Asian American Chillgrimage to Flushing Chinatown (法拉盛): Food, tourism, & honest thoughts
Recently, I was blessed to be able to travel in New York for a few weeks while couch surfing at my dear friends' apartment. During that time, I knew that I had to pay a visit to Flushing, which is one of America's biggest Chinatowns. I hoped that I could use it as an opportunity to advance further in my dream of becoming PERFECTLY FLUENT in Chinese and to learn more about the practical reality of Chinese American history. This blog post contains my full trip info, tourism suggestions, and honest thoughts.
You can watch the full video of everywhere I visited here on Youtube:
Background
Apparently, Flushing qualifies as one of the biggest Chinatowns with a population of around 250,000 Chinese Americans that comprise 10% of the population. My first reaction to learning that information was.... mild surprise and disappointment. For some reason I had thought the number would be at least a million!
As a comparison, Foshan, which is the ancestral homeland for a lot of Chinese-Americans, is considered a 2nd tier city in China and has 9.5 million people, and my guess is that the population is at least 95% Chinese. So Flushing is tiny in comparison. But I guess that's not so surprising considering that there are only around 5.5 million Chinese Americans in the USA. Even if you put all of us inside one location, it still wouldn't be enough to fill a Chinese city!
The Food Question
Going into this trip, I kept my expectations low, since most results on Google and Youtube search were focused on food, which made me worried that Flushing was just a big food court with nothing else to do. To be honest, I really dislike gastronomic tourism. Even though I myself am no small eater, I need to at least have something like a museum, park, or bookstore to occupy my mental attention. This way I can at least use the pretense of cultural learning as an excuse to justify how much food I've been eating.
Why do I dislike food tourism so much? I guess one reason is that there are really only two main meals that I eat in a day: lunch and dinner. I can visit museums and gardens for 8 hours and still be hungry for more, but food-eating is at most 3 hours of my day. And if I really wanted to eat good East Asian cuisine during those meals, I would just drive to a good restaurant, eat my fill, and drive back. There's already so many good restaurants in any decent American city and even in the suburbs, so being completely surrounded by a ton of exotic snacks in a walkable city for a whole day really isn't a special experience unless you're a professional eater with an endless stomach.
Preparation
I went on this day trip without a strong itinerary, and pretty much just read the best blog post I could find about non-food tourism destinations (there didn't seem to be many) and then wandered around. This turned out to be a pretty good strategy.
Fortunately, I'm already conversationally fluent in Northern Chinese, which is the lingua sinica of Flushing Chinatown (as opposed to many other Chinatowns in California, which are all Cantonese), and I made sure to aggressively speak it in search of language practice, new friends, and local experiences.
The Train Ride
The train ride was pretty smooth. A significant part of the ride, towards the end, takes you above ground where you can see the city views. Most of the train views looked nicer than this, but this happened to be the only video I took.
Main Street Station
As I exited the station, my immediate thought was that Flushing, in terms of the layout, architecture, and chaos was pretty much worse than most Chinese cities. If you haven't ever been to a Chinese city in your life, just imagine Tokyo. Most modern 1st tier cities in China are that level of beauty and cleanliness these days. And if you want to make an apple to apple comparison, I think that Japantown in downtown LA, and probably also Seattle Chinatown, is more beautiful than Flushing.
Food Picture: Eggy, quiche-like Oyster Mushroom bread. I paid for this using a $50 bill and the cash register attendant checked the bill multiple times, called over her manager, and used a fraud detection machine. After the payment succeeded, I finally had a bunch of small bills that I could use for my other purchases in the city.
New World Mall
I went to this mall with a funny name near the main street station and explored a few floors. The first floor was an ordinary Japanese-American grocery store. The other floors were like a clean, mid tier Chinese mall with restaurants, pharmacies, clothes shops, and nail salons.
In the USA, one thing you always have to think about is the difference between "walking around" vs. "taking a trip". In my American suburban hometown, it was always easy to access Chinese grocery stores and East Asian restaurants; you simply had to deliberately plan it and drive there. In an actual walkable Chinatown like Flushing, you can walk around casually and bump into 20x of these experiences. I started to become mildly interested, but at the same time... you don't get that much benefit from visiting five Chinese grocery stores compared to one. If you've seen one, you've seen them at all. This is one of the problems with consumption based tourism.
Food Picture: Shrimp Shao Mai, quite tasty with a firm texture. Around $5 for this set of four.
Anime Castle
I went to this small hobby store called Anime Castle after simply typing "anime" in Google Maps.
It was a pretty interesting to walk along this road, which was filled with a diverse array of shops: restaurants, hobby stores, massage parlors, medical clinics, where each "floor" (basement, 1F, and 2F) was a different shop and they all had different entrances. Walking down the stairs to enter a basement shop was pretty exotic to me and reminded me of similar small shops in Tokyo.
Unfortunately, the Anime Castle was more like an Anime Warehouse and was just stacked with a lot of manga, some keychains/figurines, in a compressed style, and everything was English only! That's fine, but for me, I prefer to read manga in Japanese or Chinese as language practice. I had some decent conversations with the shopkeeper in Chinese, so that was already a linguistic win in my book. She and her coworker gave me suggestions on where else to visit - the Eglance bookstore, a Chinese language bookstore nearby.
It was really nice to speak with the shopkeeper in Chinese and learn some local knowledge, but other than that, I would totally recommend visiting Kinokuniya in Manhattan for your multi-language manga needs.
Footage available on Youtube.
