Chinatown in the 21st Century – Strolling Down Mainstreet: Chinese Americans and Other Ethnic Groups

Thomas Tam: Relatively speaking, the Chinese community is a young community. The Jewish community and the Italian community have been in this country for a much longer period of time. Even though initially it was discriminated against, over the years, it has been absorbed into the mainstream. Can you tell us the reasons of such success and the lessons that maybe the Chinese community can learn from?

Vincenzo Milione: It is very important to understand what happens in terms of the geography of the Italian American community and the Asian community. Neighborhood has evolved. What’s happened is that in Little Italy, Asian Americans have turned it into a new Chinatown.

If we look at the old little Italy, that was all Italians. Believe me, at one time, when Italian immigrants came here and get off the boat, they all went down to Little Italy, so it’s full of Italians. But now even in old Little Italy, it’s 57% Asian, with only 8.3% Italian, which is similar to the percentage of Italians in New York City, 8.4.

Thomas Tam: Ok. If I can just repeat that the Italian and Jewish communities are truly stories of success; Can you comment on the success and the kind of lessons the Chinese Community can learn from?

Allen Cohen: Let me first asked a question: Where is the oldest Jewish cemetery in the United States?

Yes, St. James Place in Chinatown. Why is it there? It is there because the early Jews came to the United States; they fled Brazil because of the Portuguese Inquisition. The Jews got on a boat, a French frigate, and came to New York in the early 1600s.

The establishment of Dutch colony was already there, within an area surrounded by a Wall. Peter Stuyvesant, not liking the Jews, said they could not be buried within the walls of the community. He sent them to the little synagogue at Chatham Square which was a rural area, far away, at that time.

To protect itself from attacks by Indians and other European powers, The Dutch had a civil guard around the walls. Jews were not allowed to serve, but they still had to pay taxes to the government. The small Jewish community was upset about this, so they organized. They petitioned the Royal Dutch Company in Holland to rescind this order. Eventually, the Jewish community won, and they were allowed to serve in the National Guard.

I point this out because it is relevant to our discussion today. In the early part of the 18th century, more Jews began to come into these new colonies, and set up their own little communities. The reason they came was an opportunity for religious freedom. Jews have been persecuted for thousands of years in Europe. They were looking for a place where they could come and practice their religion without fear, without being killed.

You may remember a couple of years ago, some Native Americans were protesting Columbus’s discovery of America. Actually, Jewish people should be protesting Columbus’s discovery for two reasons. One, that was a terrible year for Jews, because that was the year when Jews were expelled from Spain. You either had to convert to Catholicism, be killed, or to leave. Two, the money for Columbus’s ships was from the Jewish who were told, that if they didn’t cough up the money, they would be killed. It was that money that went to Isabella, who paid Columbus for the ships.

Some of you are old enough to remember the Blue Laws in New York City. Blue Laws were laws that forbid the opening of business on Sunday because it was a Christian day of celebration. It’s a day for rest and a day of piety when you go to church. Well, that excluded a lot of people. Just think about it for a second, if we still have the Blue Laws in New York City, what will Chinatown be like on a Sunday? It’s interesting that the Jeffersonians in the 1700’s opposed those laws. The Jeffersonians cited the fact that Jews, Buddhists, and Arab people would not be allowed to practice, and to take part in commerce on those days. It’s very interesting that, back then, there were people who strongly felt that there should be a separation of church and state. One of the things that had made United States a beacon of power has been that separation of church and State.

At that time, very rarely were Jews elected to office. The first offices they were elected to were small ones. It’s almost like John Liu getting elected to City council. In the 1700’s, you find some Jews in Virginia being elected to a small office and then, somebody was elected up in Providence, Rhode Island.

This was very exciting for the Jewish community, because in Europe this would be impossible. They learned pretty early on that they had to organize, that they had to fight for their rights, and that they had to become part of society. One of the things we have always done at Chinese Planning Council is to insist that the Chinese immigrants learn about the Constitution and the democratic system, that they take part in the government structure, because every minority here in the United States should have the same opportunities.

Terri Mizrahi: That was a great history, but I am starting in a different place. I wasn’t going to do the history.

I started my community organizing career, working for an organization on the Lower East Side in the late 60’s. We worked very closely with what was then the beginning of Chinatown Planning Council, and several of the settlement houses.

