Helen
It is a cloudy, unseasonably chilly day in the sleepy village of Mount Kisco, located in Westchester County, New York. Helen Zhang scurries around the kitchen, busily preparing an assortment of small snacks, despite my numerous pleas that there is no need. Her kitchen is almost immaculate, except for the the stacks of sheet music that are scattered across her counters and sit in piles in few quiet corners. She brings plates of vegetables and a sliced loaf of bread that she just took from the oven. Helen then joins me at the table smiling.
Helen Zhang is practically my second mother. Her oldest daughter has been my best friend since 2005, her youngest daughter is my sisters best friend, and Helen herself is my mothers best friend.
Despite her slight accent, and the different cuisine she served at sleepovers, I rarely thought of Helen and her journey from South Korea until now. We sat at her table in the corner of her kitchen, located under an elegant crucifix that seemed almost too large for the room, and I began asking her of her immigrant story.
Helen decided to move her life to New York from Seoul, South Korea, in order to pursue a higher education, but to mainly follow her passion and love for the cello. Ever since she was a young girl of four, Helen and the cello have been inseparable. The early years of her childhood and adolescence were spent divided between school work, playing with her friends, exploring with her darling little sister, and playing the cello.
Leaving her sister was the hardest part of leaving her home. “My parents were overjoyed that I got accepted into the Manhattan School of Music”, Helen describes. “Of course they were sad and a bit worried, their daughter was moving across the globe”. Helen sips her iced coffee and then out of her wallet pulls a picture of herself and her younger sister when they we both just teenagers, gently sliding it across the table. “I too was sad to leave my parents. But leaving my sister was absolutely devastating. Even today after everything I have been through, I still consider it the hardest thing I have ever had to do. We were the best of friends, we did everything together”. Helen then jumps from story to story, chronicling all the adventures her and her best friend went on. “When we were younger we would even dress in the same exact clothes, put our hair in identical pigtails with the same red polka dot ribbon, and tell shopkeepers and the women in our favorite ice cream parlor that we were twins”.
In New York, not only were the opportunities limitless for her to build upon her advanced cello skills, but their was a level of diversity present that she did not have in Korea. She recounts how she went to New York once as a child. Eyes wide, she saw many, many, many different peoples living together. Countless cultures, countless traditions, countless cuisines and religions all concentrated on a small island. This fascinated Helen, and even at a young age she knew she needed to return to this mystical place that seemed to contain the whole wide world within its grid of streets.
South Korea is one of the most racially homogenous countries in the world. Though this mindset has, in recent years, begun to change; the people of South Korea have historically valued preserving their ethnic and cultural homogeneity. South Koreans are taught that ever since their founding five thousand or so years ago, they are a country of one race, of one blood. For a long period of time the racial diversity in South Korea was almost non-existent. However, the demographic makeup began to change in the country starting in the early 1990’s.
In the latter years of the twentieth century, the aging population of South Korea became plagued with an ever decreasing fertility rate (Park). By 1970 the fertility rate was only 4.5 children per women, but this further dropped to only 1.21 children per woman by the year 2014 (Park). This low fertility rate coupled with the high educational attainment that was achieved by the majority of South Koreans, left little of the population to work in the unskilled labor force. To combat this shortage, begging in the early 1990’s, the South Korean government began to allow unskilled migrant workers to trickle into the country. Despite the increase in immigration, the majority of the population in South Korea remained native by a landslide. Additionally, the majority of the immigrants are from other neighboring Asian countries. This lack of true diversity in her home country is one of the reasons that Helen found New York so appealing.
In the year 1994, Helen finally left for New York, a decision that changed her life. She arrived at the airport, tired, and a bit grumpy after listening to a baby cry for many hours, but nevertheless exhilarated. Navigating herself through the airport was practically a breeze for Helen. She surprised herself with how calm she felt, but this serene sensation could also have been extreme exhaustion. Throughout her years in school, she picked up a pretty solid understanding of the English language; an understanding that left her unnerved by all the English signs, announcements and directions that the airport seemed to throw at her at every corner, which typically overwhelms newcomers.
