The Next Wave

Published by The New York Times, November 21, 2004

NEW YORK is being re-formed, and its face is increasingly foreign. Today, about 40 of every 100 New Yorkers were born abroad, a percentage unmatched since the 1920’s.

Yet, although much is written about the cultures, problems and impact of today’s immigrants, their own voices are often but a murmur in the city’s din.

Here are the stories of 10 transplanted New Yorkers, all under 40, told from their own personal, often poignant, perspectives, as well as voices culled from a dozen immigrant gathering places around the city. When this modern surge of immigrants reinvents New York, as did their Irish, Jewish and Italian forebears a century ago, it is words like these that will be their Hester Street, their Lower East Side, their history, their myths.

'Facing Poverty With a Rich Girl's Habits'

By SUKI KIM

 QUEENS in the early 80's struck me as the Wild West. Our first home there was the upstairs of a two-family brownstone in Woodside. It was a crammed, ugly place, I thought, because in South Korea I had been raised in a hilltop mansion with an orchard and a pond and peacocks until I entered the seventh grade, when my millionaire father lost everything overnight. Gone in an instant was my small world, made possible by my father's shipping company, mining business and hotels. Because bankruptcy was punishable by a jail term, we fled, penniless, to America.

The ugly house was owned by a Korean family that ran a dry cleaner in Harlem. Their sons, Andy and Billy, became my first playmates in America, though playmate was a loose term, largely because they spoke English and I didn't. The first English word I learned at the junior high near Queens Boulevard was F.O.B., short for "fresh off the boat." It was a mystery why some kids called me that when I'd actually flown Korean Air to Kennedy Airport.

At 13, I took public transportation to school for the first time instead of being driven by a chauffeur. I had never done homework without a governess helping me. I also noticed that things became seriously messy if no maids were around. Each week, I found it humiliating to wheel our dirty clothes to a bleak place called Laundromat.

One new fact that took more time to absorb was that I was now Asian, a term that I had heard mentioned only in a social studies class. In Korea, yellow was the color of the forsythia that bloomed every spring along the fence that separated our estate from the houses down the hill. I certainly never thought of my skin as being the same shade.

Unlike students in Korean schools, who were taught to bow to teachers at every turn, no one batted an eye when a teacher entered a classroom. Once I saw a teacher struggle to pronounce foreign-sounding names from the attendance list while a boy in the front row French-kissed a girl wearing skintight turquoise Jordache jeans. In Korea, we wore slippers to keep the school floor clean, but here the walls were covered with graffiti, and some mornings, policemen guarded the gate and checked bags.

My consolation was the English as a Second Language class where I could speak Korean with others like me. Yet it did not take me long to realize that the other students and I had little in common. The wealthier Korean immigrants had settled in Westchester or Manhattan, where their children attended private schools. In Queens, most of my E.S.L. classmates came from poor families who had escaped Korea's rigid class hierarchy, one dictated by education level, family background and financial status.

Immigration is meant to be the great equalizer, yet it is not easy to eradicate the class divisions of the old country. What I recall, at 13, is an acute awareness of the distance between me and my fellow F.O.B.'s, and another, more palpable one between those of us in E.S.L. and the occasional English-speaking Korean-American kids, who avoided us as though we brought them certain undefined shame. It was not until years later that I learned that we were, in fact, separated from them by generations.

We who sat huddled in that E.S.L. class grew up to represent the so-called 1.5 generation. Many of us came to America in our teens, already rooted in Korean ways and language. We often clashed with the first generation, whose minimal command of English traps them in a time-warped immigrant ghetto, but we identified even less with the second generation, who, with their Asian-American angst and anchorman English, struck us as even more foreign than the rest of America.

Even today, we, the 1.5 generation, can just about maneuver our anchor. We hip-hop to Usher with as much enthusiasm as we have for belting out Korean pop songs at a karaoke. We celebrate the lunar Korean thanksgiving as well as the American one, although our choice of food would most likely be the moon-shaped rice cake instead of turkey. We appreciate eggs Benedict for brunch, but on hung-over mornings, we cannot do without a bowl of thick ox-bone soup and a plate of fresh kimchi. We are 100 percent American on paper but not quite in our soul.

In Queens of the early 80's, I did not yet understand the layers of division that existed within an immigrant group. I preferred my Hello Kitty backpack to the ones with pictures of the Menudo boys, and I cried for weeks because my parents would not let me get my ears pierced. I watched reruns of "Three's Company" in an attempt to learn English, thinking the whole time that John Ritter was running a firm called Three's. I stayed up until dawn to make sense of "Great Expectations," flipping through the dictionary for the definition of words like "Pip."

More brutal than learning English was facing poverty with a rich girl's habits and memory. In my neighborhood, a girl who grew up with a governess and a chauffeur belonged to a fairy tale. This was no Paris Hilton's "Simple Life," but the beginning of my sobering, often-terrifying, never simple American journey. I soon discovered that I had no choice but to adjust. I had watched my glamorous mother, not long ago a society lady who lunched, taking on a job as a fish filleter at a market.

Before the year was over, my parents moved us out of the neighborhood in search of better jobs, housing and education. As for the family who owned the house in Woodside, I did not see any of them again until the fall of 2001, when Billy walked into the Family Assistance Center at Pier 94, where I was volunteering as an interpreter. He was looking for his brother, Andy, who had been working on the 93rd floor when the first plane crashed into the north tower.

Suki Kim is the author of "The Interpreter," a novel.

'New York Was Our City on the Hill'

By EDWIDGE DANTICAT

IF you are an immigrant in New York, there are some things you inevitably share. For one, if you're a new immigrant, you probably left behind someone you love in the country of your birth. In my case, I was the person left in Haiti when my mother and father escaped the brutal regimes of François and Jean-Claude Duvalier in the early 1970's and fled the extreme poverty caused by the Duvaliers' mismanagement and excesses.

The plan was for my parents to send for me and my younger brother, André, who were 4 and 2 years old at the time of their departure, when they found jobs and got settled in New York. But because of United States immigration red tape, our family separation lasted eight years. The near decade we were apart was filled with long letters, lengthy voice messages on cassette tapes and tearful phone calls, all brimming with the promise that one day my brother and I would be united not only with our parents but with our two Brooklyn-born brothers whom we didn't know at all.

Still André and I were constantly reminded by our Aunt Denise and Uncle Joseph, who were caring for us in an impoverished and politically volatile neighborhood in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, that we were lucky our parents were in New York. If we dared to disagree with that idea, the Faustian bargain our parents had faced would be clearly laid out for us. They could have stayed behind with us and we could have all gone without a great many necessary things, or they could have gone to New York to work so that we could have not only clothes and food and school fees but also a future.

As my Uncle Joseph liked to say, for people like us, the malere, the poor, the future was not a given. It was something to be clawed from the edge of despair with sweat and blood. At least in New York, our parents would be rewarded for their efforts.