We came together around getting a new hospital opened. My first job was to organize all the people in the community after they had closed the old one where people went in to die. We united the community, and that was the first time I saw and heard about the Chinese community. Don’t forget! ‘65 was the beginning of the immigrant influx.

Let me just stop there. One of my claims to fame is that I hired Thomas Tam for the job of community organizer, along with another wonderful young man, Paul Ramos who died too prematurely. We were the Lower East Side Health Council that spun off the Chinatown Health Clinic, Nina Health Center on 4th street, as well as this wonderful new Gouverneur Hospital complete with patient advocates.

My knowledge of growing up as a Jew comes from two different backgrounds. My mother’s side came from Europe.

My father grew up on Hester Street; he lived in a walk-up where they carried ice up five stories, when they had ice boxes in those days. There were 10 brothers and sisters in three rooms. They didn’t know whose feet and heads they were sleeping next to. They came from Syria, called Sephardic Jews. They didn’t speak Yiddish, and they are minorities within the minorities. They are Jews who didn’t identify either with the Italians or with the other Jews, and certainly not with the Christian community. They were down and they were in this melting pot.

Here are a couple of things that I think are important. The Jews were prosecuted. They couldn’t own land in Europe. They had no ability to go to the universities, a total, absolute apartheid, just like South Africa. So they lived in their own ghettoes. The Jews in the ghettoes had very little contact with the outside world, but they were able to develop schools and everything for themselves. The ability to have your own institutions is the strength of a minority community. It’s the positive end of a ghetto, if you see that.

We think of the ghettoes as terrible because they contain people, but it forced everybody to develop self-sufficiency and a sense of community. Clearly, religion is the bond. Everybody went to the synagogue. It was the life of the people. That was an extraordinary bonding, and that’s still what bonds the Jews in many parts of the world, certainly here in New York.

I use the terms: prejudice and discrimination, not outright racism; but Jews were absolutely excluded, and people didn’t like them. You read the articles from Herald Tribune and the New York Times of those days. “These slovenly people”, they’re talking about the Italians and the Jews. If you white out the ethnic group and you see how they describe these smelly, disgusting people with dirty streets, and foreign languages, it could be today’s Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, or Chinese in Chinatown.

It was tremendous prejudice, stereotypes, and myths about the community they didn’t know. They just dislike the way they look. Jews could blend in, if they weren’t too dark, if they didn’t have curly hair, and if they didn’t have big noses. When you see the descriptions of Jews in literature, that’s how they looked. When somebody says, “I could pick out a Jew in this room!” Well, what does that mean? It means they look like the Arabs with black, curly hair. The Jews used to go to the black community to get their hair straightened, because they wanted to be like Americans.

I want to get into quotas and Affirmative Action and how it plays out differently for Asians and Jews than it does for Blacks and Latinos. For Jews and some of the Asian community, quotas are seen as keeping them out. My colleagues, my lawyer friends and educators of the African American community felt that quotas keep them in, and bring them in. For different groups, it’s totally different views of the same phenomenon. That’s what separates us.

Tom asked a question. He is interested in the Jewish success story, and what Asians can learn from them.

There are different components: First, there were intellectuals in the Jewish community coming from Europe. They didn’t come from the ghettoes. There was a history of political activism in Europe. How come they are the early labor leaders? Many of the communists were Jews. Many of them were socialists. Many of them were trade unionists. They came with that history from Europe to the States. It wasn’t endemic from the lower east side.

The other was that the Jews created their own industries. The country was in a stage of industrialization and expansion. In 1900’s, the Jews didn’t care when Christians put up signs that say “No Jews Could Come into this Country Club” or “No Jews Here”. They set up their own. They could set up their own because they had that history of setting up their own. We’ll have our own country club, we’ll have our own group, and we’ll have our own theatre. There was an intellectual piece that came from Europe; there was a political piece; there was the religious piece and there was the sustaining of their own community. There were a lot of positive parts and unique experiences in our history where there are lessons to learn from.

Allen Cohen: Just want to add one piece to Terri’s comments about socialism on the lower east side. The old Jewish Forward building on East Broadway has been owned by a Chinese developer as a church. If you look above the portal, there used to be four busts because the Forward was a Socialist Paper. One of the busts was Marx, one was Engle, one was Daniel DeGleon who was one of the old American socialists, and the fourth one, I forget. When the Chinese owner took over, he removed Marx and Engle because he knew them, but he didn’t know the other two socialists. So, you can still see them if you walk behind the scaffolding.

