Neither Here Nor There

I grew up in the New York of the late ’90s: The days of Robin Ventura’s grand slam single and Street Fighter arcade cabinets in all the laundromats, pre-9/11, pre-financial crises, back when the utopia of a polyglot immigrant city seemed, for a fleeting moment, like it was actually within grasp.

I came here as part of the burgeoning Chinese middle class — a group that feverishly branched out into every part of the world to become the global poster child for 21st-century upward social mobility, as the American middle class was in the 20th.

All of this played out haphazardly in Flushing, Queens, a neighborhood that was speed-running through world-historic changes at the far end of the 7 train. For most of my lifetime, Flushing was the humble immigrant enclave that could. It built itself upon a backbone of thrift and cheap labor into a network of restaurants, accountants, medical offices, travel agencies, and cram schools — leveraging its insularity and esotericism into a diversified economy of second-order business services. The food was good, the kids did well on the SHSAT, small business dynamism was high, intergenerational upward mobility was attainable — all such rarities for a low-income, working-class neighborhood in post-industrial America that Flushing seemed like an exceptional place. There was a triumphant story you could tell along these lines, and as an urban planner and child of the neighborhood, sometimes I told it.

Then, Flushing became something different altogether. Over the past 15 years or so — running in parallel with the economic and cultural rise of Asia — basement food courts gave way to billion-dollar megadevelopments funded by the combination of overseas capital and a wealthier, homegrown second generation. Though it was a solid hour out from downtown Manhattan, there were now multinational hot pot chains, movie theaters playing imported Asian films, luxury-concept shopping malls taking cues from overseas, rooftop bars, a public square with decorative fountains, and high-end mixed-use complexes planned along the muddy banks of Flushing Creek. Here, too, was an exuberant story about how developing-world grit met the magic freedom dirt of America and became something greater than the sum of its parts. Flushing was the multipolar world in action. These newcomers were not your poor, huddled masses. Their sophisticated and worldly talent, capital, and ways of life would refresh American society. Sometimes I told this story, too.

After that came the pandemic. I missed the haggling on the curb, the end-to-end traffic, and all the high school kids in the brief exciting limbo between school and home. Worse was the uncanny feeling of paranoia — already festering in late 2019 — spreading between masked strangers throughout the empty streets, in the WeChat groups, against a backdrop of trade wars, capital controls, arrested development, and conspiracy theories. Coming off the buoyant mood of the first two decades of the millennium, it felt like a dramatic endpoint. The end of Chimerica, maybe. The breakdown of some sociocultural synthesis that probably mostly existed in my head, where it encapsulated a range of personal and professional aspirations, biographical traits, and idiosyncratic interests. Nowadays I don’t know what story to tell about Flushing.

But I did have a fun dream the other night. I was back in the Modell’s in downtown Flushing, the one that is now a Chinese supermarket. I recalled the layout of the store in detail, the stands near the checkout counters, the shoes in the basement. I don’t have some formative or traumatic story or even a halfway interesting anecdote connected to the place, and I hadn’t been in there since I was a kid. It was thrilling to walk up and down the aisles in my dream. I woke up tingling.

In 2021, Modell’s sold the land for $67 million. The Chinese supermarket that replaced it looks just like any other one in the neighborhood, lively and loud and anxiety-inducing, seafood all out in the open. It is in the heart of downtown Flushing, right above the subway stop at Roosevelt and Main, much touted as the busiest intersection outside of Manhattan and third busiest in the entire city. But how can it possibly be worth that much money? How many bags of bok choy, how many jars of chili crisp do you have to sell to make $67 million? How did they figure a supermarket to be the highest and best use? But that is the way things are now.

Modell’s was an outmoded and bankrupt chain store, peddling the all-American dream of social acceptance through casual sportswear. The entirety of their brand and assets fetched a measly $3.6 million in a 2020 liquidation sale. Yet the cramped, L-shaped lot they owned in Flushing turned out to be worth 19 times that. When I try to make sense of my neighborhood and my city, and the broader shifts in urban fortunes, I guess I might as well go back to that lot, to that Modell’s and then that supermarket, and start pulling at the threads.