If living in one of the richest cities in the world did not guarantee a struggle-free life, my brother and I didn't realize it. New York was our city on the hill, the imaginary haven of our lives. When we fantasized, we saw ourselves walking the penny-gilded streets and buying all the candies we could stuff into ourselves. Eventually we grew to embrace the idea that New York was where we were meant to be, as soon as the all-powerful gatekeepers saw fit to let us in, and if we could help it, we would never leave once we were again at our parents' side.

Our parents might have had utopian fantasies of their own when they sold most of their belongings to pay for passports, visas and plane fares to New York. I can't imagine making the choices they made without being forced, mapping out a whole life in a place that they'd seen only in one picture, a snow-covered street taken by my mother's brother, who lived there.

Later my parents would tell me that what kept them trudging through that snow to their factory jobs was their visions of their two New York-born children playing with the children they'd left in Haiti and the future that we might all forge as individuals and as a family.

When I finally joined my parents in Brooklyn, in 1981, at age 12, I became acutely aware of something else that New York immigrants shared. If they were poor, they were likely to be working more hours than anyone else, for less money, and with few if any benefits.

For years my father had worked two minimum-wage jobs to support two households in two countries. One job was in a textile factory, where my mother also worked, and another in a night car wash. Tired of intermittent layoffs and humiliating immigration raids, my father finally quit both jobs when André and I arrived so he could accompany my brothers and me to and from school.

That same year, our family car also became a gypsy cab, a term that, when I first heard and researched it, led me to think that we were part of a small clan of nomads whose leader, my father, chauffeured other people around when he was not driving us.

Though my brothers and I weren't aware of it at the time, our financial situation was precarious at best. Once my parents paid the rent and utility bills and bought a week's worth of groceries, there was little left for much else. My father never knew from day to day or week to week how much he would collect in fares.

Winter mornings were more profitable than summer afternoons. But in the winter, our needs were greater: coats and boots for four growing children, and regular hospital trips for my youngest brother, Karl, who was prone to ear infections and, as one doctor pointed out to us, might have suffered through 25 different colds one long winter.

We had no health insurance, of course, and each of Karl's visits to the doctor, or those for my brother Kelly - the only child I knew who got migraines, which we later discovered were a result of some kind of pressure on his optic nerve - were negotiated down at Cumberland Hospital's payment services department when my father took in my parents' joint tax return.

I remember going to the same hospital's women's clinic with my mother for one of her regular checkups when I was 16. She had a headache, her blood pressure was high, and the doctor told her that she'd have to be hospitalized that day if she wanted to avoid a stroke.

"Doctor, I have children at home and work tomorrow," my mother said, before signing papers declaring that she'd been advised of the treatment for her condition but had refused it. On the bus home, I watched her carefully, fearful that she would keel over and die for our sake, but she made it home, and despite the persistent headache, she went to work the next day.

I don't know what a catastrophic illness might have cost our family financially. But it was something my parents always had in mind. My father tried to pay all his bills religiously so that if we ever needed a bank loan for a sudden emergency, we would have no trouble getting it.

What we would eventually need a loan for was our house, which my parents purchased 18 years ago in East Flatbush. The day we moved in was one of the scariest and most exhilarating of our lives. My parents invited groups of church friends over to celebrate and bless our new home, but at the same time, they warned my brothers and me that the biggest battle they'd face from then on would be to try to keep it. The mortgage was nearly double the amount they'd paid in rent, and some months my father drove his cab both at night and during the day to make the payment, which he then took to the bank, in person, during the final hours of the grace period.

IT is the burden of each generation to embrace or reject the dreams set out by those who came before. In my family it was no different. My parents wanted me to be a doctor, and when I wasn't accepted by a Brooklyn high school specializing in the health professions, my father met with the principal and persuaded him to reverse the decision.

When I decided, after a brief school-sponsored internship at Kings County Hospital Center, that medicine was not for me, my parents were disappointed, but accepted my decision. My brother André has never forgotten the day he turned 14 and my father took him to the post office to buy a money order for the application fee for his first summer job. And over time we have all nearly wept when tallying small loans and advances from Mom and Dad on salaries spent way before they were collected.

Over the years, I have also come to understand my parents' intense desire to see my brothers and me financially stable. They had sacrificed so much that to watch us struggle as they had would have been, to quote a Creole expression, like lave men siye atè - washing one's hands only to dry them in the dirt.

These days, if you're an immigrant in New York, you might not consider yourself an immigrant at all, but a transnational, someone with voting privileges and living quarters not just in one country but in two. This was my parents' dream until they reached middle age and realized that with their decade-long friendships and community ties in Brooklyn, they didn't want to live anywhere else.

Last year, when my father became ill with pulmonary fibrosis - a result, some doctors say, of environmental pollution, to which he was especially vulnerable from working such long hours in his cab - he began to have long talks with my brothers and me, fearing that as the disease progressed, it might become harder and harder for him to speak. While I was writing this, we talked a little about how New York had changed from the time he arrived.

The most striking difference, he observed, is that these days, like most New Yorkers, he has to worry about terrorism, both becoming a victim and being blamed for it. He also worries about the high cost of everything from food to housing, about doors closing behind him, and thousands of families never having the kind of opportunities that we've enjoyed. When he first got to New York, all he did was work nonstop and pray to see his children and grandchildren grow up. Looking back, it feels like a simpler time, but maybe it wasn't. Then and now, he whispered wistfully, one can only hope that the journey was worthwhile.

On Nov. 3, after this essay was submitted, my Uncle Joseph died at age 81. More formally known as the Rev. Joseph N. Dantica, he died in Miami after fleeing gang violence and death threats in Haiti. He was detained by Department of Homeland Security officials after requesting asylum in the United States and died in their custody. The department said the cause was pancreatitis.

Edwidge Danticat is the author of the novels and story collections "Breath, Eyes, Memory,'' "The Farming of Bones,'' "Krik? Krak!" and "The Dew Breaker.''

'I Breathed in the Air of a Million Misfits'

By SANJNA N. SINGH

I HAD been an avid photographer for some years, my camera my conduit to mysterious worlds lurking beyond my chipper Upper East Side existence. One summer found me in Jackson Heights, Queens, a neighborhood that seemed out of touch with the modern India where I was raised, but one I was eager to explore.

I started to photograph a family that had emigrated from a small village in Punjab 20 years ago. They had arranged the marriage of their 23-year-old daughter, Kamal, to a boy from their hometown who would be arriving shortly to start his life, and hers, in Queens.

I was disturbed that a young Indian-American girl would so easily acquiesce to an arranged marriage. The family, in turn, was horrified that I, a 26-year-old Indian girl, remained as yet unmarried. This could only be interpreted as a shocking lapse of parental duty. They kindly offered to find me a spouse. I politely declined.

As India past and present collided, incongruously, in Queens, I couldn't help but think of my sister's wedding in Delhi a few years earlier. In India, my sister and her boyfriend had dated for 10 years before getting married. In New York, Kamal had met her fiancé only once.

