Post-174: In New York City (Part VIII, Asian New York)

Previous Post: Part VII, Modern Art

Two East-Asians, well dressed, passed us by. A man and a woman. They spoke a foreign language. Half a moment swirling around in my brain, and it registered. It’s Korean. Korean, a language I’d heard near-daily for three years (with mostly no understanding).

It was a little disorienting, somehow, but not as much as encountering this a moment later:

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The above is a sign for a nightclub which advertises (in Korean only) that it offers soju (a terrible drink similar to vodka); beer; and yangju (양주), which I long thought was a super-special Korean alcohol due to its high price whenever I saw it on a menu, but it turns out it just means “Western liquor”.

We can tell with certainty that it’s a genuine-Korean affair, you know, because even with only five English words on their sign, they still manage a mistake (no space between ‘7’ and ‘Days’). Haha. Sorry, Korean readers, if any. ^_^

Here is another marker of Korean presence in NYC that I immediately recognized:

“Caffe Bene” is everywhere in South Korea. It’s one of the more-successful of the many, many coffeshop chain stores.

This Manhattan Caffe Bene I saw may be something brand new. From the Korea Tourism organization:

It’s news to me that there is a “Koreatown” in Manhattan. (At left is a photo of it that I found. We didn’t visit it.)

The Census reports that there are 200,000+ Koreans in the NYC Metro Area. I already knew that there were two million Koreans in the USA — Allegedly, up to one million in Southern California and one million in the rest of the USA. I have rarely encountered many, leading me to conclude they are invisible.

Maybe the USA’s two million Koreans are, mostly, invisible, because they cluster around each other. You won’t see any most of the time, but when you see one, you’ll see many. My impression. Koreans’ group-orientation is among the strongest I’ve encountered…

My friend B.W. stayed at a Korean guesthouse in Manhattan for his two weeks there in 2010. I had gently discouraged him from that (being in the cocoon of Koreanness abroad). See Part-III for comments on B.W.’s impressions of NYC.

Koreans are not the only East-Asians in New York, of course. There are many more Chinese.

My friend T.A. had to go to the “Rego Park” neighborhood of Queens on an urgent errand. I went along. We ate at a typical American “Chinese-takeout”-style restaurant there.

It all fit the bill: the greasy food, the utter minimization of all costs (crummy styrofoam plates and plastic forks), the poor grammar and mildly-sour attitude of the Chinese woman taking the order, and the fact that all the cooks seemed likely to be family members. Here was our meal:

It was a filling meal, cheaply had, the raison d’etre of these kinds of places. Here was the restaurant:

Surprisingly, I read that this “Rego Park” was dominated by the Chinese in the late 1800s. At that time, it was farmland. All the farms were bought-up by the Chinese and they sold “exclusively” [naturally…] to Manhattan’s Chinatown. 

This should give a clue as to the timeframe of “Rego Park” Sinicization. Today, the neighborhood has a predominantly Soviet-Jewish character, with a 20% East-Asian minority, mostly Chinese.

The history of this neighborhood is so interesting to me that I did some research on it, which I’ll present in Part IX, and finally put the topic of NYC to rest.

Next Post: Part IX, Rego Park and Its History