There is no shortage of lamentation for New York neighborhoods of yore and establishments gone by. But I’ve noticed there’s not much retrospection about what we, as planners and designers and city enthusiasts, used to think and believe. Nothing ages so badly as our intellectual history. It’s embarrassing when the ideas that guided us are revealed to be wrong or — worse yet — become unfashionable. We shouldn’t be too critical of our half-formed thoughts from the past. But it’s instructive to connect the dots and see how our beliefs may have translated to the reality around us.

Rewind with me to the heady days of the early 2000s. Michael Bloomberg takes office as mayor. A groundswell of post-9/11 political will bolsters a downtown revival that was already in full swing. Richard Florida writes The Rise of the Creative Class, a pop-academic book that was easy to criticize, yet framed the way academics, professionals, and enthusiasts spoke about urban development for almost two decades. Florida argued that as more refined and innovative knowledge-driven sectors come to undergird the economy, cities will need to compete for those sectors’ human capital by appealing to their workers’ tastes and dispositions.

The argument was not exactly revolutionary: human capital, broadly defined, has become more important as we move from an industrial society to a more complex economy based on advanced technology and logistics. But Florida dressed this human capital up in the nebulous cloak of creativity, a “Creative Class” including everyone from artists to programmers to financiers who moonlight as deejays. This was, in hindsight, a stroke of genius. While it invited much scrutiny and even mockery, it nonetheless directed all the attention towards discussion of who should be counted as a part of this exclusive group, and what should be done to cultivate them. Florida flattered his audience to join in the debate, and we planners, designers, community developers, local politicians, and other upwardly-aspiring urbanites counted ourselves in the creative camp.

This formulation of urban development and dynamism established a personal stake for many of us who were thinking about and studying cities at the time. It invited us to make the city in our own image, giving us free reign to pursue our hobbies and flex our tastes in the name of furthering creativity in our city. But it also fed into our status anxiety, especially in the learn-to-code era of shrinking economic promise and asymmetric distribution of rewards. Everything we did now figured into economic competitiveness. Whether there was any other model for urban prosperity became an afterthought.

It was never clear what was to be done for the “uncreative” neighborhoods or the “uncreative” underclass. If you were a kid growing up in Flushing, you looked around at the neighborhood and people around you, and your path seemed clear enough. Whatever your future pursuit, whether art or finance or deejaying or urban planning, you should do it somewhere else. In its own way, the neighborhood did its utmost to encourage us. The cram school where I took SAT prep had no windows. The Chinese bakeries, the closest thing to cafes, had cold metal tables and chased you away if you lingered. It was as if the austerity of the neighborhood was a conscious design decision. The clutter of the streets, the lack of public space and greenery, the brusque service, all like a bowstring, drawn taut, propelled us onwards and outwards. Maybe someday the benefits of our work elsewhere would trickle down to Flushing.

The planners and urbanists who came of age in this generation operated within this framework, even the homegrown ones who could claim some level of street cred, like me. You see this in the parade of major projects that will be our legacy: the rezonings of Inwood and the Brooklyn and Queens waterfronts; the renewal of East Midtown; the decking over the West Side Railyards. All dedicated to the idea of the city as a giant funnel for human capital, defined in whatever way is convenient. Housing these special talents, providing entertainment, and building state-of-the-art office space for them.

Even as the narrative changed from building vibrant downtowns to managing too much vibrancy, this mindset remained unchallenged. Major equity-minded initiatives like Mandatory Inclusionary Housing rode the coattails of market-rate development, a concession to the cold, churning logic of urban economics. There is no way to lift up a neighborhood, apparently, except to attract high-value outside talent. The most we can do is lessen the blow for the uncreative, to set up some community benefits — some affordable housing, some job training, a company-sponsored cleanup of the local park — in return for development.