Thomas Tam: Things have changed, since the 60’s, with a lot of activism in places like the lower east side and Chinatown. Asian American For Equality has done tremendous amount of work and their success was quite undisputed. Do you want to talk a little bit about some of that success? Maybe there are other kinds of problems facing us now?

Christopher Kui: The Chinese American community hasn’t settled on which way we’re going to end up. The Chinese American community, which is the largest among the Asian American communities, comprises about 5% of the New York City population now. Our contribution could be much greater than our number. From my perspective, in heading the Asian Americans For Equality, we have always seen the potential of the community. This is a community that has a lot of asset, and a lot of greatness. The question is how we show that as a community.

In the ‘70’s, the mentality of the community was about fighting for civil rights or access. We still have a mentality that we need to fight for something, that we are victims or that we are facing discrimination, so then the response is always that we have to raise our voice. I think that by looking down 20 years from now, we should see ourselves, not necessarily as victims, as advocates, but as contributors to the city or society. We should see ourselves as builders of the community or the city, as well as a player within the society of the mainstream.

Again, a lot has to do with the history. Until the 70’s, people come here to make a living. They come in as laborers, and the mentality is always thinking of going back. That starts to change in the 70’s with the Civil Rights movement. In some sense, the Asian Americans For Equality, riding through the Civil Rights movement, transformed that paradigm in the Chinese communities. We are going to stay here; we are not just victims, but contributors as well.

If you look at New York City today, the Chinese American community has helped revitalize New York City. Look at Flushing, and look at Sunset Park: many neighborhoods now have enclaves. I would not call them ghettoes; they are enclaves that are in various neighborhoods. It’s more than just Chinatown, Sunset Park, or Flushing; they are in Bensonhurst, Elmhurst, and many neighborhoods. Look at their economic strength: the savings rate of Asian Americans and Chinese Americans indicates tremendous deposits.

In that sense, I think we are poised to be more of a player with additional access to the political or civic world. We need to have a mentality to take our place in society, so that it’s no longer just about making money. September 11 impacted our community tremendously, but the mainstream didn’t see that because the community has been very much on its own. With our own infrastructure, we are able to deal with our own issues, and we’ve been very insular.

For a long time, we have not engaged actively, or effectively. When September 11 came about, the immediate reaction was to voice our concern, and fight for our rights, which we did.

In terms of long term impact, however, it’s not enough. The mainstream says, “Wow, the Chinese community is all fragmented, and everybody wants to do their own thing.” In any community, African American or Jewish there are also a lot of dissensions, but there is a certain level of maturity where people form network or hook up as a coalition. They rotate leadership positions, so that when they represent the community, there’s a certain united front.

That’s what we want within the Chinese American community.

In terms of September 11th, we saw the Rebuild Chinatown Initiative as a process. The process was the most important thing; how you engage and who you use. We got experts and leading planners from the mainstream to facilitate and provide different opinions. We used focus groups, meetings, survey research to get ideas and put them all together.

At the same time, it’s not just writing a report, but engaging the decision makers, whether he or she is in the mayor’s office or in the department of transportation. We have to find out the plans they have, the existing ideas so that we can say, “Yes, you have this in mind for Chinatown in the lower east side, maybe with the environment after September 11, these are things that you can put resources on right away.” With this process, we have legitimacy and ideas that are more comprehensive.

An example: the Allen Street Mall has been dirty and neglected for years. For a long time you just accept it.

When we started the process to rebuild Chinatown, we engaged a lot of ideas from the community, and combined it with the experts’. Then, we started to say, “Wow, this could be the Avenue of the Immigrant, very beautiful, just like 5th Avenue.” When we talked to the government decision makers, they understood that. They said, “Yeah, maybe if we widen the island, make it really nice from South Street to Delancey, you’ll have 100 years history of immigration.”

I remember Betty’s talk about the history of South Street Seaport where Manhattan had traded with China. We can bring that idea combine it to the immigrant trail experience along Avenue of the Immigrant, and then we’ll have something. When people come and visit the World Trade Center five, seven, ten years from now, they would say, “Wow, New York’s Chinatown was next door; it was impacted.”

People would ask me, “Oh, what’s happened with Chinatown?” “Oh, how are you guys doing?” So there’s a passion, there’s a concern for Chinatown. These are people from outside the community. They have read stories in the New York Times about how Chinatown was devastated. They are concerned that Chinatown will no longer be Chinatown, that it will be just a tourist trap and that the people who live there will no longer be there.