The bus ride on the way to her new apartment was equally as uncomfortable as the plane ride to the US. A man’s backpack hit her with every jolt of the bus. But every negative thought in Helen’s mind vanished immediately after the famous New York made its way into her longing gaze out the crowded buses window. “The moment I saw the skyline my heart stopped, and a lump formed in my throat. This is the moment it finally hit me that I’m moving to New York. That this is my new home. That I truly did say goodbye to my home”, Helen reminisces. “Finally when I got off the bus, that is where the nerves hit. I had to navigate through this foreign city to my new home, that definitely did not truly feel like home yet”. Luckily for Helen, her Uncle was by her side, helping her to settle into her new home, and grow accustomed to her New Life.
In the 1990’s, the total population of New York city was around 7,322,564. 28.4% of this total, or 2,082,931 people, made up the city’s total immigrant population. 2% of the immigrant population, or 56,949 individuals, made up the city’s total Korean immigrant population. Helen was one of these 56,949 individuals; a small fish in a vast, unexplored new ocean.
Asian immigration really began to pick up after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. This Act repealed previously in place immigration quotas that hindered Asian immigration terribly by favoring Northern and Western Europeans, and gave immigrants from all different countries an “equal” opportunity to apply for citizenship. This Act had a truly dramatic effect on the American population. For example, in 1960, Asians represented a mere 5% of the US foreign born population. However, by 2014, the Asian immigrant population grew 230% ! More specifically, after the passage of this Act, the Korean population also increased dramatically from 39,000 in 1970 to a whomping 290,000 in 1980. Then in 1990 it nearly doubled to 568,000, and in 2010 it reached 2.1 million.
Helen settled into her new life quickly and smoothly. She explained , “With so much on my plate all of a sudden, I really didn’t have much time to lull in my homesickness thinking of how much I missed my family, my friends, and my sister”. Everyday Helen would commute from her tiny apartment located on the Upper West Side; not to far away from Harlem 125th streets, and go to Columbia University to take extremely challenging ESL classes. When she was not in class, she was studying and playing the cello. “I never played so much cello in my life”, Helen recounts. But despite the oozing blisters that were on her hands, Helen loved every minute of it. Much of her time was also spent in Church, and Bible study. She grew very close to her Presbyterian Church community. Her fellow parish members became her closest friends; Helen attributes many of them to why she was able to settle into her new lifestyle so quickly. Even to this day, they remain as some of her closest friends.
Some of Helen’s favorite adventures she had in her early years in Manhattan include wandering the streets of SOHO, trying different coffee shops and viewing different art galleries. She also became passionate about running, a hobby she has kept up with to this day. I ask her what her most memorable moment she has of her first days in Manhattan. She smiles to herself, and then looks up at me again. She describes how during her first few weeks she often confined herself in her apartment, and fell asleep reading her Bible on the couch 
during the early hours of the night. However one night, Helen’s friend succeeded in dragging her out of her apartment. “We left the apartment at 9:00, and it felt so risky. I was a bit scared but my friend comforted me, saying it was fine. We went to this bagel place, and I was shocked that it was still open. But thats New York! We both ate bagels, the best bagels, and sat on a bench talking for such a long time. It was such a nice time.”
Helen moved from the city to suburbia many years ago to raise her family, however she yearns to move back. Though Westchester is absolutely lovely, Helen craves her city, the city she fell in love with. As she describes, “ My New York is an energetic, vibrant, bustling hub of creativity, diversity, and innovation, and that has incredibly rich culture”.
Refrences
“Demographics of South Korea.” Demographics of South Korea – New World Encyclopedia, web.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Demographics_of_South_Korea.
Lobo, Arun Peter, and Joseph J. Salvo. The Newest New Yorkers: Characteristics of the City’s Foreign-Born Population. The City of New York, Department of City Planning, Office of Immigrant Affairs, 2013.
Park, Young-bum. “South Korea Carefully Tests the Waters on Immigration, With a Focus on Temporary Workers.” Migrationpolicy.org, 28 Mar. 2017, www.migrationpolicy.org/article/south-korea-carefully-tests-waters-immigration-focus-temporary-workers.
Zong, Jie, and Jeanne Batalova Jie. “Korean Immigrants in the United States.” Migrationpolicy.org, 2 Mar. 2017, www.migrationpolicy.org/article/korean-immigrants-united-states.
Zong, Jie, and Jeane Batalova Jie. “Asian Immigrants in the United States.” Migrationpolicy.org, 2Mar. 2017, www.migrationpolicy.org/article/asian-immigrants-united-states.
