This is what Chinatown is REALLY like in NYC | exploring with a local

Auto-captioned from the film, lightly cleaned. Elena's words, not edited prose.

hi hello how's it going my name's elena and i love to travel since i cannot travel internationally at the moment i figured i would explore the world through my own backyard i live in beautiful new york city also known as one of the most diverse cities in the world made up of its famed five boroughs the new york city is extraordinary diverse by nearly every measure it has the largest foreign population of any metropolis it's home to more than 800 languages and has no ethnic majority and like anywhere the city is defined by its residents above all else it's out of my deep-seated love for this town that i'm teaming up with locals from all over new york city to share with you their unique experience from the angle of the neighborhoods they call home while places like midtown and soho and washington square park aren't going anywhere there are countless neighborhoods that you're less likely to find in your tour guide book that are vastly underappreciated i'm excited to welcome those guides to my channel to share with you the new york they'd like you to know so before we jump fully into our first destination i figured i would tell you a little bit about me i was born in paris and as a small child i was constantly traveling to different countries and being exposed to various cultures and people my mom is iranian-american whose family had to flee when she was a child because of the iranian revolution they immigrated to the us with several suitcases and worked incredibly hard to build a life from scratch my childhood was filled with hearing stories of iran from my grandpa eating your running cuisine and listening to the sounds of farsi while my cousins and great uncles played backgammon and drink chai tea bubba is with the king of iran that's the king on this baba my home growing up was constantly filled with foreign exchange students and international colleagues as my parents made learning and celebrating people different for myself a vital element of my childhood while i've been very privileged to be white passing and to hold an american passport i feel that my mixed heritage has shaped the way i see the world my multicultural upbringing has heavily influenced my interest in travel and passion to learn from and celebrate other cultures i know from personal experience that there's so much richness to experience when exposed to cultures different than your own so i am so excited to be able to bring a little bit of that to you all as i was deciding where to start off this series i stumbled across an instagram account called send chinatown love and i was quickly inspired in the midst of the pandemic xenophobia has grown and chinatown businesses have really struggled the local community has suffered from the effects of kova 19 both physically and financially and could use support so there's actually three chinatowns in new york city but today we'll be visiting the one in manhattan it happens to be home to the highest concentration of chinese people in the western hemisphere and there's much to be learned and appreciated in these neighborhoods so this chinatown started forming in the 1870s as many immigrants were driven out of the west due to racism and economic hardship following the end of the gold rush chinese immigrants clustered around a few core streets but eventually expanded into the chinatown we see today now you can find a thriving community of countless shops markets restaurants cafes and more you can find incredible food and super large portion sizes may i add in chinatown for great deals and much of the food is also served family style which is a reflection of how family oriented the culture is here so meet jessie she's a new york city local who's lived here for almost a decade after she emigrated here from hong kong she actually responded to an instagram story of mine and said she'd love to show me around so i'm going to pass the mic off to her so she can share more about her favorite spots in chinatown the cuisine the culture and why you should check it out for yourself hello from chinatown hi jesse i'm jesse um i am a og new yorker i live in brooklyn but i'm very familiar with chinatown and all the history and culture surrounding this community and i'm here today to introduce elena to um all the good food and specifically cantonese culture should we head to the first place yes it's this way okay i'll let you be my google maps guys our first stop is one of jesse's favorite cantonese restaurants we're known for our big dishes like a mixture of like western and like chinese culture because of the colonization by british so a lot of the dishes that we there are unique to hong kong alone it's like it's not like completely chinese it's not completely western so cantonese is my first language okay um because that's the dialogue that we just began but mandarin meandering i learned oh there we go okay so this one has peanut butter and this one doesn't oh my god what do we got going on right here this is condensed milk and you pour the condensed milk on top yours has peanut butter oh like just watch out it's basically french toast this is definitely not a chinese dish like in hong kong we start um to eat this because of um the bridges colonization like before 1997 yeah so like crazy did you do this in the sun so recent it's very pretty it's very recent yeah it's so good really so i'm glad you like it okay so then what do we have here baked fried rice and chicken chop so um with tomato sauce put like a bunch of cheese on top so this is like another example of like mixture of western eastern this baked pork chop rice is a prime reflection of hong kong's 150 year history as a british colony basically like a hong kong lasagna so i was born in hong kong they immigrated to the united states like to new york specifically with my family when i was 14.