They want to preserve Chinatown. They want Chinatown to maintain its history and the culture. The lesson I learned is that we need to continue to be advocates, but we also need to see ourselves having a lot to offer. Our community is an asset for the city and for the country. As we engage people who control resources, we can say, “Look, you need to rebuild this community, because this is part of you, this is part of the city; this is part of America.” Once we get this mentality, we would then be part of the larger community.

Thomas Tam: You talk about the process, and the need to not just look at ourselves as victims, but as contributors and builders as well. As Dr. Milione has shown in that slide, Chinatown has expanded into Little Italy, and as immigration grows, during interaction with other groups, some violence developed.

For example, in Bensonhurst, there have been cases of violence against Chinese families. There are street fights between different groups of kids. Dr. Milione, do you think you can enlighten us a little bit about that?

Vincenzo Milione: Let me put it this way. We’ve heard a lot of immigrant experience. It was said that nothing is really different now. You can blank out the world Italian; you can blank out the world Polish; you can blank out the word Jewish and add Asian; and you’ll get the new immigrant groups. This country is the history of immigrants. It was founded by Anglo, but the first immigrants were German. Now the Germans are the largest ethnic group in this country; Anglo is second, follow by the Irish.

The Irish came over because of religious reasons. The original Irish were the Daniel Boones and the Davy Crocketts that you read about. They were the pioneers, the ones that went out to find the west. When the Catholic Irish came in the mid 1800’s, they were snubbed by the Scotch Irish, and pushed to the urban areas. They did have something going. They did speak English, so they were able to move quickly within the process, and that helped.

Even though Italians have had their history of discrimination, it probably helped to be Christian, marry a good Irish woman and become assimilated. In the late 1800’s, a very prominent Italian became the governor of Maryland.

The only way you could find a new life in those days was to leave your old ways behind. Many Italians were brought here on the bottoms of ships and dumped into Little Italy to work at those factories where they died.

We got blamed for bringing tuberculosis to this country just like you guys got blamed with the SARS and the Haitians got blamed with the AIDS. “It’s your fault; you brought it to this country!” No! It wasn’t that. It was the conditions that put many people to live in one room, in a very unhealthy situation. We got tuberculosis here and we went back to Italy to die with our family. That’s the way it was then.

Thomas Tam: I do want to ask Allen, as a non-Chinese leading a Chinese group into such prominence, do you have some advice from that perspective?

Allen Cohen: Well, I would agree with everybody on this panel. I think we are all on the same track, that is, there are certain commonalities. Of course, there are differences. The Professor just mentioned when immigration took place, what was happening in the old country and in this country; they all impacted on the immigrant experience.

Everybody feels that they themselves are unique, and that they have unique problems. More than race and religion, although those are dominant factors, it’s economics that is the problem, particularly in today’s world.

I traveled around the world and there are many wonderful cities, but New York is unique; the United States is really unique. We have probably about 145 different language groups. I was talking to a principal in Queens about putting a program into the school, and he said, “I have 14 language groups in this school!” I said, “What? 14? Name them!” And he went through this list and there were five language groups that I’ve never heard of. We had to look them up in a book; some of them were dialects of Indian tribes from Paraguay. I mean, the country is absorbing all these people.

Now, if you know the history of Europe, it’s a history of cross-migration through wars and conflagrations. The European Union, under recent law passed, has to open its borders. They are going to face this problem with the North Africans and the people from Turkey. They’re going to have to face all the people from the former Soviet bloc countries, and from the Arab countries. Europe until very recently, were basically White, Caucasian, with all the mixtures. They were pretty smug in their attitudes towards us in the 50’s and the 60’s, but now they are going to face the same problems that we have faced. Hopefully, they’ll do it better. They have their old prejudices, and they’re going to have to deal with that.

Going back to the commonalities, no matter what our differences are within cultural and racial groups, we all want to be loved; we all want to have a peaceful life, a decent house, kids, and grandkids. These are the commonalities. I was on an island in Hong Kong, many years ago. Late one day, I was standing at the bay right next to a very poor Chinese fisherman, probably about 20 years older than me, smoking a pipe. We were looking at this gorgeous sunset together. Neither of us could speak the other’s language, but we were sharing a wonderful experience of that time and place. That’s what it’s all about, you know?

