Flushing is a Cosmopolis
Flushing is a cosmopolis: a virtual cosmos of immigration and culinary development which is more comprehensive and awe-inspiring than the neighborhood’s common descriptors as a world-city and a melting pot. In the neighborhood which I have become familiar with over twenty years as a 1.75-generation Chinese American, everyone learns to become familiar with many different countries and cultures where culinary delights, multilingual conversations, efficient transportation, and commercial development circulates commodities, communities, and entire knowledge systems. All beings here are members of a single community of wayfarers, merchants, residents, followers, travellers, flaneurs, artisans; blue, white, and pink-collar workers without separation; clerks and attorneys, dentists and doctors, yuppies and neo-citizens, provincials and transients, the rootless and the grounded.
Flushing makes room for those with certainty in pursuing a singular small business. I think of a renowned restaurant specializing in dim sum where my recent favorite dish is the lobster vermicelli, a higher-end species of the Hong-Kong style Cantonese fried noodles which I first labeled my favorite food. For under five dollars, the delectable noodles were served out of a Chinese bakery filled with egg tarts, roast pork buns, and unsweetened whipped cream chiffon cakes before being discontinued around a decade ago. It reappeared like a species undergoing a revival at the ten dollar lunch special at the escalator before entering New World Mall. A Korean BBQ midnight joint, seafood pans and skewer grills, make-your-own hotpot spice combinations tucked into a nook or cranny within a trendy mixed-use development, which I eagerly anticipate every week with my partner on the twenty-minute bus ride from Whitestone. A salon boasting vibrant single and double processes, an opportunity I undertook only to make the decision to double-bleach thick black Asian hair into a canvas on which hours-long artistry can even become apparent. Japanese marts whose grand openings were met with disproportionate excitement to bulk-purchase dollar discounted imported candies and chips, picking up effervescent drinks and unsweetened bottled tea, as nostalgic as if I were shopping on the university campus of the Chinese heritage camp in Beijing the summer after I graduated high school.
Landmarks which have nourished me since childhood include the Queens Botanical Garden, the Mets stadium only one subway stop away, the Unisphere, the Ganesh Temple with its jewel-like interior and basement temple canteen carrying my highly-rated cone-shaped triangular dosas the sizes of heads, vada and idli combos, and mango lassi, as well as multiple malls emerging from the soot of abandoned architecture over the territory of the Gatsbyian valley of ashes. The activities residents choose to engage in Flushing define the people here as much as their heritage.
In north-central Queens, Flushing derives its history from the Matinecoc Indians driven out by seventeenth-century New Netherland settlers, many of whom argued for freedom for "Jews, Turks, and Egyptians" even as Quakers were deported, until the Dutch West India Company allowed all to worship freely. The John Bowne House remains a museum I have passed many times, as well as the Old Quaker Meeting House, while walking along Northern Boulevard to my parents' Airbnb, hungry for sanctuary. The Town of Flushing was one of the original five towns comprising Queens County when the English took power, a supplier of commercial trees and a stronghold for horticulture and greenhouses. Growing alongside New York City's booming population and economy, it survived the American Revolution even while favoring the British. As petroculture gained speed and railroads built traction, the Queensboro Bridge, the Roosevelt Avenue Bridge, and the subway's 7 Line Main Street terminal, which opened in 1928, brought in unprecedented motorcar and subterranean traffic. They incorporated the Village of Whitestone, the location of my house, in 1868. As the population boomed, the oldest library in Queens County arrived in 1858, as well as the first free public high school in New York City in 1875.
Asian communities began their presence in Flushing during the 1970s when Taiwanese immigrants alongside small Japanese and South Korean communities arrived in predominantly white communities, the first to speak Mandarin and Taiwanese rather than Cantonese to arrive in New York City. By oral tradition and through social networks, ethnic Chinese immigrants from all backgrounds settled in the area, especially Fuzhounese, Wenzhounese, and Northern Chinese, creating a delicious "food mecca" and international "melting pot." Mandarin continues to dwarf Cantonese and other dialects with many speakers who are recent immigrants from Mainland China and Taiwan, as opposed to the Cantonese-majority in Manhattan's Chinatown, with growing South Korean, Bangladeshi, Indian, Pakistani, Columbian, Ecuadorian, Mexican, Dominican Republican, Uzbekistan, and mixed populations. I include these dates and ethnicities ranging from the recent past to the colonial and Victorian eras for a better understanding of the richly transcendent, transnational encounters that played out while existing within this geographic space, and to expand the possible interpretations and solutions at hand for bearing testimony for a location which has continued to enrich my life as a Chinese American and instantly deepens relationships with diverse friends.
Centering my personal identity around Flushing is not a difficult task. Free-flowing immigration led to the development of the fourth largest business district and third busiest intersection in New York City at the crossroads of Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue. I have prowled through with the other hundred thousand people on a daily basis for authentic food which tastes like home, midnight subways and buses depositing me at a Manhattan high school and later, commuting to the Jamaica LIRR to the Stony Brook stop at long past 1 AM, keeping the same long hours as a commuter student at a private university. New World Mall was once the beacon around which all other malls rotated: now, popular openings such as the Shops at Skyview, Tangram, the deftly upgraded architecture of Queens Crossing, Teso Life, and 99 Ranch’s new food court have replaced mom-and-pop Chinese medicine and jewelry businesses, which in turn have migrated to other storefronts.