I was in the grip of a bizarre reverse culture-shock. How, I wondered, could you live so long in New York and not be the slightest bit American? They were equally bemused at this apparent contradiction: an Indian woman ... photographer? The word conjured a turbaned Sikh with a Nikon and a blinding flash that accosted them at weddings and birthdays saying "smile please" and "family only please."

I photographed the wedding, and fun, under the strict eye of Kamal's father, was had by all. Despite our differences, we bonded, and our time together was a memorable experience. But I emerged from my first foray into Indian life in America slightly disappointed. I hadn't known what to expect from Jackson Heights, but perhaps at the back of my mind I was hoping to find people like me.

I was part of the fortunate generation of Indians, born into a democratic country whose colonial presence was happily a memory. My family were freedom fighters in the struggle led by Gandhi, and by their grace, I grew up in relative comfort. But despite my advantages, I saw no avenues for creativity in the conventional lifestyle - office worker, then faithful spouse - that seemed ready-made for people like me. Overwhelmed by the prospect of forging a new path in a regimented society and enticed by the myriad offerings of an effortlessly prosperous America, I decided to taste that life for myself.

Here in New York, I didn't think of myself as an immigrant, because for me, the door leading back to Delhi seemed wide open, and I could return anytime I chose. Yet as I entered my eighth year in America, I was forced to recognize that this open door grew more illusory with each passing year. As I drifted further from my own country, I started to feel the need to grant space to my Indian self, right here, in New York.

A few weeks after the wedding, I found myself amid a very different group of Indians, a group I thought would share my sensibilities. I was invited to a chic Diwali cards party on the Upper West Side. Diwali is the autumnal festival of lights, and traditionally a time to illuminate one's home with diyas - earthenware lamps - to welcome the goddess of prosperity. Perhaps in her honor, it is also traditional to gamble at card parties.

In retrospect, showing up in my favorite "Jefferson High Alive in '85" T-shirt wasn't the best idea. Everyone else was dressed beautifully in the latest Indian styles, the women in flowing, two-piece silk salwaar kameez, the men in kurta pajama. I immediately felt 12. Nibbling a samosa, I perched awkwardly on the arm of a sofa, trying to contribute to the conversation. But as the topic turned to husbands and mothers-in-law, my interest waned.

I made my way to the cocktail table (mistake No. 1), then went to join the guys playing cards (mistake No. 2). They were sitting in a circle, cheerfully tossing poker chips into the pile, and I envied their unconscious abandon, which contrasted so starkly with the carefully cultivated gentility I had just parted company with. Reflecting on the hand that was dealt to me, and my chipped fingernails, I realized glumly that I possessed none of the virtues of an Indian woman, but was riddled with the vices of most Indian men.

By the time I returned to the edge of the sofa, having lost all my money, including cab fare, it was clear that I had nothing more to add to the party. I didn't have a boyfriend/husband who was a broker/banker, nor did I have a Park Slope duplex with two bedrooms (one for when his mother comes to visit). As everyone chatted about parties and obligatory trips to India, it dawned on me that these women, most of them born in New Jersey, seemed more Indian than I. Disconcerted, I put on my coat and slipped out.

Walking down the crisscrossing streets where Columbus Avenue meets Broadway, my mind was a jumble of thoughts. New York never asked me to define myself, just accepted my presence and graciously made room for me. In this city I am not a failed Indian woman because the recipes in my cookbook are for darkroom chemicals, not curry.

I breathed in the air of a million misfits. An old Indian film song came to mind, and I hummed the melody as I headed to the 9 train. Once on board, like a good New Yorker, I read a line from the latest Poetry in Motion:

If you think you can grasp me, think again. My story flows in more than one direction.

Sometimes those things are just written for you.

Sanjna N. Singh works for HBO Studios. She is also working on a documentary about the rights of South Asian and Arab immigrants after 9/11.

'My Name Is Not Cool Anymore'

By MOHAMMED NASEEHU ALI

HOW I came to possess the name of the boxer who was once the most famous and baddest man on the planet happened by accident.

Well, not quite by accident. By religious default almost every male child born in the predominantly Islamic Zongo section of Kumasi, Ghana, where I grew up, had Mohammed as a first name. The Mohammed would be followed by a defining second name, usually an adjective that described the infinite qualities of the original Muhammad, the Holy Prophet of Islam (the spelling of the name varies). My name, Mohammed Naseehu, means Mohammed the Sincere One. One of my brothers is Mohammed Nazeer, the Overseer, another is Mohammed Nuru Deen, the Light of Islam. So for most of my teens, in Ghana, I was usually addressed by my second name.

But soon after I landed at Kennedy Airport in 1988 at age 16 on my way to Michigan to attend Interlochen, the boarding school for the arts, I noticed how little middle names matter in America. They are like dirty little secrets you share only with people you trust. And mine, Naseehu, is one that many non-Muslims find hard to pronounce.

I also liked the prospect of having the same name as the famed American boxer, so I dropped my second name. I hoped that my new identity would quicken my assimilation into American culture.

For 13 years I enjoyed the way people did a double take when they heard my name. I enjoyed flirting with telephone salespeople when they asked, "Really, is that your name?" or "You kidding me?" or "Get outta here.'' Before handing me back my credit card, cashiers would say, "Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee!" Sometimes they'd shout across the store to their co-workers - "Look who I got here!" - and invite them to check out the puny freak named after the heavyweight champion.

I wasn't always sure if they were making fun of me or were simply fascinated that I shared the name of someone so bad and mean. But I didn't care, any more than I objected when the doorman in my office building started calling me the Legend. After I moved to New York for good in 1995, my name was an icebreaker, not to mention a handle that, at least for those initial few minutes after I met someone, conferred a few degrees of coolness.

My name is not cool anymore. On 9/11, I was one of the PATH train passengers evacuated from the World Trade Center after the first plane hit. Once outside, I called my wife in Brooklyn, and while we were speaking, the second plane hit. My phone died; I ran for my life.

In the days after the attacks, I didn't realize how the actions of the Arab religious zealots who masterminded them would affect my life. Two weeks later, I got a call from a worker at Western Union, which I had used to wire money for many years. The company had frozen the $100 I had sent my younger brother for his school fees in Ghana and were demanding that I fax them copies of my identification to prove that the money wasn't being sent to support terrorists. Verbal attacks were left on our answering machine by people who thought they were getting back at an Arab for Sept. 11.

These were mere inconveniences. What really got me was that my name had lost its cachet. People who had thought of "Ali" or "the Greatest!" when they heard "Mohammed" were now apt to think, "Atta." I am proud of the illustrious name of my grandfather, Ali, named for the Prophet's son-in-law. My grandfather himself became an immigrant at the turn of the 20th century when his father migrated with his family on horseback from Zamfara Kingdom, in what is now Nigeria, to the Gold Coast, which is now Ghana. Still I have considered changing my name, not only to fend off wary looks and offensive phone calls but also to restore the coolness I had lost.

Sometimes I think I'd be better off as Cassius Clay.

