Big Trouble in Little China By Andreas Marinos

 

What’s your name?: Terry.

How old are you?: 25

What do you do for work?: Uh, kind of like, contract services. We have a lot of contracts going on. At Garmin we uh, deal with a contract, we hold public hearings, that’s about it.

How long have you been doing that for?: Uh, half and a year.

Have you lived in the city your whole life?: No, I’m coming from China. Shandong province in China.

What’s the weirdest thing about the transition been coming from China to New York?: The people.

How so?: Well, in China they’re all Chinese, here it’s mixed.

Has that been strange for you?: It’s a little weird at first, but I’m getting used to it. It’s pretty cool.

Where are you going now?: Yeah, back to work. I think that’s all the time I have -laughs-

What’s your name?: Walter.

How old are you?: -Unintelligible-

What are you doing here?: I’m a protester. From Brooklyn on 4th street.

Right now I’m bout to go to my probation notice here, because I had a problem.

What do you do for a living?: I work in horticulture from Riverside, greens keepers. I’m a member of central park. I contribute to the donation of Motown. I do sanitation, and plant, trim, and landscape, so I got a big job. There’s a lot of garbage in NYC so you gotta throw it out and try to keep it clean. New York should be clean, but it ain’t.

Got anything you’d like to say?: God bless you brother. I’m from Brooklyn, and raised in the Bronx. Ever heard of West Side Story? That’s me. Streets? Gangs? Yeah long time, it’s a big story, but it’s alright though. I’m proud of New York though that it came to a different world. I’ve been all around Manhattan and Brooklyn in my life, since I was 20 years old. I’ve been a messenger, worked in chicken stores (called Checkers) and got into the restaurant business. For Italians. So all my food is Italian. Alright god bless you.

Spotlight

The experience of trying to go out and achieve profiles of a neighborhood proved to be both difficult at times, but rewarding once our team got through the task of finding willing participants to engage in our mission. I actually had pretty high doubts of scoring good interviews in Chinatown, as my experience with the community on a whole seemed to be that most people had their own agendas to tend to, and that they wouldn’t be able to spare the time required to get a good profile of who they were. I was pleasantly surprised however to find a couple of people who wanted to participate and let me get immersed somewhat into their lives. My crew and I were able to convince a couple strangers to quickly drop what they were doing and squeeze some information about their lives and perspectives on the fly and their aspirations for the future. All said and done, it was a fulfilling experience to see completely fresh faces and to hear stories we would have never found at Lab.