This is the centripetal force of the global city: funneling in people and capital, trivializing local economies, concentrating the best and most advanced technologies, e-commerce decisively taking down hapless regional dinosaurs like Modell’s, a great continuous sorting where increasingly rarefied competition leads to dramatic accrual of rewards at the top. Even after the shocks of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 and the pandemic, it still seems to be going strong. The grade-A+ office space we built in Hudson Yards and the rezoned East Midtown are not only the most successful and desirable in the city, but also may be the only successes left as the bulk of the city’s aging, reeling office stock struggles to adjust to remote work. Hudson Yards stands there, at the terminus of the 7 train in Manhattan, continually feeding our status anxiety, a monument to the winner-takes-all, self-fulfilling prophecy of the city.

Here, on the opposite end of the 7 train, Flushing was sheltered from the creative economy. Sheer distance played a big part. Flushing is not close to the Manhattan job centers, or to the theaters or museums, or anywhere in the city of popular imagination. It’s not favorable for work and it’s not favorable for play. You would have to face down an hour-plus commute to the Financial District every morning, fighting for a subway seat. And then there is that special, farcical feeling when you meet friends for drinks in Manhattan and then you take the long ride back to Flushing with the late-night worker crowd: you will never be as stone-cold sober as when you finally pull into the station on those nights.

Yet despite not being a suitable bedroom community for young professionals and being a veritable desert of art house films and vinyl records, Flushing developed a center of gravity all its own. From 2000 to 2019, total businesses grew by 82 percent in the Greater Flushing Area, far outpacing the rest of Queens (44 percent) and the city as a whole (30 percent). An overwhelming 87 percent of these were microbusinesses with fewer than ten employees. Private sector employment grew 71 percent in the same period, over double the growth in Queens or citywide. In a sustained period of economic pessimism, Flushing outperformed in every socioeconomic measure. It was a subsistence-level, small business economy that survived on high volume and low margins, a race to the bottom in price. It was populated by the exact kind of service-sector underclass that seemed more like the invisible substrate of a city rather than its leading characters. But it kept on subsisting.

It’s unclear what urban planning theory has to offer a place built on thrift, austerity, and curated discomfort. How are you supposed to improve a neighborhood except by making it more comfortable, greener, prettier, more connected, more inviting, cooler? Yet Flushing grew and flourished as a working-class neighborhood despite being far from the urban core; without high-tech and high-skilled workers; without bike lanes; without green roofs; without meaningful community participation in the public process; without affordable housing either, really. Sometimes you could feel the wrongthink bubbling up from deep within. Maybe Flushing developed not in spite of these obstacles, but partly because of them.

Flushing had real dynamism, but we didn’t have the proper vocabulary to talk about it. The neighborhood didn’t fit neatly into an American success story. It looked too much like an Asian success story. As far away as Flushing was on the 7 train, it seemed even farther away in the collective consciousness — a world unto itself — an opaque foreign culture that required serious acknowledgement, and sometimes admiration, but rarely inspired identification or aspiration.

We think about the growth of Flushing in the same way that we do about the growth of China. The numbers there are also impressive, and big enough as to seem not quite real: 800 million people lifted out of poverty, something like a 15 times increase in GDP over the past two-and-a-half decades. Still, as with Flushing, it is hard to see the relevance of its development for the American general public. It does not seem like we can replicate the exacting circumstances of China’s success, nor would we really want to.

Even as Chinese cities became cleaner, shinier, and more advanced in what seemed like the blink of an eye, something still seemed amiss. China couldn’t innovate, it only borrowed and copied, turning around cheap offerings and services of questionable quality. China was inscrutable and impenetrable, even its merits difficult to account for. China was unforgiving, built on the back of cheap labor, low consumption, high savings rates, and work schedules that offend progressive sensibilities. China still lacked soft power. Its public relations department needed a lot of work; its cultural production and influence was neither commensurate with its heritage, nor with the scale of its recent accomplishments. The problem wasn’t so much that China was unsuccessful; the problem was that it was déclassé. Its model of common prosperity through unglamorous, broad-based austerity did not fit our sentiments, which strived towards the extraordinary.

