborhood he lives in. How he expects to learn anything as he rushes past or stares through a machine, I don’t know. Ellick’s failure is that he treated this ethnic enclave like a zoo – the people should be on display for him to see, their entire lives lived out in the open for this journalist to watch. Ellick never makes an attempt to connect with the people he’s living near. He remarks that the train ride he hears “Arabic, Urdu, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin and a dose of English.” People connect through language, and if he doesn’t speak any of these languages, he’s not going to connect with anyone. He lists Spanish and Indonesian proficiency on his website, but nowhere did he seem to use it. In addition, he complains that he didn’t make any friends in Queens and had to bring his friends from Manhattan. But nowhere in the article did he describe talking to anyone but the one old woman who made excellent curry. I think Ellick’s main flaw is that he had no respect for the cultures that he was mixing with. He assumed that since he is a well-traveled journalist; he would be able to simply slide into the underbelly of Queens. I think Ellick’s killer flaw, the one that made all the difference, was the fact that he left. The article doesn’t give us a timeframe, but it sounds as though Ellick only spent a few months, maybe a year in this town. Immigrant communities are insular communities by nature. People who are grouped together do so for a reason. Even if the neighborhood he was exploring was middle-class white suburbia, I doubt he would have the trust or friendship of the residents in just a few months.  Had he stayed for a few years and dropped his pretentious superiority, he may have been able to get into a few of the places he claims he so longed for.