New York "Final Destination"

By Kurt Andersen.

When Henry James sailed out of New York harbor for Europe in 1875, Ellis Island, to his right, was just an empty rock, and the city he left behind was ethnically familiar. When he returned for a visit three decades later, everything had changed. Into the city had come millions of people from Ireland and Italy, Jews from all over Europe, Danes, Swedes, Finns and the rest. James was astonished at the polyglot place his old New York had become, at the "hotch-potch of racial ingredients" on the city's streets.

James saw the very crest of the great immigrant wave. At the turn of the century, four out of every ten New Yorkers were foreign born. That fraction declined steadily -- until the past decade. Now, once again, New York City is America's melting pot. Today, local planning officials estimate, 2.1 million of the city's 7.1 million residents are from overseas, some 30%, a larger proportion than at any time since the 1940s. There are more Dominicans (an estimated 350,000) than in any city but Santo Domingo, more Haitians (225,000) than anywhere but Port au Prince, more Greeks (100,000) than anywhere but Athens. New York has more Jamaicans (275,000), Russians (100,000) and Chinese (200,000), it seems sure, than any city outside Jamaica, the U.S.S.R., China and Taiwan. Los Angeles and Miami have a higher percentage of foreign- born residents, but neither can match New York's ethnic depth and breadth: not only does the city have nearly every immigrant group imaginable, each group is quite large. Even the smaller ethnic communities are sizable: the city has more Ethiopian residents (3,000) than several states have black people.

Mongrel New York, always a port of entry and always a slightly hysterical place, is now becoming even more eclectic, more jazzed up and redolent. Manhattan has a Ukrainian neighborhood that overlaps Polish and Puerto Rican sections, Brooklyn a Lebanese quarter just north of formerly Scandinavian, now Hispanic, Sunset Park. In the Balkanized Astoria neighborhood -- one part of one borough -- there are some 5,000 Croatians from Yugoslavia; 1,800 Colombians; 6,200 immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. In the Flushing section of Queens, a few miles east, there are 38,000 Koreans. Before he explored his new neighborhood recently, one Flushing resident fresh from India had been expecting a blonder, Wonder Bread community, like Des Moines, maybe, or Tacoma. "It wasn't America," he says of northeastern Queens. "It was the U.N. I saw Colombians, Koreans, Chinese, Dominican Republicans -- but not a single hamburger!"

Why do they come to New York? For one thing, the city has a tradition of tolerance, or at least a laissez-faire obliviousness, which amounts to the same thing. Partly too, it is the reassurance of being among one's own kind. * An immigrant from almost any country can depend on finding transplanted countrymen in the city. But there is also something appealing, it seems, about joining the larger swarm of immigrants in New York, of being on a patch that is in turn part of a patchwork quilt. Where practically everyone is an alien, no one is alien. "There is a feeling of cordiality," says Anand Mohan, a Queens College politics professor from India, "and, for us, a satisfaction in knowing that as immigrants in this city, we are not alone."

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.

Life for any immigrant anywhere is apt to be hard. New York has some aspects, like crime and physical decay, that tend particularly to taint the immigrant experience. Marian Ponanta, a Pole who works as a typesetter in New York, says his countrymen come expecting a city that always shimmers. "They only know America from the movies," says Ponanta. "It's ironic, but much of the Polish government propaganda about America turns out to be true. Those who want to come don't believe it. Then, over here, they discover there is dirt, violence, cockroaches, unemployment. They undergo tremendous stress." Kaen Singkeo, a Laotian farmer, was mugged within weeks of his arrival in Brooklyn in 1982. "I thought people here would all be nice," he says without irony or bitterness. "Now, after I was robbed, I know I must be careful of people who may attack me." Mohan, the professor, shrugs off the recurrent vandalism of some Indian-owned shops in Queens. "Irish kids do it, black kids do it, American kids do it," he says. "It is an urban problem, not an immigration problem."