Having been forced to travel through Flushing for twenty years if only to arrive at anywhere meaningful, significant, or interesting in New York City causes the streets to be unforgettable: both in their practicality as the transit hub for all that is worthy of my attention, and the ease of exploration in new relationships, flavors, and destinies. There is no other neighborhood which has grown as deeply into the past and future simultaneously: where locations provide black stone kettles, traditional Chinese screen doors, posters of painted women in hanfu, and water wheel interiors from the Song Dynasty, alongside full-screen K-pop stage performances, mobile video game collaborations with robot servers, and lightning-round neon arcades with tabletop games, street racing, and claw machines in every size imaginable. While initially with a facade as rustic as Manhattan’s Chinatown, the Queens neighborhood is now extratemporal to accommodate audiences of all ages as I track the subtle changes in food culture, transportation, and architectural style over the decades. The streets are crowded shoulder to shoulder by midday, where I can barely see through the crowds to the street vendors I hope to be satiated by. Ten years before, only beef, chicken, squid, tripe, fish tofu, and other skewers were available as instant sustenance off street carts. Now, there are more expansive and popular options. You may find tanghulu sugared fruits, milk tea samples outside bubble tea store grand openings, preserved meats, jian bing, or a street food crepe filled with youtiao, egg, scallions, cilantro, and hoisin and chili sauce with iconic baocui deep-fried crispy crackers as its iconic trait for authentic Beijing-style identification, watching vendors spread the batter on an outdoors griddle, crack an egg on top, and fill and fold it before serving.
I remember how the English language left its words marked around my body, ringing in the new year with pulses of imagination and sunshine. I followed the rabbit into its dark burrows and through doors which glowed a warm brown like they were stacked before an invisible campfire, behind which a thousand bells hung untouched. Walking through Flushing at night means sweeping the dust off my soles as wind slithers against two subway escalators leading into the belly of the sidewalk – it is trampling over the remains of the stolen and lost, revisiting the village for both the forever partiers and the disappeared family members overseas, English a language which appears as dead as Latin in Flushing and erased from historically diverse clinics, storefronts and menus.
The eve of the Year of the Rabbit in late January, the zodiac year in which I was born, is when I count the number of references to the holiday in New York City’s streets and public transportation. They line every window display and subway poster, candy-red paper cut-outs engraving flowers, fans, and lotus patterns into rabbit bodies, infusing them with what seems like mysticism or spirituality, similar to literary analysis’s symbolism and linguistic interventions, plastering the doorsteps of glass storefronts and taped above banks and bakeries. A Chinese woman whose scarlet dress lines her waist in intricate twists loosened by an invisible breeze makes an effortlessly astonished “oh” face through the Macy’s counter, almond-shaped face softly contoured by commercial makeup, either newly organic or European-imported, while a few months, or was it years before, a fire had come tearing through the commercial buildings and apartments on Main Street.
“FDNY continues to investigate cause of two-alarm fire that started in outdoor dining shed in Flushing," the headlines read on April 14, 2023. “FDNY battles 4-alarm flames in Queens building,” says Eyewitness News, Tuesday, March 21, 2023. Going back in time, now it’s a Thursday, when a “5-alarm fire in Flushing, Queens impacts more than 30 small businesses," ABC 7 writes on the same platform, March 17, 2022. Over and over, the same snapshot – broken windows smeared with soot, burnished and blackened brick walls, tornado-like plumes of smoke, ceiling panels falling atop scattered personal belongings, so out of place and postmodern it’s as if their owners are aliens. Like flames made consumable, at the base of the woman’s sprawling dress seams foreshadowing her fanned out ginger-tinted hair above, lie clusters of multi-size paper lanterns, some marked with gold characters, others bare. Advanced night repair shimmers on lit-up screens through the night on photos of lucky red knots, inflatable pink blossoms, and Radiance in Bloom – Estee Lauder in both English and Chinese.
Earlier that day I read on Google, “New Yorkers celebrate beginning of Lunar New Year,” and “Hundreds of New Yorkers gathered in Queens on Saturday to celebrate the beginning of the Lunar New Year and the Year of the Rabbit.” In New York City, 2025 would be the first year in which the Lunar New Year is celebrated as an official state holiday, though state employees do not receive a paid day off of work. I watched the firefighters climb inside the burning building and on ladders for hours, sifting through the linoleum bowels and broken windows for the inferno’s origin, as the crowds and firetrucks stood poised to document the disaster and intervene at an instant. Each time a fire spreads in the crowded restaurants or second-floor salons, which instantly injures countless businesses and individuals, we see the community come together as an insurmountable force for their neighbors, helping them survive, even as their favorite sites’ destruction feel like an attack on the identity of Flushing residents.
Our neighborhood is amorphous and resilient, as with recent high-rise residential projects such as One Flushing which prioritizes low-income and senior housing, massive mixed-use developments including the $2 billion waterfront district, and a thriving small business scene, with a seventy-percent rise in private employment. Ambitious projects such as the former Flushing Airport, now eighty acres of closed off wetland, will be converted into three thousand new homes. generating billions in economic activity and over a thousand jobs and permanent careers. The health care, social assistance, retail, and food services fuel this rapid development, yet Flushing’s origins as a racially and ethnically diverse, working class neighborhood are dissolving as luxury residential and commercial condominium development dispossesses Black and White historical residents. There is one thing that Flushing residents have in common: helping the neighborhood fulfill its highest cultural and industrial potential while saving everything valuable from being lost in one of the most interchronological and multicultural populations in existence on the planet.