before that i was like living in hong kong it's also like part of mainland china because i have family that like that lives in hong kong and mainland china but it was definitely very tough at the beginning yeah just a little bit of language barrier just complete cultural shock yeah oh my goodness you're 14 14 yeah i could not imagine moving countries at 14. we're fourteen's like the worst age two so often fourteen having to like start practicing oh my god all different nations yeah they're different from what you've always liked known i can't even imagine i think it's harder for my parents just because um they don't know the language at all like my parents kind of have to rely on me for that one me and my brother for like a lot of things it's a lot of responsibility a lot of responsibility super close yeah we're about to head into the eastern bookstore it's a chinese bookstore apparently it's been around for quite some time in the area my other friends the chinese eastern bookstore was built in the 70s and it serves not only as a bookstore but also as a community center that continues to preserve chinese culture through art and education calligraphy has been around for over a thousand years and it's seen as one of the most important ancient chinese art forms with the rise of modern technology people rarely write it all these days and calligraphy has especially become a rare skill set this bookstore is special in the way that it seeks to keep the tradition alive by offering classes for both kids and adults from language lessons to calligraphy to paper folding to painting classes my parents like made me learn how to write calligraphy when i was young different calligraphy pens are used for like different calligraphy style depends on which style you're going for how hard is it is it really hard kind of really hard you have to like kind of hold the pen in a certain way from what i remember this is how you're supposed to hold it like this yeah so there's traditional chinese and simplified chinese in hong kong we still use like traditional chinese it's basically a more complicated version of the simplified chinese okay but right now like in china and mainland china everything is written in simplified chinese these are hong kong style egg waffles so there's like toys like toys yeah your childhood you just like the food there's this actually egg waffle cart outside that if we walk by when we can get we show this is like a very traditional like hong kong uh apartment building view of what hong kong streets are like so all of this are like all the public buses and van that runs in hong kong they are a landmark of hong kong because like these double decker buses can only be found in hong kong and there kind of is not tradition but like something that's left from the british colonization so we're at the wing and wall store so this is one of the oldest um chinese antique store in chinatown it's a family-run business i think this is the fifth generation family running it right now they're known for their chinese antique that's imported from china it's one of the store that's kind of against gentrification in chinatown they're actually known for a project called the wow project they gather like different small business owners in chinatown together to talk about how we could fight against gentrification but also preserve the chinese culture in chinatown while also making profit we're getting some special brown sugar boba which i've never had before but it comes yeah this is like one of the most famous like brown sugar bubble tea joint boba is made out of like fresh brown sugar and they only make a certain number of batches each day or original originate in taiwan nice all right first step oh wow oh my god it literally tastes like ice cream in liquid form it's waffle cart come on i'm gonna sugarcraft so we're at a length fresh mini k right now where they're known for their little cake waffles another like traditional hong kong little snack that um i had growing up and they also have comes with so many different flavors chocolate nutella oh it's so cute at the end of the day you save one hello hi uh coming to you live from columbus park with jessie and now we're going to talk a little bit more about jessie her upbringing chinatown cantonese culture sure pass the baby mike how cute is it so hi guys i'm jesse i was born and born and raised in hong kong and my family and i moved to united states when i was 14 and i want the youtube community to know more about cantonese culture specifically cantonese culture in new york city so just like the chinese-american community or chinatown general it's been struggling a lot since the peak of the pandemic or since the pandemic started because there's a lot of xenophobia associated with chinatown related to covet 19 i just want more people to come to chinatown and explore the culture and kind of help out the small businesses that are struggling at this difficult time so i know you moved here when you're 14 from hong kong which talk about massive culture shock to be 14 you'd have to start over not only a new school but like a new country so how is it coming to the states and then having places like you know the chinatown population here as well as the ones you mentioned in like flushing in south brooklyn how is that having that culture around you and can you tell me a little bit like keep the history when you're coming here like at such a young age like especially for family it's very hard to find somewhere that you belong or someone who kind of understand your struggle where you're from and how kind of help you like transition to the american society and help you assimilate so having these community here it's like amazing and always try to preserve where where i'm from my ancestry and my language and i want future generation and my kids to also like learn where i'm from and my culture really well i'd love to know what are some of your favorite things about chinatown and about having this here and then just like what's something you want the world to know about chinatown about visiting it here in new york and about cantonese culture i definitely want people to know more about like the mom and pop store gentrification is a big problem in chinatown i think it's important to support the mom and pop and like preserving this unique like chinese culture i definitely want people to experience that uh for themselves and just see how yummy the food is okay well on that note we're gonna wrap it up here thanks so much to jessie for showing around chinatown she was kind enough to show me your favorite spots and again i'm very full it was delightful i highly recommend you check it out check her out and as usual thanks so much for watching over and out you