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During my internship in Manhattan this past summer, I did ethnographic research at the senior center in Chinatown. As a Chinese away from home for less than a year, I did not feel at home in Chinatown. In fact it reminded me of the Hui ethnic quarter of Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi Province, which I visited as a tourist a few years ago. Located downtown, the Hui quarter was full of restaurants and stores and was so commercialized, it seemed at first that the only reason for the local people to be there was to sell things to tourists. That impression changed, however, after I talked with some students at a religious school attached to a mosque (the Hui people are predominantly Muslim) and visited a couple of stores patronized by locals. The senior center in Chinatown was also a place where I could talk to the locals in a role other than customer. Manhattan’s Chinatown is located between Wall Street and downtown. The senior center is at 70 Mulberry Street, at the intersection with Bayard Street. About three to four hundred people come to the center every day. Anyone who is not Chinese and who is under the age of sixty or so will definitely stand out in the crowd. According to Mr. Zuhua Zhu, a volunteer staff member and one of the center’s 6,000 registered members, only one percent of members are not Chinese, although any legal U.S. resident over the age of sixty is eligible to join, regardless of nationality. The center was established with government funding in 1974 by five Chinatown and local and national Chinese immigrants’ organizations. In the center’s main hall, members play traditional Chinese games such as tien-gow, mahjong, and Chinese chess; perform tai chi; and practice calligraphy. The center also houses a Cantonese opera club and an amateur singing and dancing troupe. The Cantonese Opera Club Cantonese opera is one of several hundred local opera forms in China. Efforts are being made in China to have it recognized by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, as has been Kunqu, another form of Chinese opera from the lower Yangtze Valley. The center’s Cantonese opera club is one of the eight Cantonese opera clubs in New York. It was established a few years after the center was founded. The club is jokingly referred to by the members as the “king’s troupe” or “thousand-years-of-age troupe.” In ancient China, kings were usually addressed by their subordinates and the common folks as “thousand years of age,” and emperors as “ten thousand years of age.” The sum of the ages of the club members exceeds one thousand years, making them—collectively, at least—a king of the lowest rank. A dozen members usually show up every weekday afternoon. Some of them both sing and play, and some just play instruments. There is a small blackboard on the wall listing those who have donated money for the club’s coffee breaks. Most of the audience members are as old as the performers, and some of them don’t seem to be there purely as spectators. They have an “I-can-do-that” look in their eye, and sometimes one will pick up an instrument and try his hand. In fact, the three members I interviewed all started their involvement with the opera in that way. Seventy-nine-year-old Mr. Guowei Han came to the United States in 1985 to join his niece’s family. He worked as a typist at a publishing house in Hong Kong before his retirement. In the past seven or eight years, he has learned two musical instruments: the er’hu, or two-stringed fiddle, and a set of Chinese percussion instruments. He said, “We listened to Cantonese opera a lot when we were young, but I never learned it from a teacher. I had the opportunity [to learn] after I got here, listening to other people singing. I watched and listened; slowly, I learned. I learned as I sang…. If you love it, it will be faster.” Mr. Han was a prizewinner at a Cantonese opera contest recently held in New York. The opera club uses ancient Chinese musical notation, gongchipu. In contrast to Western opera, notation doesn’t play a decisive role in Chinese opera. Chinese opera has been preserved and disseminated orally throughout most of its history. Indeed, it was not unusual for opera performers in ancient China to be illiterate. Mr. Han told me that a few members at the club could not read the notation, but that it was not a problem. He himself learned it while rehearsing at the club. Mr. Yansheng Huang, whose name indicates his birthplace in Beijing (Yan is an ancient name for Beijing and sheng means “born”), is one of the few people at the senior center who speaks Mandarin fluently. He came to the U.S. with his uncle to study more than fifty years ago and worked as a bank employee before his retirement. The seventy-eight-year-old also learned two musical instruments at the club. He simply bought the two instruments he liked and began to practice. Although he doesn’t sing, he told me that very few people at the club learn singing formally from a teacher. “Of course they get some instruction from teachers, for instance in rhythm and pronunciation, making progress slowly. But usually nobody has learned formally,” Mr. Huang said he followed the ancient