Chinatown, on Manhattan's Lower East Side overlooking the Brooklyn Bridge, was my home for eight months. Just beyond my doorstep was a whole new world. Within several city blocks were new smells, sights, sounds and signs. On the streets of Mott, Mulberry and Canal and along East Broadway were Chinese greengrocers and fishmongers. The jewelry district was on Canal between Mott and Bowery, along with many Asian and American banks. West of Broadway were a gazillion Chinese street vendors selling imitation perfumes, watches and handbags, and more than 200 Chinese restaurants.
The population in Chinatown is between 90,000 and 100,000 and probably growing, quite the opposite from where I grew up, on the banks of the Yukon River in Mountain Village, with a population of 800, in the Calista Region founded by my great-grandfather, Chekohak.
The housing in Chinatown is mostly cramped tenement buildings, some of which are over 100 years old. It is still common in such buildings to have bathrooms in the hallways, to be shared among multiple apartments. Since new housing is nonexistent in Chinatown, many apartments were acquired by wealthy individuals through under-the-table dealings.
My apartment was in the "projects," an impoverished, neglected, disadvantaged residential neighborhood with a disproportionately high amount of crime. My neighbors were drug dealers, which always drew interesting traffic. I once came home to find a guy doing drugs outside my front door. I moved into my apartment a week after a fatal shooting on the street, and over Memorial Day weekend eight bullets hit five people in the courtyard of my apartment complex. My mom came to visit that same weekend and I didn't dare tell her because she would have canceled her trip. Another friend, after visiting, strongly suggested I move to Brooklyn. She stuck out like a sore thumb as the only white woman I saw in the building.
In January I witnessed the celebration of Chinese New Year with people popping confetti on the streets, the parade on Bowery Street and excitement in the cold winter air, and I reflected on what I love about the Asian culture: Chinese proverbs, cuisine, checkers, the Zodiac, feng shui and the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. I fit in among the people with my dark hair, dark eyes and high cheekbones, and was often mistaken as Chinese. People would get mad at me for not speaking the language. Every morning as I left for work, the building's Chinese maintenance woman would grumble something to me in Chinese. One day we were in the elevator together and I finally said that I didn't understand, and her eyes shot daggers. You would have thought I had committed the worst punishable crime. If I had the gift of reading people's minds, especially in different languages, I probably would have heard her think I was too arrogantly Americanized.
I probably confused a lot of Asian people because they would often ask my ethnicity and where I was from. I look Asian, but Chinese people ask me if I'm Korean; Korean people ask me if I'm Chinese; and when I'm in Hawaii I am mistaken as Hawaiian. On several occasions In New York, when I said I was Yup'ik Eskimo from Alaska, I received blank stares and they would say, "I don't know?" One time a woman said, "I didn't know that was a real culture!"
There was a point in my life when being Alaska Native wasn't accepted, so I would often say I was from Mongolia and people would believe me. For most of my elementary school years, the other students really thought I was Mongolian. I wasn't 100 percent lying, according to the Bering Sea Land Bridge theory. In a parallel universe, working at the Alaska House gallery in SoHo, I would encounter the rare patron who knew about everything important to an indigenous person, such as maintaining life with subsistence, the connection to the land and seasons, and the cultures and traditions.
Traditionally Yupiks were fluid, mobile and adaptable, spending the spring and summer at fish camp and then joining with others at village sites for the winter. Today, traveling by the season in order to exist in the Arctic is in my genetic material. It was cultivated early in my life by moving around. Traveling and living in a new place promises exposure to different cultures, languages, landscapes, sights, scents, foods and lifestyles.
When I moved, my life was revolutionized in every aspect. I learned how to adjust to the simple things, find my way around, make new friends, and locate the post office and neighborhood grocery store. I explored, inquired, investigated, scouted and adventured around my new elements, like my ancestors did as they adjusted to the environment and ecosystems. The determination of Yupik peoples to survive in harsh conditions in the Arctic had given me the foundation to survive the streets of New York.
Trina Landlord has worked on indigenous issues locally, nationally and internationally. Her work on Alaska Native issues earned her an internship at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Trina recently completed a fellowship at Alaska House, a cultural embassy in New York City. She is of Yup'ik Eskimo ancestry from Mountain Village and maintained a blog, Eskimo to the World, documenting her adventures in the urban tundra of New York.