| A Trip to Koreatown, NJ Written by: Carrie Pestritto When thinking of New Jersey, images of Atlantic City, The Sopranos, and the airport at Newark commonly come to mind. There is another world in Bergen County, New Jersey that many people do not know of: Koreatown. The Korean-American community makes up one of the largest immigrant population in Bergen County and represents over half of the state’s entire Korean population. It is concentrated along the Hudson River near George Washington Bridge, mainly in towns such as Fort Lee, Palisades Park, Leonia, Ridgefield, Edgewater, Closter, Norwood, and Englewood Cliffs. It is possible to live in this area and feel as if you are not in America at all: Everyone speaks Korean, and Korean TV shows and music are all avidly followed. I visited a friend and stayed with her family in Ridgefield Park, where I learned about what life is like in K-town. She and her family came to America when she was in first grade and have been living in New Jersey ever since—as residents, not citizens. One of the first things I notice when I step into her house is the TV. Her family is watching a Korean celebrity news station. They tell me, “Everyone in K-town has satellite TV, so they can watch the Korean stations.” Similarly, on Broad Street, a popular place in Bergen County where many people congregate, all of the signs are in Hangul and everyone in the stores and on the streets chatters away in Korean. We go to an H-mart, a huge chain grocery store that sells Korean food, like tofu, shrimp crackers, imported seaweed, and kimchi. Many of the foods are imported from South Korea, but some are also made in America. “It’s amazing,” she says to me as we walk around. “I never realized how un-Americanized I was until I went to college. Here, I was brought up the same way I would have been if I had been raised in Korea.” The Korean population in Bergen County celebrates traditional Korean festivals and holidays, like Korean New Year, which is the New Year on the Chinese lunar calendar, or Choo-Suk, a holiday that falls on August 15th in the lunar calendar. For Choo-Suk, Koreans eat traditional foods to celebrate the harvest, much like Thanksgiving. There are greater differences than holidays and TV shows, however, that separate the Korean community from other Americans. When I ask her how being raised in K-town and being an immigrant was unlike growing up in a typical American household, she answers, “Everything is different—the food we eat, the way we communicate, the kind of jobs we have, even the things we use. For example, Americans buy a lot of plates, but we use rice bowls. Just little things like that, but also larger things, like our views on life. We’re always trying to overachieve, because we’re immigrants and things are less advantageous for us. If Americans get into a fight and someone gets hurt, they call the cops. Koreans won’t call the cops because we know they won’t help us. There is a racial prejudice and a prejudice because we are not American citizens—citizenship and racism go hand in hand.” Koreans who live in this area often face immigration issues and there are many undocumented immigrants. They come with travel visas and then stay in America after their visas expire. There are several lawyers in K- town who help these immigrants become permanent residents; generally, if they work for two years, they can get issued a green card. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ website states that immigrants are qualified to become naturalized citizens if they have “resided continuously as a lawful permanent resident in the U.S. for at least 5 years prior to filing with no single absence from the United States of more than one year.” Many Korean immigrants do seek citizenship after they get a green card, but this is hard to do, especially if they are undocumented. Even getting a green card is an onerous procedure, one my friend calls “a continuous process of not happening.” She says, “Interviews are scheduled and then keep getting postponed.” She further commented that the Bush administration made it much harder for immigrants to get citizenship and that Bush’s laws and policies regarding terrorism also changed laws on immigration. “People try so hard to become citizens,” states my friend, whose family will be eligible to become citizens in 2010. “They don’t mind giving up Korean citizenship, because they want to make a life here. Yet, they are not entirely assimilating to the American lifestyle. They want to keep their Korean traditions and connections and they want to be American— they get pulled in two separate directions.” She does feel that immigration reform is slowly happening and that Koreans are immersing themselves into the American mainstream. “Things are better than they were ten years ago. There is a lot of hope for the future,” she says. |
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| Editor's Note: This is the first of a series exploring our country's rich cultural and ethnic heritage. |
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