My Journalism Article!
Dec. 15th, 2004 04:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ziasudraI finally got the editing and comments back from my reporting class' professor! If anyone's a good editor, HE is. The best part is that he really likes the article. *grins like a fool* He says no need for further reporting. *sighs breath of relieve*
With all the talks about multiethnicity and the public school system, blah, blah, blah...it was writing down my research that was the most difficult. Such complicated intra-race issues. Gotta love New York City :p
What a ride...I'm grateful for the experience :)
So, in case anyone is interested, or needs extra reading material...
The New Kid
Suzanne Li is the new kid on the block. On October 1, she and her white-gray Pomeranian, Fuzzball, moved into her grandparents’ apartment on 106 Canal Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side—a street within a roughly two-square-mile area known by locals and tourists alike as Chinatown. At 4 foot 8 inches tall in her white Sketchers sneakers, the thirteen-year-old looks just like other students her age. She has shoulder-length black hair, rectangle-shaped glasses with silver rims that magnify her brown eyes, and a sunny smile she only shows to people she feels comfortable with.
One might expect Suzanne to fit right in with others who live on the Asian-dominated block of Hester and Canal Streets. The block consists of four tenement buildings, all built atop small businesses run by Chinese owners. The Asian-friendly T-Mobile shop on the ground floor of Suzanne’s apartment building is the largest business within the quarter-mile radius. On the Hestor-Canal intersection stands a gray and brick-red bulwark of a stone building—Intermediate School 131. Suzanne is not excited about her new school.
“I don’t like school,” she complained in mid-November. “I don’t have any friends except for this one girl in another class, but I knew her from before so it doesn’t count.”
Middle school is an unforgiving place for the new kid—even for a Chinese kid like Suzanne, who is surrounded by other Chinese kids. The New York City school system is 12.7 percent Asian. But I.S. 131, also known as The Sun Yat Sen Intermediate School, has a student body that is 86 percent Asian. Still, Suzanne says she has trouble fitting in. That is because the high number of Asian means that Chinese students do not automatically clump together. Rather, the school’s social cliques are highly defined by the Chinese ethnic group to which one belongs. And According to this unspoken standard, Suzanne does not fit in anywhere.
She is a “2.5 generation” Chinese-American: daughter of a first-generation Toisanese mother and second-generation Cantonese father. Suzanne’s parents have jobs that require them to assimilate into the Mandarin speaking culture. Suzanne is a little bit of Toisanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin all mixed together, but not enough of one to fit into any of her school’s social cliques.
Suzanne’s background embodies changes that have taken place in the block over the years. At a quick glance, Hestor and Canal Streets are filled homogeneously with Chinese. Yet there are changes underneath the apparent ethnic stability: the early 1900 Toisanese population who immigrated from a small subsection of the southern Chinese province of Canton was taken over by Cantonese-speaking immigrants from Hong Kong and the non-Toisan portion of Canton during the mid-1900s. The Asian population has since further diversified as Mandarin-speaking immigrants have recently begun to arrive from Taiwan and Chinese provinces besides Canton.
It is unusual for a girl to claim all three backgrounds as her identity. In fact, in this block where most tenants are either first-generation immigrants or retired grandparents living alone, Suzanne might be one of a very few.
The Cantonese Girls
Qui Hua Chen likes to play Neopets, an online website where members create their own virtual pets and play games to earn neopoints, the currency of Neopia. She also likes to share. About a month ago, she granted Suzanne access to her Neopets account by giving her the account’s username and password. At December, she is still Suzanne’s only school friend.
But Qui Hua, an eighth grader, belongs to her own clique. She is in Class 806, a high school prep class of 23 with 16 Chinese students. She socializes in her established clique of five Cantonese-speaking girls: Yueming Chen, Jene (pronounced “Jenny”) Chong, Elaine Kyi, Kelly Chan, and herself. All five girls have shoulder-length black hair and dress similarly in preppy sweatshirts and jeans. Yueming is the only one with glasses.
Although Class 806 has the same lunch period as Suzanne’s class, 807, and cross-class interactions is common in the cafeteria, the girls never hang out with the lone newcomer.
