“Ey! Strawberries one dollar! Fresh!” barked over “Very fresh! Very cheap!” We can only decipher these two particular vendors’ words out of the fifteen vendors who dot the wide sidewalk of Forsyth Street
competing for a couple of dollar bills at a time.
I went “grocery shopping” with my 32-year old cousin Amy, who has grown up and continued to live in Chinatown now with her parents and her husband and 7-year old son in a little apartment at 69 Eldridge Street.
Her English is adequate but heavily accented. Ten years ago, when I came with my dad to buy our weekly produce, I would not have known how to write the vendors’ words, because they were in Mandarin or Fukienese.
The English that perpetrates the flea market on Forsyth nowadays does not imply that the vendors are distinctly “American.” Their broken English is not a purposeful simplification for the benefit of the English-deficient Chinese; it’s simply the level of English these immigrant vendors also have, and it’s become the new immigrant language here. Immigrants from Ecuador, India, Italy, Pakistan, Mexico—my cousin explains to me, knowing these specifics since she’s interacted with them almost daily.
The English that perpetrates the flea market on Forsyth nowadays does not imply that the vendors are distinctly “American.”
My eyes glaze over at the abundance of fruity and leafy colors—my, has the selection expanded since I’ve been here with my dad! I recognize the Chinatown basics: Fuji apples, Korean pears, dragonfruit, starfruit, durian, Shanghai bok choy, Napa cabbage. Every vendor has a little bit of this and a little bit of that; some vendors specialize in only fruits or only greens, but particular foods certainly repeat—bringing us back to the compilation of voices competing for our attention.
How does Amy even decide from which vendor she wants to buy her basics?
“Easy: the Indian lady always has the freshest and plumpest fruit for the lowest prices, but her vegetables are overpriced. The Italian ones grow the best vegetables—never wilted. I go to the Mexican guys when we want something special, like papaya or longan,” she tells me in our dialect.
Sure enough, she waited on the long line for the Indian lady for her Fuji apples, picked out her greens from the Italian ones, and since she had a guest (me), she added a 5-lb bunch of longan from the Mexican guys to her litany of fresh produce.
When I asked Amy the question of the year, which is how she felt about other ethnicities permeating the Chinese flea market business, she responded, in our dialect, “This isn’t the first time I’ve seen foreigners in Chinatown,” with a chuckle. “As long as they sell the fruits we need for a reasonable price, to me it doesn’t matter who they are. It’s good to have a break from all Chinese faces anyway.”
We lugged the red plastic bags back up the stairs to her apartment, to be greeted by her mother—my aunt—asking, “Where did you get these pears?” “Did she raise the price?” “Ah, why didn’t you go to the white man [Italian] for this?”
Just from these interrogations, I could tell there was a racist connotation in her tone, but it was used to differentiate, not to judge. Even my 55-year old aunt who immigrated to America only a couple years ago because of my cousin’s new citizenship accepts the fact that she gets her Chinese produce—the food most near and dear to a country folk’s heart—from people she had never seen in her life before moving to the United States.
the fact that she gets her Chinese produce—the food most near and dear to a country folk’s heart—from people she had never seen in her life before moving to the United States.
The first thing we do when we meet people who are different from us is judge them on appearance, which usually sets them worlds apart. However, the people of Chinatown have been forced to recognize that these “foreigners” to the ghetto—despite their physical variations—value the same things the Chinese do: money, hard work, and most importantly, fresh food.
There is no fresher sight than seeing the exchange of broken sentences and American currency among people who look like they belong oceans apart. Through the timeless, boundless fresh food market, these people become more American than they realize themselves to be, using American values of capitalism to survive in their new home. Their shared limitations in the English language and in financial resources force them into this market of unlimited opportunities for integration. For some of these immigrants, a step into the Forsyth Street flea market is their first step into the American lifestyle.
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