The hardship is endured by some immigrants because even a difficult New York life is preferable to their former lives. In most cases the immigrants' anesthetic is hope, the idea that they can work their way out of deprivation. Flor Rojas arrived last October from the Dominican Republic. Why? "Because there was not enough money." She lives with a friend in a cramped Bronx apartment. Her taxi-driving husband and a son live with another friend in Manhattan. She awakes each day at 5 a.m., takes the subway almost two hours to her minimum-wage factory job in Brooklyn, packing nail polish. The couple manage to save as much as $200 a month, which they send to four children still back in the Caribbean. The monthly remittances amount to twice what Flor earned in a month as a hospital worker in Santo Domingo.

New York is easy-entry capitalism on the cheap. There are plenty of ways of making a living that hardly exist in more spread-out, laid-back places: driving a taxi, selling hot dogs from a cart, hawking toys on the sidewalk. In what other city is an automobile truly unnecessary? As ratty as the subways are, the 235-mile system is still extraordinary: at any time of day or night, anywhere in the city, a job is only 90 cents away. The brightly colored, highly schematic subway maps are, for immigrants without English, the only comprehensible city guide.

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.

The shtetl atmospherics are thick in Brooklyn's Brighton Beach neighborhood, home to a majority of the several thousand Russian immigrants, most of them Jewish, who arrive each year. Near the boardwalk, babushkas at a swing set push grandchildren, while over at the M&I International food store, women who spent last summer in Odessa this summer buy kapchonka (dried fish), Yugoslavian black-currant syrup and Borjouri seltzer water direct from Soviet Georgia. El Mundo III in Jackson Heights is one of the city's 6,500 bodegas, tiny mama-y-papa Hispanic grocery stores that sell fresh coconuts and plantains, yucca and 10-lb. bags of rice, instant masa from Venezuela or Colombian figs in syrup. Compared with the big chain stores, bodegas are expensive but friendly, loose, Latin. "If you needed five cents," says the Cuban owner of a bodega on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, "the A&P wouldn't give it to you. Here, our customers are like family."

There are now large ghettos within ghettos. Haitians, about half of them in the U.S. illegally, are concentrated in the heart of Brooklyn's black area in a quarter they call La Saline, after the Port au Prince neighborhood from which many came. Hand-lettered French signs are pasted on walls and hung uncertainly from storefronts. Creole patois burbles everywhere. One hot afternoon on Nostrand Avenue recently, the Impeccable barber shop was crowded. Men had gathered under the fans for companionship, a bit of gossip, not haircuts. "We Haitians love to get together," says the owner of a neighborhood restaurant. "We talk about Haiti, about Papa Doc. New York is a tough city, very tough. But here you have freedom, and that is what we Haitians need." Indeed so: the man did not want his name used, he said, for fear of retaliation from Haitian government agents.

Immigrants reweave bits and pieces of native culture, and counterculture, into the New York fabric. On Manhattan's Second Avenue are the offices of the Ukrainian National Liberation Front. In Brighton Beach, the best seller at the Black Sea bookstore is a Russian translation of The kgb Today. The pastor of a church in Queens says he figured that one new congregant, a woman who constantly glanced over her shoulder, was deranged. "It turns out she is a Soviet refugee terrified of the secret police," says the minister.

No group seems more churchly than the Koreans, devout Protestants in Asia and now devout Protestants in New York. In Elmhurst alone they have established at least four churches. The Indian population in Queens, settled for decades and now 25,000 strong, has an elaborate cultural center-cum-Hindu temple in Flushing, complete with domes and sculpted elephants. One day in May, Kari and Shanthi Naidu were worshiping at the altar of Sri Mahalaksai, a god of well- being. They had paid a Hindu priest $5 for a prayer service. "Quite frankly," says Kari Naidu, "I did not become a believer until I arrived in this country. But here, away from home, I recognized there is something more important than daily affairs."

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."

"No one should come to New York to live," declared E.B. White in his 1948 essay about the city, "unless he is willing to be lucky." For White, the greatest New York, the one "that accounts for New York's high-strung disposition," was "the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something . . . the city of final destination, the city that is a goal." Once again, the city has become primarily, passionately a city of destination, the goal of millions who want to be rich, or to stop being poor. All over the planet, people who have never had a whiff of New York are determined to become New Yorkers. A nice place to visit? They want to live here, with all their hearts.

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With reporting by Kenneth W. Banta/New York