In her interview, Mannar Wong describes the changes she has seen in Chinatown spanning the past forty years. Emigrating with her mother and father from Hong Kong in the early seventies, Wong was raised in Chinatown and moved to Brooklyn with her parents in the eighties when she was a pre-adolescent. In the nineties, she later returned to the neighborhood she now refers to as “Chinatown Little Italy.” Wongs parents initially disapproved of her decision to move back into Chinatown, a place they regarded as a “starting point” for immigrants. However, Wong considers present-day Chinatown “hip and appealing”, which she says was the partly the result of a community of creative types who renovated the area and acted as trailblazers for others to settle there. Wong classifies gentrification as, for the most part, making a place more desirable to people. Although, she warns that the question of whether gentrification is positive or negative is a loaded question – for instance, while she enjoys the appeal and “creature comforts” of the neighborhood, Wong predicts that she will eventually move out due to rising rent prices. Moreover, even though she does not consider herself an activist, she disagrees with small family-owned businesses being replaced by businesses that are not useful to the community.

Margaret Chin, Deputy Executive Director of Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE), shares her experiences immigrating to the United States with her family in 1963 and growing up on Mulberry Street, and later Mott Street, both of which were inhabited by predominantly Chinese and Italian populations. Her memories of Chinatown reveal that it was a much smaller community then, which eventually expanded and became more vocal about Asian American rights. As a young adult, Chin became increasingly interested in and involved with volunteering for AAFE, an advocacy organization established in 1974. AAFE played a key role in organizing Chinatown tenants to fight against eviction, harassment, and gentrification in the housing developments; to secure decent housing for low-income families; and to expose the threat of development and tourism on Chinatowns “authenticity”. Chin believes that the organization has succeeded in staying true to its mission by actively organizing and changing policy and legislation for the benefit of the community.

Ming Xian Lin, also known as Cindy, tells MOCA about her experience immigrating to Chinatown from Shanghai where she had worked first as a farmer during the cultural revolution and then as a telephone operator. She discusses what Chinatown looked like in the early 1990s when she arrived, going into depth about her experiences working in different garment factories and her concerns about the crime in the area. Cindy also explains how the neighborhood has changed and offers some of her thoughts about gentrification and what she thinks the government and people in the community should do about it. She also shares her thoughts on the importance Chinese immigrants learning english and how she found her drive to pick up the language at 38 years old. She concludes by discussing how she hopes her family will remain engaged with Chinatown and the broader American world.

Lana Cheung emigrated with her husband from Hong Kong to the United States in 1987. Shortly after her arrival to New York, she remembers being initially surprised by the differences between Chinatown and Hong Kong, particularly in the contrasting architecture and combined residential and commercial areas. Cheung considers Chinatown a safe harbor for Chinese immigrants, where they had a sense of security and could speak their native language. Cheung was employed by a Jewish import company, and later as a union agent for the garment workers union, UNITE (which had a Chinatown office starting in 1998). As a union representative, Cheung provides an insider perspective of the garment factory working conditions, which affected mostly Chinese immigrant women who endured long hours, hard labor, and the burden of sustaining their families. She notes that the garment factories also functioned as a place for women to communicate and socialize with each other, a detail that is often overlooked in historical accounts of garment factory working conditions. Following September 11th, however, the garment industry slowed down and many of the garment factories were replaced by condominiums. While Cheung hopes that at least one garment facility will be preserved in memory of Chinatown’s industrial history, she otherwise welcomes the new developments and hopes that the younger and energetic generations will be a positive and reviving influence on community. Along these same lines, she acknowledges some current positive changes in sanitation, tourism, and efforts to ensure that Chinese culture and language are preserved in succeeding generations.