Flushing improved as well, first incrementally, then all at once. The first-order network of essential small businesses gave way to increasingly speculative, splashy developments: the mixed-use Sky View Parc, where prices for the condos top $1000 per square foot; the multiphase Flushing Commons project, which is transforming a sprawling municipal parking lot into a public plaza for cultural events and performances; the contentious waterfront plan, which includes $2 billion worth of housing, retail, offices, and hotels along Flushing Creek. Now, there are fancy bars and nice cafes and shopping malls evoking Hong Kong and Singapore. Yet the core of the neighborhood remains the same, ensconced in marginally nicer and significantly more expensive digs.

It seems like Flushing reflects all facets of the Chinese model. In recent years the Chinese economy has taken a dismal turn — real estate in particular. Housing long served the tenuous triple role of creating construction jobs, storing wealth for the rising middle class, and generating revenue for local governments. Bolstered by these forces, China’s real estate sector has become the largest asset class in the world, and accounts for nearly one-quarter of the country’s economic activity. The shaky fundamentals undergirding this real estate boom could be brushed aside in the face of ebullient growth, but it seems like they have finally caught up. China is a country with very low immigration, declining fertility, and an already high rate of home ownership. A sharp downturn in demand and consumer confidence has reverberated through the economy, dragging with it home prices, household savings, and balance sheets. This has resulted in a remarkable glut of housing, the “ghost cities” we hear about from afar, with almost four million unsold empty apartments that no one wants to buy, and an estimated additional ten million that developers have already sold but have not finished constructing due to lack of funding.

This glut is strange for us to contemplate, since it’s almost gospel in American planning that our biggest problem is a lack of housing and a lack of political will or construction capacity to build more. In New York, it is a given that demand for housing far outstrips supply, and maybe always will. But some doubt creeps in my mind when I look at the new buildings lining Northern Boulevard, their for-sale and for-rent banners still hanging prominently five years after the pandemic. Are there enough buyers for these buildings, at these prices? Not everyone wants to pay for the privilege of an hour-plus commute into downtown; not everyone needs Chinese groceries.

The flow of overseas money had already been slowing before the pandemic, mostly due to capital controls in China. As Chinese real estate goes through its economic reckoning, its investments in American properties have hit a rough patch as well. Perhaps most emblematic was the loss to foreclosure back in July 2023 of XIN Development’s plan to redevelop the former RKO Keith movie palace site. The Beijing-based firm had promised to restore the historic lobby as a nice symbol of Flushing’s generational renewal. The long-suffering theater, whose historic Moorish grandeur I’ve heard many neighborhood old-timers wistfully recall, has been a continual eyesore of a construction site at the intersection of Northern and Main. After a tortuous period of neglect and lawsuits, the future of the site is in doubt once more.

At the end of the day, at the end of $67 million, you have a supermarket crammed full of people making one transaction at a time. Flushing’s years of bottom-up development brought a modicum of wealth and stability, but after a certain point the outlook is not so clear. There’s not much to do except double down on the same things as before. Like some inverted reflection of Manhattan’s ceaseless, spiraling accumulation of the most ambitious, innovative people and ideas from all over the world, Flushing is curling into itself. Skimping here and there, cutting costs, and tightening the belt, trying to squeeze out every last bit from its businesses and its people.

For as long as I can remember, the hair salon I go to on 41st Road charged $6 for a men’s haircut. In the depths of the pandemic, amid rampant inflation of all goods and services, they raised their price to $10. They were apologetic about it. During college and graduate school, I would grow my hair out for months at a time until I came home on break. (Technically, buying a Megabus ticket back to New York just for a haircut would still have saved me money.) Even in a neighborhood constantly engaged in a race to the bottom, it is the single cheapest, most outrageously disinflationary aspect of modern Flushing life. I make sure to tip big every time, because in the back of my mind I still think this must be some gross oversight and I don’t want to face karmic retribution down the line. Rising real estate prices and general improvements to the public realm haven’t shortened workers’ hours or increased their pay by much. Last time I went, I noticed they removed the coatrack and squeezed in one more haircutting station.