Thomas Tam: That’s a very poetic summary of your experience. You mentioned about diversity, and I can’t think of a more diverse place than the Lower East Side. Terri, you have worked in the Lower East Side for so long, seeing different groups sometimes fighting each other, sometimes working jointly. Can you tell us about your impression and see if there are some lessons that can be drawn?

Terri Mizrahi: I mentioned before, that the groups come together when you have a common issue, or as the old organizer say, “a common enemy.”

It’s clear that as long as ethnic groups keep fighting each other, arguing as to who is more deserving, or who’s been more oppressed, it’s a losing battle. People do have to talk about their own history of oppression and discrimination; all the groups have that in common, there’s no question about that. So then, can you get together based on having been a victim, or having been out of the loop? How do you become a player?

Here are a couple of things that are a little touchy.

The Jewish, maybe the Chinese community, have ambivalence about how much they want to assimilate. There is a continuing tension between being part of the mainstream, and continuing to keep your identity and roots.

This is a clear issue for younger folks, the organizers of today. I don’t think it needs to be an either/or. We can do both, but you really have to struggle with how much separation you want and how much integration. That is something that the groups themselves have to decide. How much do people want to live with their own kind? That’s a traditional question. With the Chinese, I know you are trying to have representation in Congress and introduce something called “non-contiguous representation”, because you don’t have one community. I was fascinated with this discussion, a couple of years ago, about trying to make a district that wasn’t even contiguous, to get some political power.

What does assimilation mean? I don’t think everybody wants to assimilate. First of all, people look a certain way. They’re not going to assimilate if it means “looking white”. We have to deal with color. The difference between the Jews and the Asians is that Jews are a religion and a culture; they have a historical identity often defined by the Christian world, but the Chinese folks are part of a race, so called “yellow race”.

Vincenzo Milione: It’s biological. What happened with the Italians up to the 1940’s, however, became a perception because Sicily was invaded and settled by 300 cultures of all different colors. The fact is that we were labeled as a different class on our visas coming to this country. There’s a category called “Southern Italian Race”.

Terri Mizrahi: Alright, we know it’s political, as much if not more than, it is biological. But I do want to talk about whether we want to identify geographic communities wherever we live. In New York City, that’s a political issue in terms of organizing. In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the Latinos and the Hasidic Jews have had a tense relationship. When do they come together? They came together when the incinerator was going to be built in Williamsburg and everybody was going to be polluted.

When there’s a common issue that you can work on together, that may bring better understanding. I still want to support the old fashioned inter-group relations. We have to do political stuff; we have to do fighting; and we have to make those coalitions real. People have to understand that coalitions are about compromise and that nobody is going to get everything they want in a coalition. That calls for leadership.

We are missing what was called inter-group relations that deal with prejudices and stereotypes. The commonality between Jews and Asians is that both are admired but seen as different. I think that there’s still a lot of prejudice. I had somebody say to me in the South, “Oh, you Jews, you should be so proud of your heritage, look what you did in this country!” And he said, “How come you’re so good with money?” So I’m saying to myself, “We need to talk.” Honestly, stereotypes come from valid generalizations run amuck. We do use generalizations about cultures, Latino culture, Asian culture, and Jewish culture.

Vincenzo Milione: Right, that was in the Daily News today. How close is the portrayal of Peter Gotti to the Sopranos? How close can you get to reality, especially negative reality?

Terri Mizrahi: I have just two more points. People to people, kids to kids, adults to adults, we need opportunities to get to know each other. That’s the old fashioned body contact way of reducing prejudice. You’re more prejudiced the less you know the people. Just body contact alone doesn’t work, it takes leadership.

I want to give an example where it didn’t work, Tom, and then we can end later on one that worked. It’s a very important example. My daughter went to Stuyvesant High School, when it was moving from an old school on 15th Street to that enormous building. It’s an elite institution. David Dinkins was the one who helped develop it and he put 10 million dollars into that building while all the high schools around the city were crumbling.

And so, again, we have to deal with the forces that keep groups apart. It is as much about class as it is about ethnicity and race. So here’s my daughter in a school where it is heavily Jewish, and Asian, with a smattering of African Americans and Latinos. One day there was a problem at a high school nearby. It was an all black trade school for young women. They had to bring these kids into Stuyvesant to spend five or six months there.

