At first, my trip to Greenpoint is the same as my commute to school. However as pass through the stop where I usually get off and I start to get butterflies in my stomach. It is the same feeling like during take off on an airplane where your body rises but your stomach stays in place. Soon I transfer on 4 Ave. – 9 St. for the G train and my world slowly begins to change. The train itself changes, being only half the length of a normal change. I know that soon enough I’ll be back in Greenpoint where I have been dozens of times before but with each time being different and unique. There is always something changing, for better or worse, in Greenpoint just like everything is changing all over the city. These changes are already visible as the G train pulls into the station. The train that would usually be crowded with older men and women with a majority being from Poland is now crowded by younger, up-coming, people that are from a wide variety of countries.

However, as I get off the train at Nassau Ave. I realize that some things cannot possibly change. For example, the street of Manhattan Ave. is so narrow yet always filled with cars, bikes, and buses brings me joy because I know that there is no way it can change. As I walk down the street, I see the same situation that happened on the train where when once the sidewalks were always filled with many dialects of Polish but now they are few and far in between each other.

There are still a lot of shops that bring back old memories. There is the candy shop that sells a many old Polish candies. I loved being in that shop as a kid because of all the cloyingly sweet smell of chocolate and sweets. Now, I love the old fashioned set up of the store where all the candies are in bins and you can bag them up and are charged based on weight. Not many stores do this in the USA with many candies being prepackaged, however in Poland this is a common practice and I loved being able determine how much candy I want. As I continue walking I pass the old church where I used to spend major Catholic Holidays. Most of these memories are from Christmas Eve and Easter where mass was held at crazy hours, 5:00 am and 12:30 am, respectively. When there is no mass at church it is filled with older women, usually praying for the well being of themselves and their families. The church has a cool feeling to it with a light draft caused by the windows open near the ceiling. The ceiling, high and vaulted, covered in a mosaic that I remember constantly looking up at as if I was looking at God.

Further down Manhattan Ave. there is Greenpoint Ave., what I consider to be the life of Greenpoint. I turn to the left and find the main branch of the Polish-Slavic Federal Credit Union or just PSFCU. Looking at it, I notice that it has remained untouched throughout all these years. It is still supported by its white stone columns that make the entire building seem important, like it’s the White House. Right next to it is my favorite Polish restaurant, Karczma, which translates simply to inn or pub. This is my favorite place to eat because of the atmosphere. The walls are bare brick and dimly lit by lighting fixtures in the wall meant to look like candles. The tables are made out of old, gnarled wood and surrounded by benches instead of chairs. The whole place looks old-fashioned and I love it. Everything in the place reminds me of Poland, the appetizers come out on thick wooden cutting boards instead of plates just like how my grandma would make me lunch. I also remember how this is the first place I thought of when my old girlfriend asked me to take her somewhere Polish; “It doesn’t get more Polish than this”, I told her.

Next place I walk to is an old bakery, Syrena, where my grandfather used to work at when he came to America in the 50’s to make some extra money to send back home. I don’t know how it looked 50 years ago but I like to pretend it did not change. I look at the place now and imagine that is how he saw it when he was coming in to work at 4 and bake the bread for the morning masses. I hope that the only thing that changed are the faces, however I don’t know how if this is true. All I know is that whenever I ask anyone inside about my grandfather that they never heard of him not even the managers. It is a strange feeling knowing that he was there at one point put left no trace, similar to a ghost.

Walking back to the train, I feel prideful of what I saw that day. I am proud that Polish people have set up a small part of the city where I can feel closer to Poland than America. I know that many immigrants strive toward assimilation, however I am sad about the culture they leave behind when they “become American”. I remember streets in Bensonhurst that would be lined with small Italian businesses that now have been replaced by a lot of chain stores and the old businesses are a dying breed. It makes me proud of the Polish people in Greenpoint for sticking around for this long even though they are also slowly dying out. I hope that my children will be able to experience the same memories as I in Greenpoint.

Even though I am technically not an immigrant since I was born in Brooklyn, I can relate to what it feels like to be an immigrant because of my childhood. I was born in Brooklyn in December 26, 1995; there I spent a majority of my first year. However as my family was having financial hardships, they found it very to difficult to find the time and money to provide and care for me. So, when I still wasn’t a year old, I moved to Poland to live with my grandmother. I spent approximately three years in Poland only coming back to the US for a few weeks in the summer to see my family again. In Poland, I was raised to be Polish with Polish morals and attributes, influenced by Polish culture. As I grew up around the age of 3, I could already read, write, and speak fluently in Polish. I would’ve also went to my first year of school to Polish pre-K but my mom decided that it would be better for me to wait until American pre-K. I understand that she didn’t want me to get too accustomed to living in Poland but the damage was already done.