I tend to get haircuts during holidays, when I’m off from work and the hair salon workers are almost always oblivious of the occasion. They didn’t know about Veteran’s Day. They didn’t know about President’s Day. They confused Thanksgiving with Easter. It is an aspect of running errands in Flushing that I have always enjoyed, this brief feeling of stepping outside the main streams of time and space and the petty circumstances of my day-to-day American life.

For most of my adult life, I’ve heard Chinese immigrants discussing China and America with a kind of frank bravado, not caring too much about offending either side, at least in semi-private conversations, and especially during a haircutting bull session. Perhaps it was the inflated self-importance, a sense of straddling the only two countries in the world that mattered, Middle Kingdom egocentrism meets American exceptionalism. I was never much of a talker myself, but you overhear stuff. The hair salon was where, in the winter of 2019, I first heard about this mysterious virus going around in China. The workers and customers discussed it with a foreboding uncertainty, but sometimes also with good cheer, depending on the latest news we could glean from afar, mediated by WeChat and clickbait and hearsay. As the months dragged on, morale deteriorated noticeably, while the city around us blithely continued its business. By early 2020, before Mayor de Blasio boldly declared that we had the best healthcare system in the world and were ready to face the virus head on, my family had already stopped frequenting Flushing establishments.

I dreaded my daily parsing through Chinese and Western media to figure out the latest developments, trying to decide how many of the short unattributed videos floating around the internet were psyops. Were we over- or underreacting? Was this a special kind of failure endemic to our people? Would Chinese society ever recover from it? What used to feel so close as to be a part of us now felt impersonal and far away. Everything we knew — or thought we knew — about it came filtered through rumors and firewalls. Even as the rest of the world caught up, and even as the months dragged on into years and Flushing stabilized into a strange new normal, that connection to China never recovered. More than the travel bans or the decreasing numbers of prospective condo buyers, you get the impression that some line had been drawn in the way people present themselves. The basic pleasure of being in Flushing, of fluidly playing around in the in-between spaces, to be more Chinese than your American friends and more American than your Chinese friends, no longer feels the same. Now there’s one side and the other. The bravado and the frankness are gone. We all watch what we say now.

Standing at the intersection of Main Street and Kissena Boulevard today, the neighborhood has never felt so small, narrow, and contained. Manhattan is as far away as ever; we are under no delusions about what the ultra-selective, hyper-exclusive, tech-singularity school of urban development has to offer a place like Flushing. But the story of modern China, which undergirded so much of the recent change here and provided a broader context for our daily lives, that feels like a separate world now, too. Even the shinier and newer buildings that were part of the boom have accumulated a layer of grime and wear in the time-warp of the past few years. We were first immigrants, and then we were expats, and now we are like inhabitants of some extraterritorial, jurisdictionally unclear space.

I’m still not sure what kind of synthesis I hoped Flushing would represent, but it did not come. Could China or Asia as a whole serve as model or guide or warning for where our American cities go from here? Is there a lesson about undeniably successful infrastructure investment or construction capacity that would be relevant for us? Are China’s real estate woes a cautionary tale about treating housing as a financial instrument rather than shelter, a portent of our future? To what extent have our creative class development strategies led to broad-based disillusionment, even learned helplessness? Have we, in comparison, lost our ability to do hard things? I didn’t think these were idle questions, and there was a time when we’d consider them earnestly. For all of us who were neither an OpenAI researcher nor a Chinese factory worker, but somewhere in between, Flushing, at the nexus of all these currents, seemed like a good place to try to figure some of it out.

But maybe this is a more general story about the unmooring of a neighborhood. Flushing developed on the basis of its small business ecosystem, which diversified admirably for a typical immigrant enclave. The subsequent supercharged economic activity and eye-popping property valuations were primarily due to Flushing’s connection to a once-in-a-lifetime ascendant Asia. The people and capital came rushing in, but they could just as quickly leave. Flushing presaged the highly fungible remote world that we live in now, with our ties to our immediate surroundings less fundamental than ever. You build up your neighborhood over the course of two decades, but the decisive factors seem to come out of nowhere, outside our control.

