Children's Chinese Book Garden

  We don’t need to go to China to find authentic Chinese culture. New York City boasts multiple Chinese communities that deserve to be enjoyed and studied. Our community study will include visiting at least three Chinese communities that vary in various aspects, interviewing multiple individuals in the communities, supporting children to analyze and present the differences and commonalities across the Chinese communities (at age appropriate levels).

  We started from the nearby Chinatown (first week) and the newly expanded Museum of Chinese in America (designed by Maya Lin), moved on to Flushing in Queens, and then to 8^th Ave Chinese Community in Brooklyn. These communities are different in various aspects, such as residents’ regions of immigration in China, dialects, and how homogeneous the community is. For example, while Chinatown has a mixture of very old immigrant groups (mostly Cantonese-speaking) and the very new (mostly Fujianese-speaking), Flushing has a balanced mixture of people from all over China and other Chinese-speaking regions and nations (e.g.Taiwan). While in Chinatown it’s hard to get away from the tourists, when you step into the 8^th Ave Chinese community, you feel you’re in China because no tourists appear there.

To encourage children to actively engage in learning about the communities, we developed a survey that guides children to ask (either in Chinese or English depending on the child’s Chinese level) the parts of China where they came from, how long they have been here, why they came to the States and what they like about their new country. After each visit, children tallied, charted, and intepreted their findings. A report of their findings is on the way. 

  Through this project, children gained a deeper understanding of the communities by acquiring a scientific tool that affords them an empirical approach to learning about communities. Such an approach can be adopted by them to study any other community in the city in the future. Learning why and how people move from one country to another touches the core of the city as well as this nation. In the future years, we hope to continue to study these communities, because rich questions can be asked and addressed by Kindergarteners, by grade school children, by high school children as well as by doctoral students and advanced scholars.

In Flushing Mall

Interviewing in Flushing Mall

Interviewing in Flushing Mall

Interviewing in Chinatown 

Recording results in Chinatown

Interviewing in Brooklyn

Interviewing a comb lady in Flushing

Charting results 
 

In Flushing Mall