New York Final Destination

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New York is particularly unselfconscious about money and materialism, which is fine by the immigrants. Joanne Oplustil is founder of the Church Street Merchant Association's refugee program, which ministers to Southeast Asians. "Four years ago when he arrived," Oplustil recalls, "one man was thrilled to have a bicycle. Then a big TV, then a video recorder. Now," she sighs, "he loves to talk about owning a Mercedes." The city's notorious brusqueness, off-putting to many American visitors, also seems to suit the ambitious arrivals. When a group of Chinese recently bought a Flushing commercial building to renovate, the mood at the closing was strictly business. "The crane's already outside," said one of the buyers after the lawyers had chitchatted too long for her taste. "Get on with it." Richard Ou, a Taiwanese who now lives in Queens, runs a gift shop -- for now. Business turnover in Flushing, he says, "is very high. We are all so competitive. One year in business before selling out is not unusual." As soon as Ou sells, he plans to become a real estate broker.

Real estate speculation is a favored enterprise of the new immigrants. More than half of New York's landlords are now foreign born. Building prices doubled and tripled in one year in parts of Flushing. Tiny shops there now rent for $1,000 a month and up; so-so one-bedroom apartments 45 minutes from Manhattan go for $600. In Brooklyn's predominantly Puerto Rican Greenpoint section, the surge of Polish immigrants has, just since 1983, helped turn undistinguished $40,000 row houses into undistinguished $150,000 row houses.

Among the real estate wheeler-dealers, the Chinese tend to invest in housing, the Koreans in commercial property. Indeed, just as the turn-of-the-century immigrants clustered in certain kinds of business -- the Irish in politics and policing, Jews in the textile industry -- each new national group has its common calling. The division of labor establishes new, fairly benign stereotypes. Africans, mostly young men, sell sunglasses, umbrellas and baubles from blankets spread on Manhattan sidewalks. Albanians own apartment buildings. Greeks set up coffee shops, the walls invariably decorated with murals of the Parthenon. Koreans, it seems, suddenly own every vegetable stand in the city. Poles are especially attracted to the travel-agency business, and Russians drive taxis.

For the majority of New Yorkers the most palpable effect of the influx is culinary. Does any other city on earth have Tibetan, Peruvian, Afghan and Ethiopian restaurants? The Kam Sen grocery store in Queens draws buyers of Korean cha jang gu soo noodles and fermented Chinese "thousand-year-old" eggs packed in mud. The store sells eight kinds of soy sauce. In Flushing, a little way down from the Japan Sari House and an Italian restaurant called La Giocanda, the Bharat Bazaar has sacks of dried red chilis, deep purple mustard seeds, cloves and pistachios, and rents Indian videocassettes on the side.