NEW YORK -- The morning's copy of the Ming Pao Daily News is on a shelf in front, and the eight aisles of the Hong Kong Supermarket are packed with shoppers. Up the street -- past the Chinese video stores, some two dozen markets and Mandarin Cultural Enterprises, where they sell pictures of Chairman Mao -- some of the old men are playing a spirited game of mah-jongg in the back room of an old bakery.
The signs bear Chinese characters, but no English. The scene could be from a smaller village in south China, or maybe from the heart of lower Manhattan's thick Chinatown. But this is someplace else. Sabrina Gao, 32, sweeps the bakery floor and says: "I love this Brooklyn."
Yes, Brooklyn. Tourists and moviewatchers know Manhattan's Chinatown, a tightly wound caldron of dark alleys, office buildings and hundreds of restaurants on Manhattan's Lower East Side. But with the arrival of 85,000 legal Chinese immigrants in this decade -- and tens of thousands of others who have come illegally -- two other large Chinese communities have grown up in Flushing, Queens, and Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
"With the growing communities in Brooklyn and Queens, it is now correct to say that New York has three Chinatowns," says Ellen Young, president of a Chinese-American voters group in Queens and a native of Taiwan. "And, because of the constant influx, these are three of the most dynamic neighborhoods in New York."
Such dynamism carries a price, however. In the three Chinatowns, a visitor finds the full spectrum of the New York immigrant experience -- from crowded, fly-by-night sweatshops that prey on the least able to the fine homes of entrepreneurs who have prospered in their new country. This dynamic has led to tensions and turmoil among people that, at face value, might seem a homogeneous group.
And, at a time when immigration laws are changing and policy-makers speak of "immigrants" as if they were a monolithic group, New York's Chinese community shows the reality of immigration today could not be more complicated.
Although shuttle buses run among all three areas, "they are distinct Chinatowns, and not much communication exists among them," says Ko-Lin Chin, a Rutgers University scholar. "The people in Queens do not have the same lifestyle, or even speak the same language, as the people in Brooklyn." Queens is Mandarin-speaking, more Taiwanese. But you walk through Brooklyn, and you feel like you're in mainland China."
