BY BILL WEINBERG | It’s amazing how sometimes the smallest things can give me a little hope for humanity’s future — at least enough to get me through the next few days… .
So I’m engaging in one of my summer rituals this Saturday afternoon: having an iced coffee on the benches overlooking the handball court in Sara Delano Roosevelt Park at Grand St. — right where Chinatown meets the Lower East Side — watching the kids play.
On the bench next to me is a mixed group, all in the 15-to-18 age range — two Chinese gals, two black guys and a guy who looks Latino. They are talking avidly about some mysterious thing called “Pokemon Go.”
One of the gals admits she doesn’t like video games, and the others start teasing her about being Asian. She responds self-deprecatingly, “Yeah, I break all the stereotypes, I even suck at math!”
The Latin-looking kid now responds, surprisingly, “Yeah, I’m more Chinese than you are! I speak three Chinese dialects: Mandarin, Cantonese and Taishanese!” And to prove it, he rattles off a few phrases in each. The gals — who he is clearly trying to impress — giggle appreciatively. (These are actually distinct languages, not dialects.)
It turns out the kid is a mix of Puerto Rican and Chinese. And turning to his black friends, he adds: “And that means I’m black, too, ’cuz most Puerto Ricans and Dominicans are really black anyway.”
Now that the convo has moved on to linguistics and ethnicity, he asks one of the black kids, “You’re Jamaican, aren’t you?”
Getting an affirmative nod, he jumps into a masterful Jamaican patois, peppered with Rastafarian lingo. The gals crack up, now clearly very impressed. And so was I.
Stressed and depressed over the past week’s grim events on the national stage, I was strangely heartened by this little episode — especially how these carefree kids were utterly unaffected by it all. How they were completely comfortable with each other across their “racial” divides. How they were, in a completely natural and unselfconscious way, proud of their roots and authenticity — but without the faintest trace of chauvinism or exclusivism.
I only hope that these kids grow up to have kids of their own who are as happy and free and smart and wholesome as they are. I only hope the biggest challenge they will face is to hold onto their neighborhood — at least a little of it — and not be forced out by gentrification, rather than being swept into the maelstrom of hate and violence that this country is obviously right on the very edge of… .