When I returned to America for good about 4 years old, my whole world turned upside down. These children here didn’t speak Polish like the ones in Poland. I had no way of communicating with them yet other than a few lines of broken English that were well known and commonly used in Poland. I felt like I was born again into a new world this time. I got so used to calling Poland my home that when I was uprooted I went through shock. Nothing mattered to me anymore because I wasn’t in Poland. By the time I began to accept my new surroundings is when I realized that I would have to start all over again. This gave me the motivation to do well in schools here. Even before I started, I forced my mom to teach me simple things like the alphabet and numbers. In school, I struggled for a while both with academics and friends. The way children interact in the two countries was so different in my mind. In Poland, children would be so much more open with each other. They would horse around and rough house and weren’t afraid to get dirty. Yet here, everyone was afraid to touch anyone almost.

Growing up I still had somewhat of an identity crisis. I was not sure where I belonged, whether I was Polish or American. However as I grew older, I began to meet more kids in the same situation as me that they came to America at a young age too. Together we began to form our own hangouts and our own slang. Soon enough we felt we have achieved our own identities as Polish-Americans and did not have to rely on each other as much when it comes to making friends and being independent.  I feel like I have learned so much from being both Polish and American and that I have both of my heritages to thank for the excellent position I am in now in life.

Reylyn Roldan was born in the Philippines and lived there for eight years before coming to New York City. However, her first family member to come to America was her great-aunt, Felicitas Bobrow, who left the Philippines in early 1960 for America. During this time the only means of transport was by boat. She sailed the Pacific Ocean and first traveled to Hawaii and from there to California. She came here alone with only a few words of English, enough to carry out a conversation. After nearly a decade of working as a biochemist, she earned enough money to help bring her two sisters and brother in law to the United States. At this point, Felicitas Bobrow moved to the East Coast and conducted research at many prestigious universities such as Rutgers and Columbia. Together with her sisters, they all decided to settle down in Queens. This was only temporary because as soon as Reylyn’s grandparents earned enough money to bring their four sons they all moved to Staten Island to accommodate the increasing number of family members. Finally Reylyn and her mother and two brothers came to America 6 years later in 2003.

Reylyn’s family had deep roots in the Philippines with a lineage that goes all the way back to Spain; her family even has their own family crest. They originated from the northern islands of the Philippines in a rural landscape where they lived as farmers and fishermen. It was hard to make a living however, unless you were born into a wealthy family. There was a large disparity between social classes and a larger gap in the income between the upper and lower class. With government corruption and appeasement, moving up the social system was impossible. That’s why they decided to move to America; to pursue a better life for themselves and their families. Reylyn’s family saw America as the land of freedom and opportunity and in order to improve their living conditions they decided to make the ultimate sacrifice of leaving behind their homeland and immigrate to America. However the whole family couldn’t afford to go all at once because the trip is long and expensive. Instead only a few people at a time – roughly every decade – could make the trip. But now they all live in Staten Island, New York City and they came a long way from the lifestyle they left behind them.

Yet immigrating to New York City is only half the trouble. The second half is finding ones home here. That means finding a community or a neighborhood where one feels comfortable and at peace. One barrier from stopping Reylyn’s family from finding their home was the language. Only Reylyn’s grandmother was lucky enough to know English well because she was a schoolteacher and she was able to teach her four sons and her husband the language. Another barrier is the weather. The family was used to the tropical island weather of the Philippines where the lowest it gets in the year was 70 degrees Fahrenheit. However the weather cannot be changed, so Reylyn and her family had to get used to it. Even though it was hard for them to deal with the weather at times, it was also a new experience. For them, their first snowfall was magical because they never had such a thing in the Philippines  and they were just in awe at its beauty. Another big barrier Reylyn mentioned was the diet change. Not only was the cuisine different from the Philippines but the serving sizes were too. Bigger pizza. Bigger sodas. Bigger plates. Everything in America was bigger. Then there were new tastes for them such as mustard which Reylyn said tasted weird the first time she tried it. The last barrier to be broken is the life style differences between her family and native New Yorkers. New York is such a faced paced city especially when compared to a little Philippine farm village. The way people walk here seemed like running to Reylyn and it seemed that everyone was always in such a hurry to get places. No one looked at each other. There were no conversations. No pleases. No thank yous. No smiles. Everyone seemed to care about themselves and carried on only to their next destination. However Reylyn and her family soon learned that they had to look hard to spot the kindness in people’s hearts here. They learned that people are a lot more intimate here than the people back in their village.

By coming to America, Reylyn’s family’s hopes and dreams were to provide happiness for the rest of their family to provide their children and future generations with the freedom and privileges that were only in America at that time. Here, in America, they had an opportunity to work hard and they seized it. Through this journey they learned to never give up even when times are rough and to remind themselves where they came from and how they got there. Reylyn and her family pass along their traditions, heritage, and family story to their children and hope that they do the same to their children. But now they have a new place to call home and a new place to create new memories and traditions for future generations. As far as Reylyn sees it, her family’s hopes and dreams definitely have been realized in the half century that it took for them to get here and they wouldn’t do anything differently.