Considering our current financial and health situation, we’re unlikely to be boarding any international flights in the coming years (although I defiantly renewed my passport regardless). In fact, any form of travel that requires more than an MTA Metrocard and two sturdy legs is out of reach for the foreseeable future.
With that in mind we recently took a trip to Russia by way of Brighton Beach, and then we spent the day in the Chinese city of Flushing in Queens.
Several neighborhoods in this city and many others in the United States (I’m looking at you, Slavic Village) started as enclaves for specific nationalities and/or ethnicities. Greenpoint, for example, still retains a strong Polish presence, and Astoria has long been known as the place to go for Greek cuisine and culture. Bensonhurst, well known as an Italian neighborhood, is doing what all things in the universe do. It’s changing, and the city’s second-largest Chinatown now calls Bensonhurst home.
We are in a constant state of flux, like it or not.
Flushing, Queens, however, for the moment, is basically a small Chinese city. During our afternoon there, ours were the only non-Asian faces to be seen in any direction. And typical of a street that serves its population and not some bunch of camera-toting tourist types, there were very few restaurants.
Let the rest of the world go through its changes. Flushing likes things the way they are.
A co-worker — back when I was a worker among workers — shared that her Dominican grandmother would complain that no one in Parkchester up in the Bronx spoke Spanish anymore and that the Africans now owned all the stores.
Classic New York.
When my partner in life and art was a teenager growing up in Parkchester, the (white) neighbors were moving out ahead of the influx of people like my co-worker’s grandmother.
The great influx into Queens of Taiwanese and Chinese from the mainland got real legs under it in the 1970s, decades after the Greeks claimed Astoria, the Italians set up shop in Bensonhurst and about 45 minutes behind the Russians and Ukrainians who were making Brighton Beach their own.
Like all other waves of immigrants before them, the Chinese brought their culture and ideas of culinary delicacies.
We spent most of the afternoon walking around the main drags of Flushing — Main Street, Flushing Avenue, and Kissena Boulevard — after having started the day checking out the massive three-dimensional panorama of the city that lives at the Queens Museum.
And the Queens Museum lives in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, which has held onto some of those 1964 World’s Fair goodies. My partner, by the way, was about 13 years old then and spent many afternoons at the fair.
After giving up on finding a restaurant along Main Street, we enjoyed some interesting pastries at one of the dozen or more bakeries we passed, along with cups of hot tea with milk. We chose that place because it had tables, and we were exhausted after walking over seven miles.
We enjoyed being ignored by the good people of Flushing (as is not exactly the case in Brighton Beach). In neither case did we feel that we were in enemy territory.
Because we weren’t.
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