I recently heard someone in my New York office comment with disgust at someone’s promotion that “she wanted that job since the day she got here”. The begrudgery was so uncharacteristic of a New Yorker that it solidified for me all that I love about the residents of this city.
Normally here, you’d hear that precise expression but said in delight-“She wanted that job since the day she got here!” In this packed, fascinating, infuriating heap of bizarreness, being self-made, a striver, “getting above your station”, is viewed with admiration.
Unlike in Ireland, you’ll never hear “it’s far from it you were brought up” or the dreaded reminder that you used to wipe your backside with dock leaves. There are no grim nods of satisfied expectations, no air of inevitability, if you fail at something that might have been a bit of a reach. And if you try and succeed, you deserve your success and more power to you.
It’s created, I believe, by the city being a thriving immigrant centre. Maybe the immigrant centre. Yes, other places in the US are full of Irish-Americans and other hyphenated citizens, but they’re largely a diaspora of New Yorkers. Depending on the statistic you believe, as many as one in four Americans can trace their roots to Brooklyn. The city is like the middle of an hourglass, with one side the rest of the world and the other the rest of the US. They-we-squeeze into and out of New York in a kind of breathless grasping for something better, or at least something easier. And some never leave.
I’m one of those. I’m in New York almost 21 years now and I still love and hate it as much as ever, mostly for the same reasons. The smells. The subway. The smells in the subway. The searing heat. The bitter cold. The crowds. Chinatown turning into shopping on Broadway turning into Wall Street turning into tourists hitting the boat to the Statue of Liberty… you’ll never see open space being used so intensively.
Visit my local park and you’ll find me and the mainly Hispanic ladies doing aerobics led by our boisterous Ghanaian instructor, while in the area that is supposed to be for baseball and tennis there are, yes, games of baseball and tennis being played, but also pick-up games of volleyball, cricket, football, and basketball. And always a dog (New Yorkers love their dogs).
The schools are microcosms of the neighbourhoods. I really can’t see where else my half-Irish, half-Indian kids would fit in as easily. In their Jackson Heights classrooms, there are many other students (and teachers) who are immigrants or first-generation Americans on at least one side. The children’s heritage is both celebrated and ignored in just the right measure-it’s never viewed as predictor of how far they can go or should be allowed to go, and nobody asks who their people are.
In New York you don’t have to apologise for getting ahead, and that’s why I love it here and why I’m proud to be an Irish New Yorker.
In May, The Irish Times invited readers abroad to tell us about their relationship with the place they have made home, and why they love living there. This story is one of the entries we received. Read more here.