As I weigh the pros and cons of such a move - the effect on my work, my identity; the legal hurdles; the cognitive dissonance it would create in the minds of friends and relatives who would surely think I am losing it altogether - one benefit is clear. I could still enjoy the morale boost I get from the doorman at my office, who could still shout "the Legend" each time I flash my security badge.

Mohammed Naseehu Ali is the author of "The Prophet of Zongo Street,'' a story collection to be published next year.

'Sliding Up a Rabbit Hole Into Wonderland'

By NELLY ROSARIO

IF you applied today's world headlines to this microcosmic city, it would be easy to imagine a quilt torn to shreds. What exists, instead, is a city of complex fabrics: the Chinese in Little Italy, the Colombians in Jackson Heights. This is not to say ethnic conflicts don't exist on many levels here; polka dot and kente cloth do clash. But there's as much to be said for the fine threads of daily exchanges between all these communities that hold this city together.

I was born in the Dominican Republic and grew up in the 70's and 80's in the Southside of Williamsburg, a largely working-class Latino community in Brooklyn. The elevated J, M, and Z tracks on Broadway run like a thick seam between the Southside and the Hasidic Satmar enclave, affectionately and derisively coined "Jewtown" by local kids.

Around Broadway, you'll find the Williamsburg Public Library, the Williamsburg Bridge, a host of dining spots, banks and other businesses. Transfiguration Roman Catholic parish, our local church and school, was also near Broadway. During my childhood, this seam inevitably came to represent a personal transfiguration: religion and education, literature, movement and prosperity.

Older Southside residents joke that the statue of George Washington in Williamsburg Plaza points its rear toward the Southside. So crossing Broadway from the Southside each morning was like sliding up a rabbit hole into Wonderland: the concrete burst open with columns of muscular trees, accompanied by chirping birds; more quiet, less litter; and brownstone after brownstone flanking tree-canopied streets with names like Marcy, Hooper, Penn, Roebling, Bedford and Division.

The frayed threads between the Latino and Hasidic communities seemed, and still seem, endless, despite the fact that both communities share the experience of immigration and value family and tradition. I grew up with stories of Hasidic vigilante groups who allegedly attacked suspected Latino teenagers. I'd hear "high-hitluhs" hurled at yeshiva school buses in response to spitballs. My father used to attend community board meetings that boiled with bitter disputes over housing, social services, business practices, zoning, local politics, ad nauseam - and still do.

But it's Olivia, my 5-year-old, who encourages me to view this city's patchwork optimistically. A walk down the street provokes in her questions about why "Sidians" wear "curls" and "white pantyhose" or why Abuela speaks Spanish and others don't. She reminds me to take note of the small exchanges, the surprising moments of connection.

Besides parroting learned prejudices, children are also unwitting mediators. Women in kerchiefs often asked us to operate elevators or stoves during the Jewish Sabbath and holidays. Like me, most kids I knew rarely declined the opportunity to sneak glimpses into the lives of such an insular community. You got to peek into those strange wooden structures erected around autumn; you got to taste those slabs of honey-apple cake displayed in kosher bakeries.

I'd walk down Lee Avenue with my mother as she bargain-hunted. She used to haggle with the store clerk in broken English. The clerk counter-haggled in broken Spanish. Mexican stock boys chatted with their bosses in broken Yiddish. In other words, business as usual.

On the corner of Marcy and Hewes, another kind of business was going on: My best friend was smitten with a Hasidic boy who worked at the corner store. No ear locks or felt hat or long black coat could hide those amazing eyes, she said. The feeling seemed mutual. They had some "eye dates" for a while, and though nothing ever came of them, such glances have the power to create new generations.

Always, the curiosity. If there was one place where both sides could freely quench curiosity, it was the Williamsburg Public Library on Division Avenue. It was here I indulged in my compulsion for reading. Black Interest, Latino Interest, Jewish Interest - categories didn't matter. At the checkout desk, I'd catch a Hasidic woman eyeing one of my books, a Holocaust memoir; and she'd catch me eyeing hers, "The House of the Spirits" by Isabel Allende.

To a writer, these moments become a kind of reverse magical realism, where ordinary human exchanges take on the quality of the fantastic. I think about my father, whose name, Israel Rosario, helped him garner the votes of unsuspecting Hasidic residents at a Brooklyn Villas' tenants meeting. I think about Miriam Vale, owner of Millie's Hair Designs on Williamsburg Street East, a Hasid-customized salon where young women can get their hair relaxed.

I think about Orthodox Martin Needelman, who is a legal advocate for Williamsburg Latinos, and who is married to América Ruiz, an economist and schoolteacher. I think of the W.I.C. Center on Wilson and Taylor, whose employees include a Latina who converted to Judaism.

Snatches of Spanish come from Argentinean Hasidics, labeled Latinos in their community. Dominican cab drivers serve as guides into the Southside's underbelly for adventure-seeking Hasidic men. If you drive past the Amoco station at Kent and Flushing Avenues, don't be surprised to hear hip-hop blasting from the cars of hip-talking Hasidic boys.

The assumption that random threads can bind communities may come off as simplistic. Perhaps I'm fixated on the children who ignore prejudice at the Bedford playground. But in my mind, I multiply these threads by the hundreds of others throughout New York. Even the Royal Quilting Company at Metropolitan and Havemeyer will tell you: it's the small, even lockstitch that makes for a longer-lasting quilt.

Nelly Rosario is the author of "Song of the Water Saints,'' a novel.

'No One Cared If I Kissed Girls'

By STACEYANN CHIN

IT still amazes me that when I am away from New York, the angles of me cry out for the subways, the impolite service industry and the streets teeming with cultural insanities. After a week in Johannesburg making metaphors into theater, or 10 days in Sydney teaching the poetics of writing the self, I can't wait to get back to Brooklyn.

I can't wait to rediscover the patchwork of poetry and identities that make New York the mecca of writers and actors and belly dancers in search of good food, impossible timetables and the uncertainty that characterizes daily life in the ever-growing apple of the North American East. Born in Jamaica of black and Chinese ancestry, I have been a proud (cocky), uniformed (Triple Five Soul cargoes), card-carrying (seven-day unlimited), political (opinionated) New Yorker for seven years and about four months now.

I was 24 when I moved from Kingston to Canarsie so I could escape the atrocities too often visited upon people who have publicly identified themselves as gay. Homosexuality in Jamaica is not just a social taboo, it is an abomination that inspires celebrated songs detailing the violent killings of "chi-chi man" and lesbians. I have known men who were beaten to death because they were suspected of having female tendencies. These crimes often remain "unsolved." Women who dare to cross over into the realm of lesbianism live with the ever-present threat of rape.

If you cannot afford the high walls or what it costs to cloak a secret lifestyle, your only choice is to fake heterosexuality and pray that that pretense will eventually become real. Being "out" and gay and a resident of Jamaica was not an option that the poor or the prudent typically considered.

So when I discovered that I liked the smell of girls more than I liked the taste of curried goat and rice and peas (with lots of gravy), I promptly decided that relocation was in the charts. I finished my degree at the University of the West Indies, sold my desktop computer and moved my favorite feminist books to Brooklyn.

