New York's Chinatown: A Reflection of the City - Essay Example

New York’s Chinatown: A Reflection of the Although most people have a tendency to think of a placesuch as New York City, as having a single identity, this is often far from the actual truth. To really understand a place, the best way is to go there and live the experience for a while; get to know the people, the streets, the alleys, the businesses, the residents, everything. This reveals the tremendous cultural diversity, myriad ways of thinking and pockets of ethnicities that exist in small spaces scattered throughout the metropolis. In most cases, however, this is not possible or even necessarily desirable for a variety of reasons. Particularly in the case of a city like New York, the great influx of cultures that have come together to form what we know as America can be appreciated because of the way in which the city continues to remain culturally segregated to a great extent. While the various nationalities obviously mix and move about a great deal, the most general characterization of New York City must be reflective of its cultural representation as pockets of the city reflect the national characteristics of the people who have gathered there. Examination into one particular area of New York, Chinatown, illustrates this characteristic element of the city at large. In examining the various elements that comprised early conceptions of Chinatown, it is helpful to have an idea of the specifics of the area and the physical image people of New York had of the Chinese. As the below map demonstrates, Chinatown consists of basically three streets. Clark, 1896 Although the space available to the residents of Chinatown is demonstrably small, the people managed to find room enough for everyone to live by using thin wooden dividers or simply respecting each other’s space. The crowded nature of this housing is somewhat visible in the below photo taken of Pell Street in 1899. Chin, 2008 The buildings that can be seen in the image typically housed commercial businesses on the floor level, clubhouses or public rooms on the next level and living quarters above this. The high number of people in the street is indicative of Chinatown on an average weekend, when the population of this segment of the city was usually much higher as those working in other areas of New York returned home or simply visited Chinatown for a sense of society and community. According to Helen Clark (1896), Chinatown wasn’t exclusively Chinese even in her time, yet the environment seemed completely unique to the Chinese culture. “Its inhabitants are not by any means confined to the Chinese, for many Italians, a few negroes, and a few Irish people share the crowded tenements with them. For the most part the buildings are old and dilapidated, and those converted to Chinese use have been refitted with the flimsiest of wooden partitions and are void of many of the most ordinary of modern conveniences” (Clark 104). As she discusses this area of New York, Clark illustrates how the blocks immediately surrounding that segment known as Chinatown are notoriously dangerous and corrupt by comparison. This impression was corroborated by a former captain of the police precinct that includes Chinatown. “John [meaning the average Chinese]minds his own business … and give us very little trouble. We make fewer arrests among the Chinese than among any other foreign nationality in proportion to their numbers. They settle most of their disputes among themselves” (Campbell 551). While Chinatown itself was considered quite crowded and busy and illegal activities were known to occur there, by contrast with its immediate surroundings, Chinatown emerges as a model of respectable society. Despite the relatively sedate nature of this segment of town, as Clark hinted, Chinatown still contained its criminal element. One article, written in 1910, details the attempted robbery of a Chinese restaurant establishment in terms of absolute terror on the part of the customers, yet comprising of a simple attempt to steal money from the register near the front door. “According to Ming, the man rushed upon him at the cash register, shoved him aside and pulled out the cash drawer. Ming shoved it back and grappled with him” (Thieves Beaten 1). No one was killed in the incident and only the suspects, the owner of the restaurant and one other employee was injured. This seems to have been a rare occurrence among Chinamen as “they are honest among themselves, and so far as I know they rarely steal from each other” (Campbell 551). Another common assumption about the prevalence of crime in Chinatown is that every individual in this part of the city is engaged in either the opium trade or gambling. “Nearly every Chinaman in Mott Street – and in the whole of New York for that matter – is fond of fan-tan and other gambling games, and nearly every Chinaman smokes opium” (Campbell 552). Despite this common assumption, though, Clark (1896) insists that this is not entirely the case. “That Chinatown is not wholly a place of opium-joints and gambling dens, as public prejudice would have you believe, is proved by a census of the streets which recently revealed sixty-five stores and eighteen gambling places. Since our police do not read the Chinese language, the games of chance and the sale of opium may be openly advertised with perfect impunity, and they are constantly so advertised in red placards pasted on walls, doors and windows” (Clark 106). Thus, while activities such as gambling and opium use might not be quite as rampant as it is presented in most cases, even those most sympathetic to the area find it impossible to simply dismiss these issues. It is generally