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Arena, Performer
Where are you from? Honduras. How long have you lived in Jackson Heights? Just three months. Before this, I was in Indiana. How do you like Jackson Heights compared to Indiana? Oh, this place is very...
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Mr. Zhu, Cobbler
What do you do? I fix shoes! I can fix shoes, polish them, stretch them—I can do anything that has to do with shoes. Do you ever take days off? If it’s raining I will relax at home. No need to come out...
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Charan Jit Singh, Business Card Distributor
He stands on the corner of 74th Street and Roosevelt Avenue, as salient as a landmark, eyeing the intersection like a sentry on watch. He cuts an imposing figure with his flowing beard, turban, and...
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Hettienne Park’s Stage Dive
Hettienne Park is walking down West 52nd in a black trench coat and boots, pacing a confident, long stride and smoking a cigarette. She has just enough time for early dinner at Danji (overpriced Korean...
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Serena Qiu & Kota Kobayashi, in Transit
On my way home on the N train, as I reviewed photographs I’d taken earlier that afternoon of the Feast of Saint Anthony parade in Little Italy, I noticed a man and woman a few feet away sitting in...
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The Vegan Marshmallow
In an 8,000-square-foot factory in Long Island City, right off of bustling Queens Boulevard, Sara Sohn makes marshmallows. Vegan marshmallows, to be exact. “It’s a good conversation starter,” says...
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Doo-Ri Chung: Even Couture is a Man’s World
Doo-Ri Chung began her ascent long before the fashion documentary Seamless. In that film, which tracks a group of young designers competing for a prestigious prize, we meet her on a reverse commute to...
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Nerdcore Rapper Adam WarRock to Chick-fil-A: Your Slaw Sucked Anyway
Eugene Ahn, better known by his emcee alter ego Adam WarRock, makes what he calls “indie nerdcore pop cultural emo hip hop.” His story is as unlikely as it is inspiring: Two years ago, while juggling a...
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Dai Sil Kim-Gibson: In Mourning, a Filmmaker Turns to Writing
About a decade ago, I became familiar with the work of filmmaker Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, who’s best known for documentaries on the 1992 L.A. Riots and Japan’s system of sexual slavery during WWII. On...
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After Two Decades, Lucky Cheng’s Leaves East Village For New Midtown Digs
Lucky Cheng’s, the renowned drag cabaret club and East Village fixture, is moving to Times Square next month. Citing difficulty getting tourists to travel downtown, owner Hayne Suthon is relocating the...
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Bebi Rejendra, Student
It is often said that biggest export from Guyana—the only English-speaking country in South America—is its people. There are roughly 250,000 Guyanese in the New York area (almost one-third of the...
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Photographs: Paper Doll Immigrants
Artist John Clang has always found ways to challenge a viewer’s own version of New York City with unusual visual juxtapositions. “Beijing New York,” his recent immigration-themed project that appeared...
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The Dosa Hunt Continues: ‘Use Your Hands! Be One With the Dosa’
Poster by Anil Gupta What is dosa? It’s a crepe made from fermented rice and lentils, but as Himanshu Suri claims in Amrit Singh’s new film Dosa Hunt, “dosa is a metaphor for the American Dream.” Alan...
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Novelist Katie Kitamura: “I’m Interested In Disembodied Voices”
I recently sat down with Katie Kitamura at Café Lafayette in Brooklyn to talk about her second novel, Gone to the Forest, published earlier this year by Free Press. The novel tackles twin contexts of...
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Q&A With Ashok Rajamani: The Man Whose Brain Exploded
Excerpt from Ashok Rajamani’s The Day My Brain Exploded: A True Story Book cover courtesy of Workman Publishing When the pain grew too intense, Ashok-as-Christ emerged. When I watched my family...
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Your Day is My Night: Documenting Shifting Lives
When director Lynne Sachs first got the idea to make a film about shift-bed houses, she googled “hot-bed house” and got X-rated results. That was three years ago. This past February, her film Your Day...
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Video: Behind A Superhero
High school art teacher and artist Rajive Anand grew up in suburban New Jersey in the 1970s. “There were no other Indian kids there. There were three Asian-American kids in my school and I was one of...
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Fact/Fiction
I’m only nineteen but my mind is older/when things get for real my warm heart turns colder –Prodigy of Mobb Deep, “Shook Ones (Part II)” In 1994, the rap duo Mobb Deep released a song heralding their...
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Yoga (Re)Public
A little boy thrusts a card towards me as I angle off Elmhurst Avenue onto 91st Street. I lean over in stride, gently tug it out of his hands, and smile. Most days, I’m ambivalent about whether I’ll...
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Om in Translation: An Interview with Artist Kunsang Gyatso
Meeting people on the Internet seems to be Kunsang Gyatso’s forte. I found the 25-year-old artist on the Tibetan Arts Collective website, whose founder, Thupten Kalsang, reached out to Gyatso upon...
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