New York was my godsend. As soon as I landed, I knew I was in a place that welcomed misfits. From the adventurous streets of the West Village to the cacophony of flea markets on the Lower East Side, people shouted and bargained and laughed with their mouths wide open. Harlem held the history of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin. The Bronx boasted the seed that sprouted hip-hop.

Mostly, Manhattan was too polished for my taste. But Brooklyn called to me. From Flatbush to Fulton, from Utica to Underhill, I sensed an electricity of living that defied categorization. It tickled me that nobody objected to the violent preaching on the J train. No one cared if I kissed girls or not. I let my hair grow long and large and wild, not unlike my spirit, which has been nurtured by the comforts and the challenges of being in this rapidly moving, unforgiving metropolis.

After seven years of women and wine and too many ill-composed songs, I have adopted the passport of an international citizen. I know the sound of languages without understanding what is being said. I have met a cabdriver from almost every country I have heard about on the news. I cannot conceive of a life in which I am not a traveler. I need the world to reflect all the faces I have come to know exist. I am uncomfortable when my neighborhood is a community of hegemony.

I am of the firm belief that I will always have an apartment in Brooklyn. Even if other cities beckon, even if I choose to respond, there is something about New York that makes me want to always call it home. It was from the first day. I fit in because there was no criterion for belonging. I was already a New Yorker at heart. The external stuff was easy to fall into. I simply had to learn to walk faster than I needed, speak louder than I should, and value spaces where the faces reflect the expressions of every continent.

In retrospect, I have to admit that the giddy excitement of the new environment, and the sheer lesbian liberation of the first years in New York, did not allow much room for sorrow in adjusting from island to urban. Every time I missed the blue waters of Doctors Cave Beach, I'd remind myself of any one of the lovers I had lost because she was afraid someone would find out about our tryst and come to get her. And it was easy to forget about the things that only Jamaica could give me.

When you are young and burning with the urgency of sexual freedom and the flesh, things like culture and grandmothers and accents that mimic your own mean less than they do at 30.

Upon closer examination, though, it was apparent that my Jamaica was not that far away. When I missed eating the tasty national dish of ackee and saltfish, I took my frugal pockets to Golden Crust (the A train to Fulton Street lets you off right there), bought a little bit of home, and swallowed it with the sound of second-generation Jamaicans playing Bob Marley on Nostrand Avenue.

When I switched addresses, I did not lose a nation, for Jamaica will always be mine, but it was with the greatest certainty that I claimed this new country called Brooklyn. One allows me a way forward in freedom, while the other leaves no room for an identity I have no desire to silence.

Brooklyn gives me the time to be away from Jamaica and at the same time live in the center of the sounds and the smells that assure me I am still unequivocally Jamaican. These noisy streets offer ample room, and by extension time, to hate Jamaica, to fall in love with Jamaica, and finally, to find the medium through which I can separate the impossible from the possible and become my most comfortable self.

Staceyann Chin is a writer, performer and poet who was a cast member and co-writer of the show "Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway."

'My Life at the Pink Pussy Cat'

By NATASHA RADOJCIC

Published: November 21, 2004

I ARRIVED in New York in August 1989, leaving behind my homeland, Yugoslavia, which was deathly ill with nationalism and a collective psychosis that was about to swallow the fragile Balkan sanity. I was 22 years old. I arrived with $1,000 inside my sock, having been advised that a sock was the safest sanctuary for one's fortune during a border crossing in a heat wave; looking inconspicuous while wearing a coat with money sewn inside the lining would have been impossible.

My first home in my adopted city was a rented mattress, priced reasonably at $50 a week in Ridgewood, Queens, an area still popular for the fresh-off-the-boat-Serbs. The mattress was in an ugly railroad apartment belonging to a Romanian Serb refugee who had swum to freedom across the Danube holding onto a tractor tire.

I rose from it the morning after my arrival, nauseated from the faint but undeniable smell of urine that emanated from the middle of the mattress, and instantly gave myself over to the quest for the American Dream, a job. I had seen an ad in The Village Voice for a salesperson at the Pink Pussy Cat Boutique on West Fourth Street, and the innuendo of the name having escaped me, I dialed the number.

A woman with a voicebox burnt from years of screaming shouted two questions at me. Did I have any objection to working with sexual paraphernalia, and was I 21? No, I didn't, and yes, I was, I replied, wondering what the word paraphernalia meant.

The job paid $8 an hour plus commissions. The shop was narrow and deep and stacked with rows of sex toys. I found that the strawberry-flavored underwear (which I tried all alone while on coffee break) tasted nothing like strawberries, although a few, like the mouthless masks and the nipple clamps, were a little scary.

Our customers were either happy couples, the men asking if this underwear was really edible while their girlfriends or wives pretend to be bashful, or single boys from Jersey, too young to go to bars and drown their fears before they entered, so their inexperienced cheeks, covered with thin hair and bad-diet pimples, turned crimson before the black crotchless lace teddies.

When the owner learned where I was from, he declared himself a Communist who believed that power to the people comes through sexual revolution. According to him, the solution for the Serbs and Muslims was an orgy. I needed the job, so I offered no comment.

So I began my life at the Pink Pussy Cat. But I didn't last very long there. The hours - 6 p.m. to 2 a.m., if I remember correctly - were too demanding, and after being reluctant to work seven days straight through the holiday season, I was fired. Over the next few years, I jumped from one job to another, tried baby-sitting, being a receptionist, but for the life of me I could not figure out the switchboard, or how to simultaneously feed two babies. So I sought places that offered employment without asking questions.

I moved to the East Village, briefly dabbled in dangerous drugs, and enjoyed not caring what people thought of me, all the while practicing English verbs and memorizing the language's seemingly impenetrable syntax: I have had fledgling hopes of becoming a writer and moving to New York since I was 7. One of the first memories that connect to my present life is the world map that was stapled to the porous wall of my grandmother's one-and-a-half-room apartment in Belgrade.

One evening in 1973 I announced my career intentions to the family, and the reply I got from one aunt, a bona fide World War II heroine, was: Nobody marries a female writer. My mother reminded me that at least in her book, female writers were barely one step above prostitutes.

After a few years of trying to figure out how to support my writing "habit," I answered another ad in 1992, this one for a combination aerobics teacher/personal trainer at the World Gym across from Lincoln Center. Within a year, I had a thriving career. However unpleasant it was to get up at every morning at 5:30 for 12 years, the job provided sufficient funds for my pocket, and left room in my brain for the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway, whom I pursued all the way to Columbia University. A personal trainer is a luxury few can afford.

Working for people who could afford such luxury while my country was burst asunder by civil war was, to put it mildly, bizarre. The stories I collected along treadmill road are many. The best: Two client-friends gave me a lavish book party, surpassing in cost the entire advance of my first novel. The worst: An Upper East Sider fired me after my second book deal; unable to accept the idea that somebody so much lower on the totem pole could experience such good fortune, she sacked me on the spot.

