Flushing, Queens, New York

Flushing, Queens, New York is often recognized as the 'Chinese Manhattan' due to the dominant population of Chinese and Chinese-Americans that live in this area. Downtown Flushing is known for its restaurants, bakeries and Asian specialty stores and its easy transportation into Manhattan. Flushing finds itself as the epicenter of the Queens commercial and residential district, where access to JFK and LaGuardia airport act as major runways to/from neighboring boroughs. A New York Times article states, a "2010 census put the population of Flushing, encompassing an area beyond downtown, at 72,000 — 69.2 percent Asian, 14.9 percent Hispanic, 9.5 percent white and 4.2 percent African-American."

For Jane Re to be Korean-American would provide naunce to a Chinese-dominanted area. This hints towards the hegemony China had of East Asia, where Korea once functioned as a tributory state and even though many of the cultures and practices of Korea originated from China, it was seen as a lesser power. For Jane to be Korean and for Devon to be Chinese provides context for why, despite the age disparity, Jane must become subordinate a Devon. Jane's job as a nanny is, in a way, counter to the relative success of Asians in Queens who are self-employed. In The Peopling of New York, Muhammad Junaid states that because cultural and language barriers prevented many immigrant works to access high-scale, soft-skill, communicative jobs, "significant structural difference between Korean American workers and American workers is the large percentage of self-employed Korean business owners....Whereas 7.0% of American workers were self-employed in 1990, a staggering 16.9% of Korean workers were self-employed. In fact, according to the 1990 census, Korean Americans represented the largest majority (in terms of percentage) of self-employed workers in the US." Jane Re as a nanny would suggest that because of her access as an English-speaking American, she's able to be in closer proximity to wealthy whites, to the point of staying in there homes.

References:

https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/napoli13/flushing-koreans/

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/realestate/downtown-flushing-where-as...

Coordinates

Latitude: 40.773798122929
Longitude: -73.837265968323