New York Final Destination

(2 of 7)

Again and again each day, the juxtapositions of culture and language are jarring, like some mad laboratory experiment in continental drift. In the real world, 9,700 miles separate Shanghai from Bogota. In Jackson Heights on Roosevelt Avenue, they butt right up against each other, as when, one recent afternoon, a Colombian teenager loped into a hole-in-the-wall take-out restaurant. "You do chicken?" he asked haltingly. The Chinese teenager behind the counter frowned for a moment, baffled, then smiled. "Dumpling!" she said, nodding. "We have all kind dumpling!"

At Manhattan's northern tip, outside an 18th century Dutch farmhouse on 204th Street, elderly Jewish women sit on benches, pretending to ignore the young latino drivers who are jiving with each other through open car windows. Just south on St. Nicholas Avenue at El Pablon Chino restaurant, the Chinese waiter serves fried Dominican sausage and chop suey; he speaks Spanish, but no English. Along one refurbished commercial block in Flushing, Asia is scrunched together: Korean beauty salon, Chinese hardware store, Pakistani-Indian spice and grocery store, Chinese wristwatch shop, Korean barber.

The city's random ethnic mix and match often manage to achieve an improbable harmony. One recent Thursday evening in Flushing, six drinkers sat at the bar of the Lychee Village restaurant: a black, an Indian, a Korean, two Chinese and, discussing educational policy with one of the Chinese men, a middle-aged white. "We have all kinds," says Owner William Ming. "German, Irish, South African, black, white, Chinese, Korean, all steady customers. They like each other. Why shouldn't they?" In the Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens, the city's most eclectic immigrant community of all, the congregation of the First Presbyterian Church reflects the extraordinary local mishmash. The church has a governing body that consists of a Cuban, a Thai, a Korean, two Filipinos, a Puerto Rican, a German and a few native-born Americans.

Often, of course, the result is something less than Disney World internationalism. On Union Street in Flushing, a Korean jeweler had a neighborhood monopoly until last winter, when a Chinese jeweler opened up next door and started selling identical merchandise. Just before the ill will turned physical, local Korean and Chinese merchants' associations mediated. For his part, Colombian Eddie Polafia, 14, thinks the neighborhood Koreans are unfairly antagonistic to him and the two dozen break-dancing Latin teenagers with whom he hangs out. The older Koreans, he complains, "think they control everything in Flushing." At last count they did own 120 neighborhood businesses. "Some of those store owners," Polafia says, "think we're criminals." Nor are the Hispanics always fraternal among themselves. "There isn't much of a Hispanic family," says Hayly Rivera, who came from Peru to Jackson Heights. "It is sometimes more like a family feud." As ever, immigrants of several years' standing often look down on new arrivals. In some cases the political disputes of the old country crop up in the new land: Chilean New Yorkers argue with Argentine New Yorkers over border disputes a hemisphere away.