Today, I live peacefully in a rent-stabilized apartment on the West Side, where I write every day, facing an exposed brick wall and a sealed-up fireplace. The apartment is smaller even than my grandmother's one-and-a-half-room apartment.

And I am still in love with this city. One of my friends from the old country recently announced to me that I had become a free, peace-chasing writer because I had moved "at New York"; prepositions remain a mystery to an East European-structured ear. No, I insist with New York hubris (hubris being one of the requirements for New York citizenship), I came to New York because I was born for it.

Natasha Radojcic is the author of "Homecoming," a novel. Her autobiographical novel, "You Don't Have to Live Here," will be published next year.

'A Lifetime of Living Half a Life'

By GEORGE SARRINIKOLAOU

IMMIGRATING to New York from Athens, my father promised, would make us rich. As a boy, I never fully believed him. Still, I welcomed the fantasy, not so much because I yearned for more toys or better food than my working-class parents provided me in Greece, but so that they might stop fighting.

The lack of money was a nightly topic for my parents and the spark that set them off. Their futile form of accounting began after dinner. Seated around the kitchen table with its flowered vinyl tablecloth, my mother was obligated to report her day's spending to my father, while he, pen in hand, scribbled the figures across stained paper napkins. The tension, already high, mounted if she'd spent too much, or if his calculations showed that she ought to have more money left than the amount found in her purse.

On the worst evenings, he became furious and hit her, sometimes slapping her on the head or whipping her indiscriminately with his belt. Other nights, she protected herself by retreating to my room and putting me on her lap before he had a chance to strike.

In my recollections of these evenings, I am invisible. The only part of me that memory has preserved is my disembodied vision. I know that a young boy with olive skin and brown hair, the one I recognize in photographs of myself, completed those scenes of violence.

If going to America would mean the end of their fights, I would go without protest. As it turned out, my parents did stop fighting shortly after our arrival in New York in 1980, when I was 10, but not because they became rich. The difficulties of making a life in a foreign city made my father realize that wealth would come, if at all, only after much struggle. So some 40 days into our immigration, he decided that we were going back. He would return first to find a new job, and we would join him later. My mother agreed to the plan, but never carried out her part of it. Two years later the divorce was official, and my mother, my baby sister and I had become New Yorkers.

We were poor but safely ensconced in our new city, so the anxiety that had marked my first decade of life eased. From the drab housing project where we lived in Astoria, Queens, we would stroll to the East River and take in the panorama of the Manhattan skyline, visible proof of the distance that now separated us from our Athenian past.

Still, while I couldn't understand it then, immigration heightened the effects of the violence I had experienced. Under the stress of being cut off from everything that was familiar, the stress of having to learn a new language, of being told at age 10 that I was the man of the house, I reacted as I used to when I witnessed my parents' fights. I pulled back from everyday life, becoming an observer, waiting, as if life would begin in earnest sometime later.

On the surface, I behaved like any other boy in New York: I went to school; I played basketball in the park; I kissed a girl in the movie theater. When I was older, I went to college, I became a Jets fan. As a journalist, I reported on everything from City Hall to Wall Street. But I never let myself become fully a part of my life, feeling that it held the same potential for horror I had seen at home.

For years, I identified this separation from life with being an immigrant. I was a stranger here, I told myself. I would never belong to this city. My true home, I would think, was Athens, and it was there I would return after college, then after graduate school, when I had a little more job experience, by the time I was 30. For years, I remained apart in that fantasy, living with my mother instead of renting an apartment of my own, never buying a car, staying single. I did nothing that might solidify my ties with New York, even as the years of living in the city began to outnumber the years I had lived in Athens.

Paradoxically, it was immigration, which for so long separated me from living a full life, that afforded me the distance from which to look at myself more critically. Having entered the 25th year of my immigration, I understand that my retreat from life began not upon arriving in New York, but long before, in one of the indistinct Athens apartments we occupied, as my father raised his hand to strike my mother. There I was again, careful not to make a sound, frozen in place. I know that, at the time, the withdrawal was a way to survive. The legacy of such a survival, though, has been a lifetime of living half a life.

Each day, I struggle to put an end to that legacy. Whether in New York, or Athens, or anywhere else, I tell myself that I must embrace life. I don't long to assimilate, for I prize the intellectual freedom of the outsider. Yet increasingly I am bringing more of my mind and heart to all that I do. Gradually, I am becoming whole.

In August, I even got married. The ceremony took place in Strawberry Fields in Central Park; my bride, an American-born artist, chose the spot based on her fondness for John Lennon and Yoko Ono. I had felt no special connection to the two cultural icons, but I accepted her choice. Yet in the moments before the wedding, a memory linked to this place did come back to me.

News of Lennon's murder outside the Dakota, where the couple lived, reached me late on Dec. 8, 1980. It was shortly after my father's departure, and the crime only underscored the strange new life in New York that stretched before us. It had taken nearly a quarter of a century, but I was incorporating that event into my personal history. And life seemed not as strange anymore.

George Sarrinikolaou is the author of "Facing Athens: Encounters With the Modern City."

'Where Is Home, If the Place You Come From No Longer Exists?'

By BORIS FISHMAN

WHAT does it mean to be from a place that is no longer on the map? My homeland, the Soviet Union, disintegrated in late 1991, a scant three years after my family had managed to escape its anti-Semitism and lack of opportunity. As an immigrant in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, with a funny haircut and even funnier clothes, I tended to worry more about fitting in than the place where those clothes had come from.

By the time I became curious, that place was gone. I looked for it in books. I looked for it in college, where, to the dismay of my parents, who wanted old wounds to stay sealed, I majored in Russian literature. I looked for it in Brighton Beach, the heavily Russian community in Brooklyn where I found a late-70's Soviet aesthetic joined to the coarse materialism possible only in a capitalist society. I even went so far as to go all the way back, but the post-Soviet Russia I discovered on a 2000 visit felt as foreign as the ersatz Soviet Union frozen in time on Brighton Beach.

There's plenty of Russia in New York, especially in this age of open borders. There's Petrossian, the dispensary of Caspian caviar in Midtown; the Russian steam baths on Tenth Street, where men with tobacco-stained mustaches pummel you with bouquets of birch branches to improve your circulation; the Black Sea bookstore on Coney Island Avenue, where the socialist realists snuggle against the romantics, and even forgive the surrealists.

But Petrossian is unbearably pompous, the Russian steam baths are kitschy, and in the Black Sea you will hear more about what kind of car so-and-so's son Misha drives than about anything by Turgenev. Where, then, does the finicky Russian immigrant find his homeland in New York?

I decided to ask around.

Russia is a "feeling," said Vica Vinogradova, a multimedia producer who came from St. Petersburg in 1990. "It's when you sit at home in the kitchen and your interaction with someone suddenly becomes open and candid: a kind of kitchenness. This person doesn't have to be Russian at all."

Regina Khidekel, the director of the Russian-American Cultural Center, said Russia was tutelage in adversity. "My son Roma came here at 13 having lived through an incredibly interesting period in perestroika,'' she said. "And here, he felt an advantage, because he knew something about history and humanity that his contemporaries here didn't know. We carry an unbelievable experience."