Jing-Si Bookstore / Tzu Chi Center
On the way out of the anime store, I stumbled across the Jing-Si Bookstore and Cafe, which immediately surprised me as a potential "hidden game" and became one of the highlights of my trip. I learned about Taiwanese Mahayana Buddhism (not really in any tremendous detail) and spoke in Chinese for a while with the elderly patrons and staff members. Everyone was very friendly and nice. The conversations didn't blow my mind away, but it was nice to flip through some bilingual Buddhist books and to get some language practice in and to see a slice of traditional Chinese culture that I hadn't really engaged with before.
I purchased some organic tea, oolong tea candy (delicious), and instant corn-and-seaweed rice mix.
Food Picture: Multigrain crackers and Oolong tea; fragrant and nice
Li Chinese Calligraphy Center
Visiting this calligraphy center was definitely the best part of this trip and probably ranks in one of my top highlighted tourism experiences. Mr. Li is a calligraphy master from China who eventually settled in the USA later in his life, and he basically created all these calligraphy pieces -- which I myself can hardly read -- as part of his art.
The gallery was pretty tucked away and didn't seem very welcome or inviting to new visitors, and it didn't even have a Google Maps listening, but a nearby auntie and I conspired together to barge in anyways, and as a result we got to all talk together for a couple hours. Mr. Li has around 12 students now and told me that he's looking for eager minds and providential meetings.
Eglance Bookstore
I visited this bookstore, but the staff members inside told me that it was closed for renovations! Based on the website, I think I would like it.
Anime Ke
I visited this store called "Anime Ke" but it was basically just a self-service automated crane game parlor. The plush toys are cute, but I don't really understand why people love these games so much. I personally prefer manga stores since you can actually read and own the physical books.
Footage available on Youtube.
Haircut Street
I went to a funny haircut street where every other shop consisted of Chinese hair salons and staff members waited outside to try to sell you a hair cut. Eventually I found a haircutter who seemed nice, so I went in for a men's haircut. Many of these staff were from Guilin (?) and spoke a dialect of Chinese that I'd never heard before. It was 15 dollars for a men's haircut, excluding tip.
Afterward, I walked around nearby and got some more food:
Food picture: Oily fried pork buns -- quite crispy and enticing, and fairly cheap as well (Like 4 buns for 6 dollars).
Food picture: Peking Duck Bao, how can I not buy one when it's this cheap? (5 dollars for two). Fluffy and decent taste.
Skyview Park
I walked to my friend's apartment which was situated on a giant sky mall that spanned several blocks and had a very nice shared rooftop garden and pool. He is building a company called Certainly Health and is trying to build a more transparent, consumer-friendly medical marketplace to create win-wins for doctors and patients alike. We chatted for a long time and had some tasty whiskey.
Footage available on Youtube.
Food picture: Chita Japanese Whiskey. Smooth, tasty, easy to drink.
Tangram Mall
We decided to get food at Tangram Mall, which definitely was a pleasantly surprising, genuinely China-resembling shopping mall experience, with a beautiful clean interior and plenty of interesting shops inside.
Footage available on Youtube.
Food Picture: We grabbed some egg custard affogato; it's ice cream, how can you not enjoy it?
Juqi, Peking Duck
Afterward, we ate some food at Juqi, which served Peking Duck with a great taste and also serving experience. I've had Peking Duck in Beijing and in several places in the USA before, and this definitely ranked up there as the best Peking Duck I've had in America.
Footage available on Youtube.
Food pictures:
Braised pork belly, extremely delicious and great for gaining a lot of weight
Peking Duck - crispy and savory, and an overall premium experience; best that I've had in the USA
Almond custard desert - Sweet, soft, and tastes like marzipan
China Bar, Drinking Street
We went to a drinking street in search of a bar called "China Bar," but it turns out that the entire street had basically burned down a few months ago and all the shops were closed!
Hyatt Hotel, Leaf Bar Rooftop Bar
We went to the Hyatt Hotel in search of their rooftop bar and got some drinks there. The drink menu was very East Asian themed, and the rooftop views were surprisingly good. Success!
Footage available on Youtube.
Food Picture: Baijiu cocktail - tastes like a delicious Hawaiian Punch soft drink with a huge alcoholic kick.
Overall
I'm still learning how to be a successful culture-tourist, and this is my first travelogue, so a lot of this will be pretty unpolished! With that said, what were my original goals, and did we achieve them?
Goals:
Get a lot of experience speaking Chinese: Success. It was very easy to speak Chinese here and it was the default language for anyone who looked East Asian. Also, I'm not a Cantonese speaker, so I don't have as much access to deep experiences in California Cantonese-Chinatowns. So being able to actually communicate with people in Flushing was pretty mind blowing for me.
Do some improvised tourism without a 100% rigid plan: Success. The city is very walkable and there are plenty of interesting experiences that you can spontaneously sign up for.
Experience something that isn't just food. Success. There's plenty of good food, but there's also a decent amount of activities that aren't related to the stomach. But I feel like you have to put in effort to find them.
Have serious discussions with locals: Somewhat successful. It was very nice to speak with the Buddhist cafe-goers and Mr. Li the Calligrapher, but also almost all the bars were closed/burned-down, which would be the usual place I’d search for local talks.
Visit a real slice of China in the USA: Not really successful. Flushing is awesome, but it's still fundamentally an enclave city. From what I can see as a complete outsider and one-day tourist, it is not as beautiful or culturally deep as a city in China. And, to use a more apple-to-apple comparison, I felt that Japantown in SF and LA was significantly more beautiful (although much smaller).
Overall, I was happy with my visit but I probably wouldn't come again. With that said, someone who actually lived here for an extended period would definitely be able to dive deeper and tap into more local, non-consumer activities, and would probably become quite fluent in Chinese over time. In terms of experiencing "real" Chinese culture in the west, Flushing Chinatown probably ranks as the best I've personally seen so far.