My Korean immigrant neighbors have been in the United States longer than I’ve been alive. I grew up having them as both my neighbors and as my neighborhood grocers. When I saw the topic of this seminar’s discussion, I decided to talk with them about their experience of starting their own business in Elmhurst.
Mr. and Mrs. Kim arrived here in the early 90s. They came here hoping to establish their own business because of what they had heard about Elmhurst from their American family members. They recounted to me the network of family and friends that helped to get them started in America. Within a year, they established a town grocery and delicatessen in an already existent retail space on the corner of my block.
This deli served a great number of people in my immediate community. It out-competed another close business in terms of cleanliness and variety, so much so that the other business eventually shut its doors. Another factor in the Kim’s success was that they served both American commercial items as well as ethnic based goods. These ethnic based items appealed not only to Koreans, but also to Chinese, Hispanic and Indian customers. This well demonstrates the notion of the middleman minority.
Funny enough, though they eventually left because of rent disputes, the grocery was taken up by another Korean family. What are the Kim’s doing now, you might ask? They’re running a dry cleaners out of Forest Hills, and their teenage son wants to work in finance. Though this is just a case study, I was interested in just how parallel their lives run to the descriptions of Korean immigrants given in our readings.