“I only hang out with people in my own class…” Qui Hua said during a five-minute break between her English and Social Studies classes. She did not finish the sentence as she ran to join her group on the way to their next class.
The Mandarin Clique
Mei Dan Zhang, Annie Cao, and Lucia Chiu consider themselves Americans, but they also hold onto their Mainland Chinese identity, passed down from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. The three girls are part of Class 806’s book group, led by English teacher Bryce Bernards. In November, Mr. Bryce assigned the trio two books on Chinese history, each dealing with a Chinese girl’s experience during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Currently they are reading Ji Li Jiang’s Red Scarf Girl.
“The book’s so boring,” Annie groaned, but acknowledged that she learned a lot from reading it. Lucia agreed with similar complaints but listened attentively as a teacher’s aid explained the history of the Cultural Revolution to her. Mei Dan read Red Scarf Girl the entire class. All three made the connection between the main character’s search for identity and their own identity as Mandarin-speaking Chinese-American teenagers.
Having a firm grasp on one’s Mandarin identity sometimes means adapting to non-Mandarin culture. The “Canto-culture” is still the dominant lifestyle in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and Mandarin-speaking Chinese, especially recent immigrants, try to bridge the cultural gap when inter-dialect communication is necessary. On Hestor and Canal Streets, it is common to hear people of Mainland Chinese descent speaking Cantonese with a heavy Mandarin accent.
At I.S. 131, students in Mandarin-speaking cliques gain acceptance from students in Cantonese groups by speaking to them in English and sometimes in accented Cantonese. But when it comes to choosing partners for group projects or selecting teammates in physical education for Mei Dan, Annie, and Lucia, it’s always back to their Mandarin huddle.
The White Kid
As the sole Caucasian in his class, Martin Gotrich is a distinct minority. His clique is with the troublemakers and the class clowns—all non-Asian. Out on the streets, Chinese bias holds that one should not make friends with “white demons.” Whites are potential customers who can be duped into paying as much as four times the original price of touristy Chinatown products. Whites are not trustworthy. Worse of all, whites are rude and have no respect for their elders.
Do such stereotypes play a part in Martin’s self-image? Recently, students in Class 806 were each assigned to write an “I Am” poem. While most students wrote about their physical characteristics and favorite hobbies, Martin wrote: “I am a tool people use to find answers/ they try to use me like a tool/ People try to figure out who Iam but they cant/ because i am unpredictable.”
Many Chinese do view whites this way. Michael Lowe, a 51-year-old former Chinese restaurant owner, sums up his view of whites as tools—in his case, as naïve money-spenders—this way: “In my restaurant, white people everyone orders their own dish. They don’t share like Chinese customers do. They end up paying more.” Lowe no longer owns the restaurant and he now spends four to five days a week hanging around the Hestor-Canal block. But he holds onto his belief regarding white customers and, by extension, all Caucasians.
In the end, Martin, just like everyone else, is trying to find his purpose in life. “I always ask myself what’s the meaning of life. I ask myself that all the time but I don’t know what the answer is yet and I’m gonna keep looking and maybe find the answer when I get older,” he says. Part of his challenge of growing up in the Hestor-Canal block will be to navigate the tenuous relationship between whites and Asians, steeped in generations of prejudice.
The End of the Day
When the bell rings at 2:45 p.m., Suzanne dashes out of the classroom and makes a beeline for her locker. She stuffs her books into her backpack, grabs her jacket, and slams shut the locker door. She yells a few half-hearted “byes” to people around her while speeding down the stairs. Once outside the school, she turns right and walks towards her Canal Street tenement. She plans to spend the rest of the day doing homework, talking online with her non-New Yorker friends, and playing Neopets.
Suzanne seems to have taken her outsider status in stride. After all, she only has one more year of middle school left. The City’s high schools are all part of a regional selection system. Every eighth grader must apply to get into a school, much like the college-application process. Each student begins high school on equal ground—everyone will be new, and clique formation resets to square one. Suzanne hopes to get into La Guardia High School, Hunter High School, or Baruch High School.