assumed by most of the population that New York is full of gangsters, although the typical image of this is that of the Italian oriented mob. In this area, too, Chinatown is representative of the big city. Chinatown is home to the Tong, a particularly long-lived organized crime syndicate that, even in Chinatown, has its outbreak of violence bringing it to the attention of the outside public. One such instance was reported in The New York Times on November 22, 1920. The article details the public shooting of a young man who apparently knew his life was forfeit and illustrates the prevalence of the gangs in Chinatown. “Tong wars are usually caused, according to experts on Chinatown, by the suspicion of one tong that its troubles with the police are due to spying and treachery by the other tong, or by the fact or suspicion of one tong that the other tong’s gambling men have become too good friends with the police” (300 Sightseers, 2). Although Chinatown might be considered a completely secularized society within the heart of the city, its inhabitants started expanding out into the rest of the city, in much the same way that other races would occasionally interact with them. In an article dated as early as 1903, Chinese people were establishing businesses outside of their small Chinatown central location. On the suggestion of a patron, one Chinese man moved his chop suey restaurant out of Chinatown in order to make it more available to New York residents who appreciated the food, but did not care to go all the way into the Chinatown district. “The result has been the establishment, within a few months, of one hundred or more chop suey places between Forty-fifth Street and Fourteenth Street, and from the Bowery to Eighth Avenue” (Chop Suey Resorts, 2). In addition to chop suey restaurants, the Chinese had also established numerous laundries throughout the city, carefully designed to present competition to other laundries run by other ethnicities, but not to compete with other Chinese establishments. According to Campbell, “the Chinese residents of New York are chiefly engaged in the laundry business. There are about seven hundred laundries in the city, and as each one employs from two to half a dozen people the number of Chinese residents is by no means small” (Campbell 550). However, despite their success and their seemingly accepted subservient position within society, there remained numerous problems as the Chinese attempted to integrate into the city. Just as the Irish were experiencing troubles finding jobs and the Italians were instantly associated with organized crime, so the Chinese were fighting against their own brand of stereotype. When the chop suey restaurants began opening in other areas of the city than Chinatown, the immediate assumption was that the vices of the Chinese, namely their gambling and opium, were moving along with them to corrupt larger segments of the population. “Many persons who have seen this new crop of chop suey establishments have jumped to the conclusion that opium smoking and kindred vices usually associated with Chinamen have been going on there with the tacit consent of the police” (Chop Suey 2), but this accusation is soundly denied by the police, who asserted that the Chinese establishments were often more decorous than any other restaurant in town, partly because the Chinese proprietors were faster to run for help than to attempt to protect the restaurant and partly because the only beverage served was tea, reducing the number of drunken brawls often encountered at other places. Regardless of the actual state of things, though, single events in Chinatown had a tendency to have far-reaching consequences, such as the murder of Elsie Sigel. Her body was found stuffed in a trunk in a Chinese man’s apartment and the man had disappeared. Although the crime was never solved and further investigation proved that the young lady, a white girl of high social standing, had been on intimate terms with more than one Chinese man, the incident was used as an excuse to further regulate the movements of Chinese whenever they ventured outside of the district (11). Thus, in many ways, Chinatown of the early twentieth century can be seen as a microcosm of the city of New York. As a district, it represents the ethnically segregated nature of many sections of New York as individuals of similar backgrounds banded together to help each other out and to recreate, to some extent, the culture they are most comfortable with. However, in the various ways in which the ethnicities mixed from one segment of the city to another also illustrates the integration of cultures that could only happen in New York. This is further illustrated through the expansion of the Chinese into other segments of the city within the service capacity, such as through the laundries, chop suey restaurants and other services. While many attested to the lack of crime in this area, Chinatown even represents New York in this area as they had their own form of organized crime rings, drug houses and murders. The one difference here is that when a white woman was killed in Chinatown, the inhabitants of this area were suddenly subjected to severe restrictions on their movements, a condition intended to reinforce the superiority of the white man. Works Cited Anbinder, Tyler. “Five Points.” Campbell, Helen. Darkness and Daylight. 1895. Chin, RK. “Historical Photos.” A Journey Through Chinatown. (2008). April 26, 2008 < http://www.nychinatown.org/history/early1900s.html> Clark, Helen. “The Chinese of New York.” Century 53. November 1896. Lui, Mary Ting Yi. The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City. Three New York Times articles. C1900. Read More