'Listening' to learn a culture

Norwich - Shortly after her 15 Chinese students settled into their seats for their first English language class, teacher Denise Williams took a census.

The results: Most are middle-aged with grown children elsewhere, have lived in the United States for anywhere from two to 20 years, are casino employees and know little English.

Coaxed by one another in their native language, the men and women muddled through their answers in the Saturday morning class at Three Rivers Community College. A couple of weeks later, students were telling Williams why so few were in attendance: It was the mid-autumn or harvest moon festival, for which families cook feasts of chicken, mushrooms and vegetables and top them off with "moon cakes," small ornate pastries with a paste of ground lotus seeds in the center.

The students belong to a growing Chinese community in southeastern Connecticut. Attracted by jobs at the Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods Resort casinos, thousands of Chinese adults left China or Chinatown in New York for the unknown, comparatively rural region that had beckoned other immigrant groups in centuries past.

"After 9/11, most of the garment factories in Chinatown closed up, 90 percent of them closed or moved," said John Wong, 80, who has lived in eastern Connecticut since 1947 and founded the Chinese and American Cultural Assistance Association in 2007. "At the same time, Mohegan Sun opened its hotel and needed the people."

Both casinos recruited heavily in Chinatown, Wong said, offering bonuses to employees for new applicants. That opportunity has now dried up, with layoffs at Foxwoods and wage freezes and attrition job cuts at Mohegan Sun.

But the 10,000 Chinese families Wong's association estimates to be living within a 35-mile radius of the two casinos seem likely to stay, and their presence has changed the local landscape as other immigrant groups did before.

Learning the language is paramount, Wong said. Newcomers think he is "king of the mountain," he said, because he has lived here so long, speaks good English and interacts with government and business leaders. But it wasn't always so.

Coming to Connecticut

Wong came to New London literally on a slow boat from China at age 18. His father had moved here after World War II to work at the Naval Submarine Base in Groton. Knowing no English, Wong worked at the family's business, Wong's Restaurant, on Truman Street. He incessantly pleaded with his father to let him learn English. To appease him, his father arranged for Wong to move in with an uncle in Hartford, where there would be an adult English class. Instead, Wong worked in his uncle's laundry 18 hours a day.

On a day off, a friend took him to New York. The friend was supposed to meet him at a specified time and place to go home but never showed up.

"Scared to death," Wong hailed a taxi and said "train station," not knowing what else to say. At the station he went window by window, saying simply "Hartford." Finally, a cashier sold him a ticket. He showed it to each attendant he met and finally got on the right train.

That was it for Hartford. Wong returned to New London and tried to learn English by reading the menu and greeting customers. On March 18, 1951, a date he'll never forget, Chapman Technical High School teacher Albert Reed came in, and Wong's cousin told him how much Wong wanted to go to school. Reed told Wong he would pick him up the next morning.

"I was so excited I couldn't sleep. Not one minute," Wong said.

Wong sat, lost, in Reed's class until summer. Reed told him to relax and absorb as much as he could. By his junior year, Wong made the honor roll. By senior year, he was a high-honors student.

"When you come here, you have to learn English and the American culture," Wong said. "If not, you're deaf. You're just like a deaf person."

Old traditions in new home

On a bright, sunny September Monday morning, Chun Fang Tan turned on a tape player on the pier at the Howard T. Brown Memorial Park. Five Chinese adults faced Norwich Harbor and followed the music and instructions in smooth, slow-motion tai chi, a martial art used for fitness. On some mornings, Tan's class swells to 15 or more.

"You want to be healthy, you have to exercise," said Mayling Wong, 59, of Norwich.

During breaks, Tan and others watched fishermen at the adjacent dock casting lines.

The class drew a few spectators of its own.

Tan, 62, is enrolled in the English language class at Three Rivers. Speaking through interpreter Tommy Hom, 64, of Norwich, a tai chi participant, Tan said she trained for 10 years and became a tai chi master in China. She moved to Norwich from her Chinese city six years ago to work as a cafeteria attendant at Foxwoods.