“I want to go to high school,” Suzanne says, whose unspoken meaning is conveyed by her petulant frown and downcast eyes: I can’t wait for this year to end.
With all the talks about multiethnicity and the public school system, blah, blah, blah...it was writing down my research that was the most difficult. Such complicated intra-race issues. Gotta love New York City :p
What a ride...I'm grateful for the experience :)
So, in case anyone is interested, or needs extra reading material...
The New Kid
Suzanne Li is the new kid on the block. On October 1, she and her white-gray Pomeranian, Fuzzball, moved into her grandparents’ apartment on 106 Canal Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side—a street within a roughly two-square-mile area known by locals and tourists alike as Chinatown. At 4 foot 8 inches tall in her white Sketchers sneakers, the thirteen-year-old looks just like other students her age. She has shoulder-length black hair, rectangle-shaped glasses with silver rims that magnify her brown eyes, and a sunny smile she only shows to people she feels comfortable with.
One might expect Suzanne to fit right in with others who live on the Asian-dominated block of Hester and Canal Streets. The block consists of four tenement buildings, all built atop small businesses run by Chinese owners. The Asian-friendly T-Mobile shop on the ground floor of Suzanne’s apartment building is the largest business within the quarter-mile radius. On the Hestor-Canal intersection stands a gray and brick-red bulwark of a stone building—Intermediate School 131. Suzanne is not excited about her new school.
“I don’t like school,” she complained in mid-November. “I don’t have any friends except for this one girl in another class, but I knew her from before so it doesn’t count.”
Middle school is an unforgiving place for the new kid—even for a Chinese kid like Suzanne, who is surrounded by other Chinese kids. The New York City school system is 12.7 percent Asian. But I.S. 131, also known as The Sun Yat Sen Intermediate School, has a student body that is 86 percent Asian. Still, Suzanne says she has trouble fitting in. That is because the high number of Asian means that Chinese students do not automatically clump together. Rather, the school’s social cliques are highly defined by the Chinese ethnic group to which one belongs. And According to this unspoken standard, Suzanne does not fit in anywhere.
She is a “2.5 generation” Chinese-American: daughter of a first-generation Toisanese mother and second-generation Cantonese father. Suzanne’s parents have jobs that require them to assimilate into the Mandarin speaking culture. Suzanne is a little bit of Toisanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin all mixed together, but not enough of one to fit into any of her school’s social cliques.
Suzanne’s background embodies changes that have taken place in the block over the years. At a quick glance, Hestor and Canal Streets are filled homogeneously with Chinese. Yet there are changes underneath the apparent ethnic stability: the early 1900 Toisanese population who immigrated from a small subsection of the southern Chinese province of Canton was taken over by Cantonese-speaking immigrants from Hong Kong and the non-Toisan portion of Canton during the mid-1900s. The Asian population has since further diversified as Mandarin-speaking immigrants have recently begun to arrive from Taiwan and Chinese provinces besides Canton.
It is unusual for a girl to claim all three backgrounds as her identity. In fact, in this block where most tenants are either first-generation immigrants or retired grandparents living alone, Suzanne might be one of a very few.
The Cantonese Girls
Qui Hua Chen likes to play Neopets, an online website where members create their own virtual pets and play games to earn neopoints, the currency of Neopia. She also likes to share. About a month ago, she granted Suzanne access to her Neopets account by giving her the account’s username and password. At December, she is still Suzanne’s only school friend.
But Qui Hua, an eighth grader, belongs to her own clique. She is in Class 806, a high school prep class of 23 with 16 Chinese students. She socializes in her established clique of five Cantonese-speaking girls: Yueming Chen, Jene (pronounced “Jenny”) Chong, Elaine Kyi, Kelly Chan, and herself. All five girls have shoulder-length black hair and dress similarly in preppy sweatshirts and jeans. Yueming is the only one with glasses.
Although Class 806 has the same lunch period as Suzanne’s class, 807, and cross-class interactions is common in the cafeteria, the girls never hang out with the lone newcomer.
“I only hang out with people in my own class…” Qui Hua said during a five-minute break between her English and Social Studies classes. She did not finish the sentence as she ran to join her group on the way to their next class.