"Welcome to the world of being a professional immigrant!" the novelist Gary Shteyngart, who emigrated from what was then Leningrad at the age of 7, exclaimed when he heard I was writing an essay about being Russian in New York. For Gary, Russia is America's untiring appetite for its beguiling, enigmatic former nemesis.

Mikhail Baryshnikov didn't want to talk about Russia. "I spent only 10 years there," he said, brushing me off. "I was born in Latvia." For those of us from the other Soviet republics - I was born in Belarus - Russia is an accident of association and a confinement of identity, too.

"Misha doesn't want to belong to anything," said Mr. Baryshnikov's friend Roman Kaplan, a co-owner of Russian Samovar, the purveyor of nostalgia and fruit-infused vodka on 52nd Street. "He is like a fully detached house.

"For me, it's like the poet has it," he added. " 'Face to face, one cannot see the face.' You see the larger things from a distance. Russia is not the horror I left. It's something far greater. That something is Russian culture. Politicians come and go, but Pushkin is forever, correct? Tsvetaeva is forever. Malevich is forever. Pasternak is forever."

Modern America is kind to ethnicity. A hundred years ago, when the country was less certain of itself, the greenhorns who sailed from Eastern Europe for the tenements of the Lower East Side were expected to assimilate and lose themselves to America's cultural largess. Today, immigration has so thoroughly redefined the American narrative that I feel American precisely because I am an immigrant. New York has subsumed ethnicity so thoroughly that I feel more American than Russian plowing through a plate of blintzes at the Russian Vodka Room.

At the same time, America's youth and consequent obsession with genealogy - "Where are you from?" after all, is the standard greeting in town - frees the foreigner to keep a bit of home on unfamiliar ground.

"I thought I'd lose my Russianness when I came here," Ms. Khidekel said. "America allows you to remain who you are, doesn't force you to change your religion, or your interests. Doesn't force you to reject anything."

Where amid all this is my Russia? Where is home, if the place you come from no longer exists? Does immigration mean it can survive - like the demonic figure Woland in Mikhail Bulgakov's ingenious novel "Master and Margarita," who must commit evil as a catalyst for the world to do good - only as a shadow, only in opposition, only as not-Petrossian, not-Russian Baths, not-Black Sea?

No. Roman Kaplan's poet had it right - "face to face, one cannot see the face." To uproot oneself from native soil, to deny oneself the great, unfathomable fortune of growing to old age in the place one was born, is not to relinquish one's homeland. But it does mean one can never take that homeland literally again.

If Russia was everywhere back home, it comes in fleeting moments here in New York. Russia in New York is pomposity, and kitsch, and obsession with material possessions, and also the opposite of all those things. As for an "authentic," "real" Russia? Who knows? I don't live there anymore.

Boris Fishman is the editor of "Wild East: Stories From the Last Frontier,'' a collection of short stories about the former Soviet Union and post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

'This City Is a Monster'

By JAVIER F.

NOTHING happened in my life for three years. Then, in 10 days, everything happened.

One night, I was at a nightclub in La Rioja, the kind of place with a lot of drugs and a lot of people who you weren't quite sure how they made a living, when someone called me a drug addict in front of my girlfriend. So I punched him. It turned out he was a powerful drug dealer whose uncle was a judge. The police came after me, and suddenly, La Rioja became very small.

Meanwhile, a Brazilian woman I had dated during vacations in high school had tracked me down from New York. At the same time, the Argentine economy was headed toward another macabre collapse. With the help of a friend who had worked in the state intelligence service, I escaped from La Rioja in a black car, just like in the movies, went back to my hometown, Córdoba, and arranged to come to New York. Ten days after Sept. 11, 2001, I moved in with my old Brazilian girlfriend in Sunnyside, Queens. Even though I was undocumented, she got me an $8-an-hour job in the cafe where she worked.

It happened so suddenly, I hadn't considered the adjustments I would have to make. Before I left, a friend asked me, "Javier, how's your English?" I told him I had studied it for three years in high school. "House," "dog," that was about the extent of my vocabulary. When I got here and started working in the cafe, people would ask me, "Can I have a Coke?" and I would think, "What in the world is this guy talking about?"

But language was the least of it. I was 32 years old, already a mature adult. Here, life was full of incoherencies. I needed a dictionary to translate the culture of New York City. I was essentially reborn with a blank slate, and now, three years later, I am barely starting to speak.

One of my first tasks was to adjust to the American workplace. One day when I was working the counter at the cafe, a man complained that his table was dirty. In Argentina, I would have gone and cleaned it - we're used to multitasking. But someone in line said to me, "That's not your job." So I didn't do it. I guess I should have called the Department of Table Cleaning to take care of it.

After a few months at the cafe, I was named assistant manager - my first promotion. After a year and a half, I became the manager. But still, not everything made sense. Take that truly American word that says so much about life here: networking. To me, it is an absurd concept. In Argentina, such things happen spontaneously. I go to a barbecue, I meet someone. A party is a party. Here, networking is like going fishing.

Eight months ago, I went to a networking party. The conversations went like this: "Hi, what do you do?"

"I sell shoes."

"Oh, I do Web design."

You exchange cards and go on to the next person. Ridiculous. But afterward, I made a business card, just in case. To be prepared.

There were also differences I liked: I found that New Yorkers smile a lot. In Argentina, people's bitterness is visible in their faces. If you go downtown, you have to avoid people who hate their jobs, who are broke, whose children are sick but the social security system doesn't cover them. Here, people smile at you. It's normal. It's polite. Before I understood this, a woman would smile at me in the cafe and I would immediately think I should ask for her telephone number. I was an Adonis.

Another thing that surprised me was that when I started to explore New York, I found that this city is a monster. It's transitory, so making friends is very difficult. It's unforgiving: you leave your car at a meter for three minutes too long, you get a ticket. On the other hand, there are unlimited possibilities. Here, even I can afford to go out and spend $20 every night. If I told that to my friends in Argentina, they'd say: "Wow, this guy, what a marvelous life he leads!" Because even if they have money, they don't know what's going to happen tomorrow.

After these three years, I'm a different person. I have learned to be more private about my personal life, like an American. Still, I will never completely adapt. For example, the idea of a stranger as your roommate doesn't exist in Argentina, but that's what I have here.

After I broke up with my Brazilian girlfriend, I moved in with a Uruguayan. Three months ago, I needed a new place and found someone on Craigslist. This time, it was an American. We've been living together for a month and a half, and we still haven't gone out for a drink. It's tough to break the ice. One day, I asked him, "What are you doing tonight?"

"I'm going to see some musician friends play in a recital," he said. "And you?"

Great, I thought, he's going to invite me along. "Oh, nothing," I said.

"O.K., see you later." Then he was gone.

But that kind of thing seems minor compared to the cultural and economic obstacles of being undocumented. At first, I got around things. I managed to get a driver's license before my tourist visa ran out, but only with the help of my girlfriend. I work without any kind of health insurance, but take vitamins every day to be like a bull, and have not had to go to the doctor.