Tan works five days a week, second shift. On workday mornings she teaches tai chi or goes to the English class. On her days off, Wednesday and Thursday, she rides an early morning bus to Chinatown in Brooklyn, N.Y., where her 41-year-old daughter and grandchildren live.

"I miss them, but this is my job to make money," she said. Several years ago, Tan's daughter told her mother that lots of Chinese people in Brooklyn were getting jobs at Foxwoods. A friend guided Tan to the casino.

"I was a little nervous," she said. "I spoke no English. I go to school to learn English. I listen to understand."

Tan recently became a U.S. citizen. She has one son, 38, in China, who just got married. Maybe in the future, he will bring his family here, she said.

Tan's tai chi assistant, Mei Rong Yu, and her husband work at Foxwoods. Their 25-year-old son lives in New York. Yu and her husband go to New York every week on their days off, returning for the Saturday morning English class. Family members in Chinatown learn English "a little," Yu said, but they don't need it.

Making a mark on Norwich

John Wong said 65 to 75 percent of Chinese residents in eastern Connecticut travel to Chinatown on days off to shop, stay with family and run errands. While they live and work in eastern Connecticut, they're spending much of their incomes in New York, making it difficult for local business owners to develop customers among the new Chinese immigrants.

Still, their residence here has drawn significant investment by Chinese businesses, including housing.

Notably in Norwich, developer Janny Lam has renovated numerous rundown apartment houses and commercial buildings over the past 10 years. Many of her residential and business tenants are Chinese.

Lam, who lives in Norwich, renovated the Lerou building on Main Street into apartments, the Red House Asian restaurant and a laundry. She owns the Alice Building nearby and the former Elks Club across the street, as well as the MVP's Chinese restaurant and sports bar on West Thames Street.

Lam recently took over the Heritage Discovery Center buildings on Main and Water streets through foreclosure. A Chinese hair salon has opened there. Across Water Street, she owns the Thames Plaza office complex, which houses U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney's district office.

Hurt by the recession, Lam has had trouble finding a restaurant tenant for the renovated former Chelsea Landing Pub and she is on a payment plan for some back property taxes.

Lam hopes to redevelop the long vacant Reid & Hughes building and open a downtown Chinese grocery there.

Several Chinese grocery stores have opened in Norwich and Montville in recent years, but in summer the Chinese turn to their own yards for produce. Entire front and back yards in urban neighborhoods have been transformed into thriving gardens engulfed in bean vines, squash and vegetable plants and towering stalks of medicinal plants.

Besides new businesses catering to the local Chinese population, some long-standing businesses have tried posting Chinese signs in their windows to attract new customers.

Chinese residents use Otis Library to read Chinese newspapers and for tai chi classes in winter. Director Robert Farwell said groups of puzzled Chinese patrons stood outside the door when budget cuts reduced hours and closed the library for two weeks in August, so he posted explanatory signs in Chinese.

Farwell said children often help translate for parents. They have library cards and understand borrowing, Farwell said, but due dates and book fines sometimes confuse their parents.

Norwich public schools have 80 Chinese students among the 4,100 enrolled in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, including more than 60 at schools somewhat near Mohegan Sun.

Most Chinese residents have yet to become active politically or in local civic groups as they struggle with English and continue their ties to New York.

Chinese residents who have lived here longer and are more invested in the community are trying to ease the newcomers' transition. The assistance association sponsors the English class at Three Rivers. Association members Wong, Tommy Hom, Andy Wu of Montville and Dennis Chen and Sunny Lam of Norwich give rides to students. Next year, the group hopes to offer a summer school for children and parents.

An Asian and American Lions Club was launched last January.

Wu held a voter registration drive outside the Lerou building two years ago, but many Chinese are not American citizens or don't speak English well enough to vote, he said.

Wong said the cultural assistance association has about 1,000 members, but doesn't charge for membership. That could change soon, with dues and a membership drive, because the group "keeps doing things more and more and more," Wong said, to help people become acclimated to eastern Connecticut.

"You have to learn the language and the culture," he said.

c.bessette@theday.com