The Mandarin Clique
Mei Dan Zhang, Annie Cao, and Lucia Chiu consider themselves Americans, but they also hold onto their Mainland Chinese identity, passed down from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. The three girls are part of Class 806’s book group, led by English teacher Bryce Bernards. In November, Mr. Bryce assigned the trio two books on Chinese history, each dealing with a Chinese girl’s experience during the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Currently they are reading Ji Li Jiang’s Red Scarf Girl.
“The book’s so boring,” Annie groaned, but acknowledged that she learned a lot from reading it. Lucia agreed with similar complaints but listened attentively as a teacher’s aid explained the history of the Cultural Revolution to her. Mei Dan read Red Scarf Girl the entire class. All three made the connection between the main character’s search for identity and their own identity as Mandarin-speaking Chinese-American teenagers.
Having a firm grasp on one’s Mandarin identity sometimes means adapting to non-Mandarin culture. The “Canto-culture” is still the dominant lifestyle in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and Mandarin-speaking Chinese, especially recent immigrants, try to bridge the cultural gap when inter-dialect communication is necessary. On Hestor and Canal Streets, it is common to hear people of Mainland Chinese descent speaking Cantonese with a heavy Mandarin accent.
At I.S. 131, students in Mandarin-speaking cliques gain acceptance from students in Cantonese groups by speaking to them in English and sometimes in accented Cantonese. But when it comes to choosing partners for group projects or selecting teammates in physical education for Mei Dan, Annie, and Lucia, it’s always back to their Mandarin huddle.
The White Kid
As the sole Caucasian in his class, Martin Gotrich is a distinct minority. His clique is with the troublemakers and the class clowns—all non-Asian. Out on the streets, Chinese bias holds that one should not make friends with “white demons.” Whites are potential customers who can be duped into paying as much as four times the original price of touristy Chinatown products. Whites are not trustworthy. Worse of all, whites are rude and have no respect for their elders.
Do such stereotypes play a part in Martin’s self-image? Recently, students in Class 806 were each assigned to write an “I Am” poem. While most students wrote about their physical characteristics and favorite hobbies, Martin wrote: “I am a tool people use to find answers/ they try to use me like a tool/ People try to figure out who Iam but they cant/ because i am unpredictable.”
Many Chinese do view whites this way. Michael Lowe, a 51-year-old former Chinese restaurant owner, sums up his view of whites as tools—in his case, as naïve money-spenders—this way: “In my restaurant, white people everyone orders their own dish. They don’t share like Chinese customers do. They end up paying more.” Lowe no longer owns the restaurant and he now spends four to five days a week hanging around the Hestor-Canal block. But he holds onto his belief regarding white customers and, by extension, all Caucasians.
In the end, Martin, just like everyone else, is trying to find his purpose in life. “I always ask myself what’s the meaning of life. I ask myself that all the time but I don’t know what the answer is yet and I’m gonna keep looking and maybe find the answer when I get older,” he says. Part of his challenge of growing up in the Hestor-Canal block will be to navigate the tenuous relationship between whites and Asians, steeped in generations of prejudice.
The End of the Day
When the bell rings at 2:45 p.m., Suzanne dashes out of the classroom and makes a beeline for her locker. She stuffs her books into her backpack, grabs her jacket, and slams shut the locker door. She yells a few half-hearted “byes” to people around her while speeding down the stairs. Once outside the school, she turns right and walks towards her Canal Street tenement. She plans to spend the rest of the day doing homework, talking online with her non-New Yorker friends, and playing Neopets.
Suzanne seems to have taken her outsider status in stride. After all, she only has one more year of middle school left. The City’s high schools are all part of a regional selection system. Every eighth grader must apply to get into a school, much like the college-application process. Each student begins high school on equal ground—everyone will be new, and clique formation resets to square one. Suzanne hopes to get into La Guardia High School, Hunter High School, or Baruch High School.
“I want to go to high school,” Suzanne says, whose unspoken meaning is conveyed by her petulant frown and downcast eyes: I can’t wait for this year to end.