Chinese musical notation by translating it into Western notation. The members of the senior center opera club seem to counter the notion that art education should be acquired systematically and that specialization is essential. These senior citizens pick up their skills in a casual way, yet they are serious about their art. I once witnessed a player refusing to accompany a singer when she failed to perform as the piece required. Fun and Games Playing games is serious business at the senior center. The members do so with a minimum of paraphernalia: all that is needed is a set of tien-gow or mahjong tiles. Tien-gow is such an ancient game that most young people in northern China don’t even know of its existence. Mahjong is still a favorite pastime of people all over China. When pop diva Fay Wong split up very publicly with her rock-and-roll husband Dou Wei a few years ago, one of his complaints was that she spent all her time playing mahjong. At the Chinatown senior center, more people play tien-gow than mahjong. A tien-gow player looks as totally absorbed in his tiles as a kid playing a computer game. The major difference between them might be that the older gamer sits facing another player or three, rather than a computer screen. (Tien-gow is usually played by four people, or occasionally two.) The game is played by both men and women, but it seems to be an unwritten rule at the center that men play only with men and women only with women. Tien-gow has a set of thirty-two tiles, nowadays usually made of hard plastic. (In the past, they were made of ox bone or ivory.) The tiles are divided into civilian and military suits, just as in ancient China the emperor’s officials were classified into civilian and military orders. The military tiles are ranked according to the number of their spots, while the civilian tiles are ranked by what they represent. The twenty-two civilian tiles consist of eleven pairs of tiles, called heaven, earth, man, harmony, plum blossom, long gown, bench, tiger head, redhead ten, long-leg seven, and bronze-head six. The number of spots on the civilian tiles illustrate their subjects. For instance, the pair of “heaven” tiles have twenty-four spots all together. They represent the twenty-four solar terms in the traditional Chinese calendar. The “earth” tiles have four spots, representing the four cardinal directions. The spots on the “human” tiles represent the “sixteen characteristics” of humans, such as kindness, honesty, sympathy, courtesy, and so on. The serious gamers at the senior center seem to turn up rain or shine. Playing games not only keeps the fingers nimble and the brain active, but also provides an opportunity to meet with friends. Unlike the members of the opera club, quite a few of whom were happy to talk with me, the mahjong and tien-gow players were single-mindedly focused on their games. None were willing to be interviewed. At Home in Chinatown Chinatown has a different meaning for the older generation of immigrants, who often came to the country to work as laborers, and the newer immigrants. Some new immigrants rely on the ethnic enclave to survive as low-wage laborers, but many—including students and middle-class professionals—only visit Chinatown to buy groceries. Most of the game players are immigrants who have spent all of or most of their lives in the United States, while the singing and dancing group members are newer immigrants—but not brand new. Ms. Guiqiong Chen, who came to the U.S. in the 1970s, was a kindergarten teacher in China. She worked teaching English at the center to people applying for citizenship before her retirement. She explained to me why there were few new immigrants at the senior center. “If you just came from Guangdong or Hong Kong, and you are already sixty years old, and you don’t need to work to feed yourself, then you can come. But there are no such people who can enjoy themselves as soon as they come here [to the U.S.].” Another member remarked, “We have worked hard for ten years to have the free time. It is not possible for people who just arrived [in the U.S.] to come.” In Chinatown, although there are stores and restaurants of all kinds—not only Cantonese, but northern Chinese, Taiwanese, Malaysian, and Vietnamese—few national symbols identify the prior homes of these establishments’ proprietors. In nearby Little Italy, you’ll see green, white, and red flag motifs on the facade of every restaurant. This notable absence could stem from the ambivalent sentiments some people in Chinatown have for their former homelands. It could also be a sign of the underlying relationships between immigrants from different regions. The opera club members at the senior center hail from many places, including mainland China, Hong Kong, and Vietnam, and the time they’ve spent in the United States varies. Interest in the same art form draws them together. On the wall of their practice room, there is a framed American flag. Their cultural and political identities are in harmony, as well as their voices. Note: Chinese words are written using pinyin romanization, with the exception of “tien-gow,” which is written according to its Cantonese pronunciation.

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