These African American kids came from very poor neighborhoods, not well schooled and there were fights every single day. The leadership of the school never tried to deal with it. The black young women resented this constantly and were vandalizing. The white kids and Asian kids in that school resented these black kids coming in and ruining their school. Where was the leadership?

When we look at New York City where you said people were fighting each other on the streets, we really do need to have a commitment to leadership. I don’t know where the principal was and if the teachers had their own views of what was happening, but nobody ever sat down with the kids to resolve conflicts so they would go away with mutual understanding. What did they do? They all left with the same stereotypes, and worse!

So just putting people together doesn’t make it good. We need to have good dialogue, be respectful and honest with each other. Our own views have to come out. We have to feel safe to say all these stupid, naïve and sometimes hurtful things. Get them on the table in some safe environments so we can deal with it. Jews were good in money, and traded gems because they couldn’t own land; they had no allegiance to the country; they were going to be kicked out any minute and they never felt safe and secure. The only thing they could deal with was coins and gems because you could take them with you and trade! It’s not the color of my skin. I don’t have money in my genes. We don’t want to say Jews are not involved with money, but there’s a whole historical context associated with it.

Allen Cohen: They were also forced into that profession which Christians didn’t want to pursue.

Terri Mizrahi: Christians didn’t want to do it. So I’m saying that, people need to be educated about the complex history of each group before we can move on.

Look who came today. 90% of the audience is Asian. Nobody else was interested in this topic. I’m being honest; this got publicized very widely around CUNY. We know a million reasons why a million people aren’t here on a Friday afternoon, Asians or otherwise, but I’m saying that the topics are interesting to one group, but it’s not something that folks with white color skin are going to come unless they’re dragged here by their professors.

Vincenzo Milione: Yeah, but it depends. Tom and I have been working on that. Actually, we’ve been coordinating with ethnic centers around CUNY. We’ve had a meeting this year, and we’re going to continue to do more, exactly for that reason. We’re going to hold a lot more joint activities because we do have this commonality.

Thomas Tam: Chris, you talked about process, and about how Chinese shouldn’t take on a victim’s perspective, but to participate and be a builder. What kind of comments do you have for the non-Chinese, people who are in the mainstream?

Christopher Kui: Do I have comments for them? One thing that I always talk to people in a foundation or government office is not to look at just one or two community groups, support them and that’s it. I think the key is to educate these people about the size of the Chinese population, the diversity, and their locations. Our experience with the city indicates that when the City funds 50 groups, only one Asian group gets funded. They thought that by funding one Asian group, whether it is CPC, AAFE or Manpower, then they have funded sufficiently the Asian American community. They did not realize that the community is really diverse as well as dispersed.

It’s important to get them to understand that the Asians are not monolithic. I think that’s a big challenge.

Thomas Tam: Many people in the audience would like to ask some questions, so I’m going to open it to the floor.

Betty Lee Sung: Let me say that, for Allen, we never think of him as Jewish anymore. He is 80% Chinese.

Allen Cohen: My wife says 90.

Betty Lee Sung: Especially since he was the leader when he started CPC, which was the only organization that was really working for the Chinese community, because the one before, CCBA, was considered antiquated.

I want to make a comment about Chris now. Very few people realize the important work that he is doing at AAFE with the Rebuilding Chinatown Initiative. He has gotten funds to do research into how to rebuild Chinatown; he’s made a video of all these that we should do, like the Allen Street project, and integrating the whole community into a coherent plan, whereby Chinatown is going to be very different from what it was before.

To pick up on Terri’s comment, we need to rally around an issue. In many ways, I think that 9/11 may have been a blessing in disguise for Chinatown, because the community rallied around this situation of what we should do, since Chinatown was so severely impacted. I think AAFE and Chris have been providing the leadership, to come up with a plan to revitalize Chinatown. Everybody should take a good look at the plan that he has developed, and he has a booklet on it, and…

Christopher Kui: It’s on the web. Actually, it’s on www.rebuildchinatown.org.

Betty Lee Sung: Take a look. He’s starting the revitalization process. Historically, we’ve look at Chinatown as if it is a crumbling, declining place, and we should do something about it. In the 1950’s, I think Robert Moses started to do something, but he was trying to…

Terri Mizrahi: He was trying to get rid of it.

Betty Lee Sung: He tried to destroy Chinatown, and rebuild it completely in a different way. In 1976, during the bicentennial, the city’s planning committee came up with a plan, but somehow or other it just died.

