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The myth of one "Chinatown"

The latest wave of Chinese immigrants have been coming since the late 1980s, swelling the population of Asians in the area well past the 150,000 mark. Unlike previous Chinese immigrants, who came from China's southern provinces and are mostly Cantonese speakers, these recent arrivals are mostly from Fujian Province and speak Fujianese or Mandarin. There are also numbers of Chinese from northern China arriving who speak only Mandarin. The Chinese tend to identify themselves by the province they came from. William David "Charlie" Chin was born in Chinatown in 1944, and like most Chinese in Chinatown at that time, his family's roots were in southern China. He wrote about his impressions of Chinese from other provinces in "Bu Gao Ban," a newsletter of the New York China History Project. "Adults would answer our curious questions about them by commenting with a frown, 'They are Mandarin,' or with the even worse epithet, 'Northerners.' We children were encouraged to think of them as an unusual but uninteresting subgroup that was also from China."

Cuisine, customs, and habits are all very different among the different Chinese groups, and that's without throwing the touchy issue of Nationalist-versus-Communist China into the mix. The mix of Chinese in present-day Chinatown would be similar to throwing together 150,000 Europeans in a neighborhood, labelling it "Europetown," and expecting everyone to get along fine.

This mix of Chinese from different provinces has caused friction as recent arrivals and long-term residents learn to live as neighbors--a process that has continued in the neighborhood ever since the first Irish immigrants arrived. Another historical trend that continues is the move to the suburbs as the immigrants get wealthier. Sunset Park in Brooklyn and Flushing, Queens, now have thriving Chinese and Asian communities. It is estimated that there are now more Chinese in Flushing than in Chinatown.