Genesis of a New York Chinatown
Chinese are increasingly moving to New York's idyllic Long Island - but will they get, or even need, a societal hub, asks Rong Xiaoqing.
When Lisa Wang and her husband decided to buy a home in New York, the family had a sleepover at a friend's apartment in Manhattan. It was a nice day, Wang remembers. They walked through Central Park, had dinner at the Jean-Georges restaurant, in the Trump Hotel, and went to a concert at the Lincoln Centre. All of these attractions are a few blocks from the friend's apartment.
"It's a very convenient location, where you can enjoy the best things in the city," says Wang, who had been renting in Queens since the family received their green cards through the United States' Immigrant Investor programme, and moved to New York from Shanghai a year ago.
Still, the Wangs didn't choose to nest in Manhattan. Early last month, they signed the papers for a US$2 million house in the hamlet of Jericho, on Long Island, which is known for the Hamptons - a beach playground for wealthy New Yorkers - and as the setting for F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920s novel The Great Gatsby. The Wangs are not buying in a beach zone - for that price, it is difficult to get a property close to the water in the best areas of the island. But Jericho is an area of lavish greenery, and it is the best school district in New York state, if not the nation.
"Manhattan is too crowded, just like Shanghai. But the spacious and garden-like environment on Long Island is what you don't easily get in China. And my son will be getting into high school in September; the schools on Long Island are better quality than those in the city," says Wang, who, like the wives in many such investment-immigrant families, lives with her son in New York while her husband spends most of his time in China, taking care of business. (The name she uses in the US, and gives for this article, is not one that would be recognised by people who know her back in Shanghai.)
Wang is not alone. Many affluent newcomers from China, as well as earlier Chinese immigrants who have climbed the ladder to the upper middle class, have been eyeing up properties on Long Island in recent years. The influx is changing the demographics of the island and reshuffling the dynamics of its economy.
Furthermore, if a municipal government or a real-estate broker - or both - get their way, Long Island may soon see its own Chinatown, one that is very different to the others in New York City.
