A Guy in New York » Blog Archive » “In Chinatowns, All Sojourners Can Feel Hua”

“In Chinatowns, All Sojourners Can Feel Hua”

There is no consistent name for “Chinatown” in Chinese. Newspapers use one name, popular speech uses others. At the Canal Street subway station on Broadway the chosen translation is delicately pixeled together from colorful tiles: “huabu.” Hua means “Chinese,” but with a sense that transcends geography, independent of the nation of China. Bu means “place” or “town.”
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New York’s Chinatown predates the Communist government, and even the one before that. When Chinese first settled in the crooked intersection of Doyers, Pell and Mott Streets, an emperor still ruled.
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Chinatown exudes density. It not only rivals Times Square as the most crowded pedestrian area in the city, but also is one of the most visually cluttered, greeting you with a jumble of fire escapes, colorful store signs and streams of tattered flags. Like many crowded Asian cities, Chinatown has mastered the art of the vertical, inspired by languages that can be written up and down, not just side to side.
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New York now has three Chinatowns — one each for Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, though only the original can claim the name. In 1946, a small group of United Nations delegation members from the Nationalist Chinese government settled in Flushing, in what was then a largely white middle-class community. Since the 1980’s, the neighborhood has flourished as the Chinatown for Mandarin speakers from Taiwan, Shanghai and northern China. More recently, Manhattan’s working-class Chinese population has been squeezed down the N subway line, emerging on Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and in other satellite clusters farther out.
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Today Chinatown is large enough to have two main arteries: Canal Street, the tourist-friendly thoroughfare that is still predominantly Cantonese, and East Broadway, which has become Main Street for Fujianese immigrants.
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Flushing has many more Chinese bookstores and more men in suits.
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Where Chinatown is shrouded in history, Flushing is bright and contemporary. The broad, flat cityscape of Queens is spiced up with the shiny metal-and-mirror aesthetic popular in industrial East Asia. “In Chinatown, everything is right in front of you,” Charlene said, putting her hand right in front of her face. “In Flushing, you can breathe.”

The street food is more northern and western Chinese.
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We trudged to Minni’s Shabu Shabu, a hotpot restaurant off Main Street that is one of my mother’s favorites for family occasions.

“In Chinatowns, All Sojourners Can Feel Hua,” by Jennifer 8. Lee, The New York Times, January 27, 2006