In recent decades, hundreds of thousands of mostly poor and often undocumented immigrants from China’s Fujian province have arrived in Sunset Park. They’re quietly doing as much to transform Brooklyn as Williamsburg’s hipsters, turning a once-forgotten corner of the borough into a launching ground into the middle class — and thereby challenging Mayor de Blasio’s “a tale of two cities.”
An analysis by WNYC shows that Sunset Park and Borough Park zip codes have some of the largest number of acceptances at the city’s specialized, competitive high schools. “Most of the other admissions to the elite schools,” the report notes, “came from middle- to upper-class neighborhoods like the Upper West Side and Fresh Meadows.” In other words, Sunset Park’s kids are on track to achieve the upward mobility that the “two cities” tale suggests is no longer possible here.
So what accounts for that success? The answer is fourfold.
First: a zealous focus on education. For Chinese immigrants, education for the next generation is close to a religion.
Slightly more than half of the student population at PS 971 on Fourth Avenue, at the western edge of Sunset Park, is Chinese. Principal Ruth Stanislaus was amazed when one kindergartner’s mother told her, in faltering English: “My son must go Harvard.”
No matter how poor they are, Fujianese parents find a way to get their fourth- or fifth-graders into test-prep classes for the city’s competitive high schools. WNYC found one Sunset Park family who put aside $5,000 for classes for their three sons out of a yearly household income of just $26,000.
CUNY professor Philip Kasinitz surveyed second-generation immigrants in New York and found that Chinese kids had the longest commutes to high school. Most parents would be uneasy about an hour-and-a-half trip every day from the middle of Brooklyn, say, to Bronx Science. Chinese parents aren’t deterred by distance — or by much else.
Second, the Sunset Park Chinese still believe in the American dream. They still say they’ve been discriminated against, and tell their kids to expect discrimination. But most seem to maintain immigrant optimism.
The earliest Fujianese settlers dubbed the Eighth Avenue subway station as the “blue sky” station. They meant not only its outdoor platform, but also a symbol for their hopes in America.
Brooklyn’s Fujianese aren’t just looking for jobs; they want to live the dream: owning their homes, being their own bosses and sending their kids to top schools.
Third: For these immigrants, upward mobility is familial and multigenerational.
Couples often share living space with their children’s grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Kids aren’t expected to explore their individual talents; instead, they learn to equate their destiny with their family’s destiny.
Their parents’ sacrifices — the 12-hour days, the six- or seven-day workweeks — have instilled in the children a belief about the good life only superficially shared by most middle-class Americans: to succeed is to compensate for past familial suffering.
The fourth reason is the ethnic enclave itself. To spin a familiar phrase, it takes a Chinatown to raise an immigrant child.
The Chinese hire their own and work for their own. Newcomers who can’t read English usually still find jobs. They may be pitifully low-paying jobs under exploitative bosses — but, the way they see it, they’re still jobs.
The community also helps promote social ties. Many social groups in Sunset Park organize around hometowns or family names. People with the last name Lee join the “Lee association,” where they can find job tips, advice on test-tutoring centers and fellow mah-jongg players, while gossiping about their kids.
And when it comes to children, ethnic isolation is a boon. Today’s mainstream American culture isn’t the best recipe for educational success. In Sunset Park, Chinese kids are part of a counterculture, reinforced daily by family, neighbors, Chinese TV shows, test-prep centers and more established Chinese residents.
Many Brooklyn Chinese eventually do assimilate. Second-generation Fujianese tend to marry in their early 20s, and these couples often move to nearby Bensonhurst or Borough Park — places with a bit more space and air, but easy access to the familiar Chinese shops and restaurants of Eighth Avenue.
Somewhat older adults might move to Queens or Long Island, and grow less attached to the enclave — and to stories of old-country hardship. But that’s after they’ve fulfilled the family dream, and succeeded.
The Fujianese model may not be possible or even desirable for other groups. It does remind us, though, that for all their problems, New York neighborhoods still boast some blue-sky stations.
A longer version of this article appears in the spring issue of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, where Kay Hymowitz is a contributing editor.