Still, once you reach a certain level, you realize that the next job up is only for Americans. And even the job you have is unstable. The cafe where I work changed ownership seven months ago, and the good will I had built up with my old bosses vanished. They deduct taxes from my salary, and since I can't file for a refund, I end up paying much more than legal workers. If they need to, they make me work for no pay on my day off. But there is a line of 10 people waiting to take my job, so I swallow my pride.

Then a few days ago, my boss said he was cutting my salary 41 percent. So I now make less than when I got here, and I do triple the work. I am letting my roommate know I have to move out soon; I can't afford the rent. I am angry and am losing hope. Logically, working hard should lead to a better life, but it doesn't.

I don't want to go back to Argentina; I may move to the small basement apartment of a friend in Jamaica, Queens. It's far, and though it's cheaper, I'm going to have to get a second job just to afford the rent. But at least maybe, once in a while, we'll get together for a drink.

As told to Seth Kugel, who translated from the Spanish.

B O O K L I S T

Beyond 'Call It Sleep': New Immigrant Classics

By SCOTT VEALE

FOR past generations, the bedrock accounts of the immigrant experience in New York described the lives of newcomers from Eastern Europe and carried titles like Call It Sleep, by Henry Roth (1934), A Walker in the City, by Alfred Kazin (1951) and World of Our Fathers, by Irving Howe (1976). In the last quarter century, however, the literary melting pot has been spiced with fresh voices from Korea, Cuba, Mexico, Russia and beyond, even as the dreams and struggles they chronicle echo those of their predecessors.

Here is a baker's dozen of new and recent classics.

The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen
By Jacques Pépin (2003)

The author of this culinary coming-of-age memoir honed his skills in the grand kitchens of Paris before ditching it all in 1959 to travel to New York and that shrine of haute cuisine, Le Pavillon. Before long he's on the street, armed with poor English and an open heart, and he winds up flipping burgers at a Howard Johnson's in Queens. The savory tale of Mr. Pépin's rise and fall and rebirth is infused with his gleeful discovery of Oreos, Jell-O and other American delicacies.

Bodega Dreams
By Ernesto Quiñonez (2000)

Growing up in East Harlem, the cynical, street-savvy half-Ecuadorean, half-Puerto Rican narrator of this gritty novel struggles to escape his supermarket job by getting a Hunter College education, while avoiding the lure of the drug-dealing life. This is a raw portrait of life in the projects of El Barrio.

Drown
By Junot Diaz (1996)

In his debut collection of short stories, the Dominican-American author chronicles the lives of young Latino men and their halting attempts at assimilation, lives defined by a carefully guarded sensitivity, obsessive watchfulness and awkward relations with women.

Fixer Chao
By Han Ong (2001)

William Narciso Paulinha, a gay Filipino street hustler on the make on the streets of Times Square, is recruited by a bitter, social-climbing writer to assume the guise of "Master Chao," a bogus feng shui expert, to bilk members of the writer's upper-crust circle. This darkly funny novel tracks his rise from the city's underbelly to the loftiest echelons of Manhattan society, with plenty to say about race, class and privilege.

The Mambo Kings
Play Songs of Love
By Oscar Hijuelos (1989)

Cesar and Nestor Castillo, who emigrated from Havana in the late 1940's to become New York City mambo stars, find fleeting glory when they are discovered in a nightclub by Desi Arnaz, who invites them to make a brief appearance on "I Love Lucy.'' Their immigrant story, however, is less about realized dreams than about missed opportunities and squandered hopes.

Native Speaker
By Chang-rae Lee (1995)

The author, who immigrated to the United States from Korea at age 3, tells the fictional tale of Henry Park, himself the son of Korean immigrants, who follows the classic path of assimilation to gain an education and a strange career: he works for a New York dirty-tricks firm that hires first-generation Americans to spy on the immigrant communities they come from. Somewhat surprising for a book that focuses on outsiderdom and the perils of multicultural identity, it offers a hopeful perspective on the nation's role as a beacon to the world.

The Rug Merchant
By Phillip Lopate (1987)

This novel's hero, an Iranian rug merchant who settles on Amsterdam Avenue and prefers quiet, bookish pursuits to the business of commerce, labors mightily to keep his greedy landlords at bay while trying to do something about his middle-aged bachelorhood (his mother tries to force him to marry a young Zoroastrian woman). Navigating his Manhattan purgatory, he is gradually forced to confront the reality of his own anonymous existence.

The Russian Debutante's Handbook
By Gary Shteyngart (2002)

This playfully energetic novel revolves around an "immigrant's immigrant" named Vladimir Girshkin, a Russian Jew who is lugging a passionate Slavic soul into a weightless state of exile in the New World. Living in a cramped East Village walk-up and toiling as an immigration clerk, he takes up with a quirky cast of characters, including a demented Russian war veteran and a young woman who initiates him into the glamorous world of American academe.

The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiérrez
By Jimmy Breslin (2002)

The short, unhappy life of an illegal Mexican immigrant is the subject of Mr. Breslin's angry broadside against the exploitation of low-wage labor and cronyism in New York City's municipal government. Mr. Gutiérrez left his dirt-poor village for a simple room of his own, sleeping on the floor of a cramped Brooklyn apartment before drowning in a pool of cement while working at a construction site in 1999.

Feb. 9, 2005: Ernst F. Wakonig decided to read
There Are Jews in My House  By Lara Vapnyar (2003)

The author, a Russian émigré who learned English after moving to New York in 1994, paints vivid portraits of lives in transition. One story, about a multigenerational family that has emigrated from Russia to Brooklyn, explores the often painful displacement of roles in an immigrant family.

'Tis: A Memoir
By Frank McCourt (1999)

In the follow-up to "Angela's Ashes," his Pulitzer-winning memoir of growing up poor and miserable in County Limerick, the Brooklyn-born Mr. McCourt tells of his homecoming in 1949 at age 19, and his pursuit of the American dream - the "tormenting dream," as he calls it. As he journeys from menial jobs to student to successful public-school teacher, Mr. McCourt struggles to navigate the shadowlands of Irish-American identity.

Translations of Beauty
By Mia Yun (2004)

This novel about immigrants' children laboring to please traditional parents while creating new identities in a strange world begins when a Korean family leaves its small village for greener pastures in Flushing, Queens. Though only planned as a stopover "on the way to the Real America," Queens becomes home, and the family's experiences make for a bittersweet tale about the meaning of race, kinship and success.

When I Was Puerto Rican
By Esmeralda Santiago (1993)

Though they are United States citizens, Puerto Ricans in New York share in the immigrant experience. In her inspirational coming-of-age memoir, the author writes lyrically about growing up in the 1950's in a corrugated metal shack in Puerto Rico, where she lived with six siblings, and her family's move to a grim Brooklyn neighborhood when she was 13. Her personal journey, twisting and turning through an often-harsh alien culture, culminates in her acceptance at the High School of Performing Arts.