Our experience of living in the city, our understanding of why things are the way they are, or why things might be different in the future, no longer track neatly onto land use patterns or zoning regulations. We still lead our everyday flesh-and-blood lives, interacting with a few people and places, constrained by the physical limits of time and space and attention: the hair salon, the supermarket. Beyond this, there is the identity we share as New Yorkers, precariously built on that collection of common references we try to make room for once a quarter, maybe once a month: museums, Broadway, Mets fandom. But stretching over us everywhere, at all times, through the internet, macroeconomics, or geopolitics, are the vague and half-formed yet very real possibilities of pandemic, hyperinflation, cold war. We all live extraterritorially now.

If you stand in the front car of the 7 train and look out the window, the multiple layers of glass make it so the view is blurry and the lights on the outside reflect dizzily onto themselves. You see multiples of everything. You see the red and green and yellow light signals, the lights in rows along 61st Street station, the lights of Citi Field blurred in the distance, and the curves of the train tracks that are there even though you don’t feel them enough to notice. When you pull into Flushing with Skyview and the new-ish hotel on College Point Boulevard and the rest, it is still a little reminiscent of Shanghai or Chongqing. In the many-faceted blur of the train window, Flushing can look like any number of cities. It takes more imagination now, but you can still see it.

These days, I mostly interact with China through a veil of mixed media. I put Youtube walking tours and drone videos of Chinese cities on my second monitor, expansive vistas of night skylines set to cyberpunk music. I read Chinese books and research Chinese history and watch Chinese movies. I study memes from the Chinese internet. Gathering all this information and storing it away in the warehouse of my mind feels like the best way to escape the growing irrelevance of my immediate world. The surface level of the neighborhood is no longer enough, so you hunker down and try to reach for some meaning beyond it. You dig a hole so deep in your head that you come out the other side of the world.

As a good urbanist, I know I’m supposed to put the physical city experience first: nothing substitutes for the sidewalk ballet, never bet against New York, touch grass, convert offices to housing, if you are tired of the city you are tired of life. I’ve been around long enough that I’m mostly sympathetic, but I’m also still young enough to recognize how naive it sounds today. There used to be a time when simply existing in the city was enough; its attention-grabbing and mind-dominating power would take over and you could just hang along for the ride. The city taught you what to want and how to want, it induced a vague but mobilizing ambition, especially in a half-formed human being encountering it for the first time. But whatever signals it used to send, whatever convoluted but edifying narrative you could patch together for yourself, it no longer feels strong enough to carry the day. This is the real legacy of these past few years of stasis and uncertainty.

The ballet isn’t happening on the sidewalk anymore. You can try telling a wholesome story about the interplay of the neighborhood butcher, the baker, and the Chinese herbal medicine shop owner, to the extent that they still exist. Of course, amusing, surprising, eccentric things still occur in New York on a daily basis. But the most desirable and economically remunerative work in our society seems to concentrate only at a select few companies in a handful of industries, and you need to know linear algebra to participate. Major infrastructure projects and innovative civic problem-solving, the big plans that stir men’s blood — and the capacity to carry them out — seem to only exist halfway across the world, in dynamic, developing countries. Meanwhile our attention is taken up by wars, scandals, and parallel virtual societies rendered at least as real as the physical world around us. Decades of economic development patterns that warped the urban economy, the end of America’s unipolar moment and the easy self-confidence that came with it, the multiplicative complexities of a more connected, more disorienting tech-enabled world, all left to stew in years of pandemic-induced quarantine and self-exile, all the better to reflect on the paucity of modern city life. In Flushing, we had front row seats to all of this.

I think back to all the things I used to know and took pride in knowing about the city. Tips and tricks, subway routes and their deviations, how to profile people on the 7 to predict which stop they’ll get off so you can snag a seat, being in the loop about local hotspots, random bits of neighborhood trivia about things gone or people past, shortcuts, fun slang, ways of navigating places and situations. Street smarts, we used to call it. How quaint it all seems now. We want our urban experience to hold special meaning for us, to give us insight into life that others don’t have, to make us sophisticated and urbane by association. But on the time scale of decades, so many cracks start to appear in a life based around local knowledge. Neighborhood spots close down, old urbanist theories fall out of favor, sentiments change, people change.