I hope that, with this plan you have, Chris, it’s not going to be just a process but it will be implemented. I’m looking forward to that. We want something done. He has laid it out step by step; the three year plan, the five year plan and the ten year plan…

Christopher Kui: Ten year plan with 20 year vision.

Betty Lee Sung: He has this vision of how we want to do it. He has said that this is a process, but I hope it’s not a process, I hope it’s an implementation.

Christopher Kui: The implementation is also going to be processed.

Betty Lee Sung: I have a question for Terri. She talked about her parents; one from Europe and the other from Syria, and they got married. I was just wondering, within the Jewish community, do they have the cleavages that we in the Chinese community have, like the Cantonese, the Mandarins, the Taiwanese, the Native-born and foreign-born, do you have those divisions?

Terri Mizrahi: This is a topic for another discussion. I was thinking about Israel and how Israel has integrated its multicultural people. It’s a wonderful model of absorbing immigrants, because it’s a total country. Of course, it started with everybody coming from somewhere else to form a Jewish state.

There’s so much variety within the religious spectrum, from people who don’t identify religiously but only culturally as Jews, all the way to the Orthodox Jews. And there are several strains. It’s visible here; in Israel it’s very tense. You can see that played out in the politics where religion is stronger.

Do you all know “Goodbye Columbus”, Philip Roth’s book and movie from years ago? It was about anti-Semitic Jew. These are Jews who hate Jews, just like black self-hate. So we have to deal with people in our own community who have internalized some of the anti-Semitism. It’s okay if you look like them; you can move in the neighborhood, and they can accept you. But if you don’t look like them, when you move in, people don’t like you. You have to look like the people to really assimilate, physically as well as culturally.

Edward Ma: I’m very interested in Professor Mizrahi’s inter-group relations. Recently, I went to a Jewish inter-group relations meeting.

Terri Mizrahi: Bob Kaplan. Rabbi Kaplan does this.

Edward Ma: Recently, the Chinese moved into Bensonhurst, and they moved into Flushing. You know what? When the new group of new Chinese came, they don’t talk to their next-door neighbors; they don’t say hello; they just come make money. They buy a house, but they don’t care about the lawn. We think we are passive, but we are really aggressive, so the children get the message.

Professor Mizrahi, I’m asking you, why does the school of social work not teach group relations to community organizations? This is very important. It puts people together, so they can work smoothly with mutual understanding.

Terri Mizrahi: I’m not going to take it on, except to say that it’s definitely needed. It was seen as an old fashioned concept. The 50’s were about inter-group relations and prejudice reduction. The 60’s were about political power and gaining inclusion. There are lots of good literatures about that. The answer is, you’ve got to be politically astute and you’ve got to get control of the resources. But we can’t forget that human one to one element. It’s not just touchy-feely, oh, we like each other, and we eat the foods and I show you my costumes and my countries. That’s certainly not enough, but I think those things are very important.

Thomas Tam: One last question.

Male Audience Member: I walked past Little Italy quite often. Recently, with the gentrification, a lot of new immigrants are coming in. What is Little Italy now, and what is its future five to ten years from now?

Vincenzo Milione: Okay, let me diverge a little bit because there’s an interesting comment made. That is, preserve Chinatown. We couldn’t do it as Italians back then; we didn’t have that sophistication. The Jews couldn’t do it back then; they didn’t have that sophistication. You do, and I hope you would.

Little Italy is now the restaurants. Who’s living there? It is the Asians. What’s going to happen to Little Italy? There is a phenomenon, not just in New York, in Chicago, or San Francisco. Wherever you find a Chinatown, you’ll find a Little Italy. That says something about our cultures. I think we’re going to preserve Little Italy. We have the San Gennero festival. We’re not going to forget it, but it’s never going to be the same. I think, as much as you could preserve your culture there, you should do it now.

Did that answer your question? Little Italy disappears basically. We have very good scholars that have spoken to this group. Jerry Krase is Professor Emeritus from Brooklyn College. He goes around many cities in the world to find Little Italy. Sometimes he couldn’t recognize that they were Little Italy’s. He got to know it only from history; because there’s a landmark, so that was, at one time, an enclave of Italians, but now they’re gone. Is that what’s going to happen to Chinatown? I don’t know.

Thomas Tam: With that, I want to thank everybody here for coming, and especially our panelists, who would support our forum by taking the time to join us. I really appreciate that. Please give them a fantastic hand.