Tuesday, December 23, 2008

you taste like cigaretts...

I caught the writing bug and just wanted to write...

about Chinatown. Other than Brooklyn, Chinatown has been in a way a second home for me. My parents have always worked there, I've worked there, my friends still work there...hell I still work there. Something just ain't right this time around. I see Chinatown changing, and I know it has been for the past 10 years but this time around...something is not sitting with me well. At night when I walk around Chinatown, I see more and more white people on the streets. They jogging, walking their dogs, on dates, in the stores buying food...

WHEN DO YOU EVER SEE SOMEONE JOG IN CHINATOWN AT NIGHT?!

Even though I joke about it with my friends, I feel sad and hurt at the same time because I know gentrification is happening. It is SUCH a dirty word. One may say that Chinatown is changing for the better but who is moving out? who is moving out the affordable housing and rent control units? Who is being threatened at night to get out so the landlord can make more money?

Hopeless is a way to describe what I feel like at times when I walk down Grant Street. I see shops and restaurants closing, buildings gutted it out for one purpose and less and less elderly walking on the streets in their neighborhood because who knows where they were banish to?

The saying is right..."you see more problems in your neighbor's backyard." All this time, I've been trying to raise awareness in the wrong doings in Boston's Chinatown and forgot about my own. It is also sad to see that we have so many youths in Chinatown yet no know seem to care because it's not an issue in their world of being "fresh" or that someone is trying their hardest to make it out of New York like I did.

Chinatown is dying...in front of our eyes and no one seems to care

5 comments:

Louie said...

i talk about this in my new lp.

PretendingToBe said...

you know...

people talk about gentrification as if it is the black plague...
but it actually positive in the long run. Gentrification is the only known solution to urban blight, hundreds and hundreds of years activist have tried to find a way to find an alternative, but they cant, because one doesn't exist. Also a few years ago I was the same way, really sad about gentrification in my old neighborhood in Park Slope...

but only way to stop it is for the people who grew up there to move back in to the old neighborhoods. But in most cases, they work their asses off to move the fuck out of those places.

PS
yo Louie ill sing the hook on your first single.

-Jun

Mr. Long Wu said...

Jun you are banned from the album...

well you know what you dont know half the shit thats going on with the old tenants and helpless old ladies who cant speak english to defend themselves. for that, you are banned from the album

PretendingToBe said...

pshhh, fine...

T-Pain been buggin me the past few weeks anyway...

-Jun

Golden N Rong said...

shit is actually fo real, its really sad. We should start a rally how we do that?