New York Final Destination

(6 of 7)

Here, away from home. "Everyone is homesick," says Ecuadorian Howard Saltos, who owns the Discosymas record store in Jackson Heights. He has a separate section for the music of each Latin American country. Folk ballads are the best sellers. "They like to reminisce a lot," explains Saltos of his customers. Peruvian Hayly Rivera, now a naturalized American, is scornful of the "ghetto mentality" of many of her fellow Hispanics. "Their heart is back home. I hear too many people around here saying 'I don't like this, I don't like that.' " Rivera hears them complaining in Spanish, which riles her all the more. "They can't communicate. If they don't learn English, they'll never succeed."

It is not only Hispanics, of course, who are tempted to hunker down in an insular subculture. "In the summer," says Emmanuel Pratsinakis, a Greek Orthodox priest in Briarwood, Queens, "the air is full of the sound of children shouting in Greek. This community gives a feeling of security." "Polish Greenpoint is comfortable, familiar," says Ponanta, the typesetter. "You stay as long as you need to, then move out to Queens, to Manhattan." Assimilation still seems inexorable. "We want to be part of American culture," says Richard Ou of Flushing. The Russian New Yorkers may keep eating piroshki forever, but, says Sima Blokh of the Brighton Beach public library, "they want to be Americans. The most important thing to the new immigrants is to read English."

Sung Woo Choi, 6, is working at it. "There is just one fish," he reads aloud from his school workbook. "There are three birds." The lower lip is bitten. The forehead wrinkles. With great deliberation he draws a circle around the three birds. At Sung's school, P.S. 89 in Elmhurst, English is not the native tongue of fully half the 1,500 students. All told, they speak 38 different languages. Throughout the New York public school system, there are 113,000 such children, most of them helped along by 2,100 bilingual teachers. But P.S. 89 is singular. There, just before the end of the school year, Ann Pryor was guiding her second-grade English-language class through the basics. She asked each child the salient question, and in a dozen different accents, they answered. "I come from Japan," said Kazuko Hiraga. "I come from Afghanistan," said Omar Norzyai. "I come from China," said Thomas Chuang. "They try so hard," Pryor says later. "They deserve to succeed."

Demetre Belgis, a Greek who arrived 17 years ago, is a success. In 1977 he opened a gallery in SoHo, where he sells from an impressive stock of Toulouse- Lautrec lithographs. Belgis has been persuaded by his experience that the land-of-opportunity platitudes are real. "Regardless of what country you come from," he says, "one still sees America and New York as dreamland, where you can be what you want to be. One has to be willing to work very hard here, but one doesn't need to have millions behind him to be successful here. A lot of it is just luck."