These days, the scope of what I don’t know seems only to get bigger. I’m not sure there’s much to learn from bus routes and Yelp reviews anymore. I want older and heftier stuff instead: dynastic histories, comparative myths, encyclopedias, epics, sweeping narratives where the characters are constantly buffeted by forces much greater than themselves. These won’t fill in all the blanks, but maybe they can serve as some deeper reservoir for our everyday experiences, surfacing every now and then to add a bit of commentary to life in this neighborhood. I think about all the things that Flushing is or was or could have been — Chinese and American, rich and poor, bourgeois and bohemian, erudite and lowbrow — and I can still build something that holds on to all these possibilities, at least in my head. You try to encompass and mend all the fault lines by becoming more expansive yourself.

I’m reminded of the opening lines of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the classic Ming-dynasty novel. I know it mostly through the old TV adaptation that I checked out on VHS from the Main Street library when I was very young, and so this too I associate with Flushing. “The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.” Even as a kid this didn’t make sense to me. Sure, I understood that the united empire would inevitably divide. But who’s to say that the long-divided empire must unite? Things seem to break apart much more often than they come together. I’m not sure where the confidence in this perpetual cycle of division and reunification comes from, stated so matter-of-factly in those opening lines. But it’s true that there has always been this tendency towards consolidation in Chinese culture, some monistic faith in the oneness of all things, the idea that simplicity embodies complexity, one embodies many.

Tangram is the latest in the line of major shopping mall projects in Flushing, and maybe the last one for a while, soft opening in late pandemic 2021 and only gradually filling up its offerings. It’s named after an old Chinese geometric puzzle in which many different shapes are rearranged into novel configurations. The mall has become a collection of Asian cultural miscellany: arcade games, plushie claw machines, anime stores, conveyor belt sushi, Cantonese romcoms, faddish chain restaurants specializing in spicy fish with sour vegetables. They are a collection of allusions, references, riffs, and tributes to other worlds within worlds. It’s no longer as suggestive of a surging, real-life Asia as it is of one existing in the imagination, across time and space through flights of fancy.

Stepping out of the mall and walking back along 39th Avenue towards Main Street, past the boom-era restaurants and hotels in Hyatt Place, the buildings look worn. Progress is less noticeable, and the chronology of the whole neighborhood gets more jumbled. You pass St. George’s Church, built in its current form in 1854; its neo-Gothic steeple that blew clean off in the tornado of 2010 and wasn’t replaced for many years. You get to Main Street on its recently widened sidewalks, a 2017 project to expand pedestrian capacity, eerily empty during the pandemic but now bursting again. Keep on going eastward and you’ll come across more scattered vestiges of colonial Flushing, historic homesteads and Quaker meeting houses dating back to the 1600s.

And then there are Chinese characters everywhere: on storefronts, menus, advertisements, Falun Gong signs, hawker stands; on St. George’s bulletin board, plastered on the walls and windows of the Free Synagogue of Flushing, on the explainer markers for all historical buildings. There are Chinese characters on top of other Chinese characters. Flushing is not known for much in terms of physical details and building modifications, architectural flourishes, tactical urbanism, or a coherent visual design. But there are Chinese characters everywhere, and they are enough.

In the Chinese language, each character is monosyllabic. When spoken, it can sound rather stark and barren. But the tight economy of the words lends itself to an austere, aphoristic elegance. The language has a way of articulating in a few characters, or by not saying anything at all, the wide expanse of the world. Things are simply what they are. On the other hand, every character is a painting with endless possibilities for visual puns and idiosyncratic calligraphic expression. It is certainly the most beautiful written language in the world. In a tradition where art and writing are the same thing, pictures and words always go hand in hand, form and meaning together, the same synthesis over millennia. It has always been the encapsulation of a particular kind of seeing and living, of representing the world as it is, concisely, richly, evocatively. It tells a familiar story about this neighborhood, but you still pick up on new things with every retelling.