Manhattan's Chinatown.
It's one of the most well-known ethnic Chinese areas in the world outside of China.
But take the 6 train north to Grand Central,
transfer to the 7, and ride it all the way to the end of the line,
and you'll feel like you're not in Chinatown but...
China.
Much more than Chinatown, Flushing has all the features of modern, urban China.
Both the fancy parts and the not-so-fancy parts:
Swanky high rises, massive malls, and hip restaurants.
Fruit stands, massage parlors, and bubble tea.
Lots of bubble tea.
Flushing is being shaped by a new wave of Chinese immigrants:
Wealthier, better educated, and moving abroad, not out of necessity, but by choice.
They're bringing their distinct urban lifestyle to the English speaking world.
In New York, Vancouver, Toronto, Melbourne, LA, and beyond.
What they're forming are economically thriving cities within cities,
challenging traditional notions of the roles immigrant communities play in wealthy nations.
We're traveling around the world to find out how China is changing... basically everything.
This week: how Chinese immigrants are creating their own cities around the world.
I'm Nikhil Sonnad reporting for Quartz.
You're watching Because China.
Old Chinatowns were created out of necessity.
Low-income immigrants with little formal education needed a safe space from their racist host countries,
which were happy enough to have them in segregated ghettos.
Flushing, by contrast, was a choice.
Around the late 1970s, the then-predominantly white neighborhood
began to be settled by middle class Taiwanese who didn't want to be relegated to Chinatown.
They turned the area into Little Taipei
and made it a convenient destination for mainland Chinese immigrants.
This is David Chen, a real estate broker originally from Taiwan.
He first moved to Queens in 1995.
The data backs up Chen's observation.
Flushing's Chinese population now outnumbers whites.
And that's especially true downtown.
This is what Chen means when he says Flushing is China.
Sure ,the signs and ads are almost all in Chinese, but so is the stuff they're selling:
immigration services, wholesale Chinese medicinal herbs, wire transfers to China,
and food from any and all regions of China.
All types of food, serving almost exclusively Chinese customers.
Like Betty Lu's noodle shop.
The main dish is beef noodles in the style of Guizhou, Betty's family's home province.
- So in the broth, we have ox bone.
The process of cooking it, it takes quite a while.
To come out from this to what you just ate, probably takes like five hours.
Walk around Flushing, and you'll find countless other restaurants serving regional Chinese specialties:
Tianjin dumplings, Guangdong rice noodle rolls, Xinjiang barbecue, Congqing hotpot. The list goes on.
But there's another thing that makes Flushing feel like China:
It's been growing really fast.
The number of businesses here grew 29% between 2009 and 2017,
well above the 17% for New York City on the whole.
- So, what you're looking at behind us is the Skyview Shopping Center.
When I first moved to Flushing, this would have been a lot of property not put into use.
Malls like this are popping up all over Flushing,
and have many of the distinctive features of malls in China.
They have lush food courts.
They're connected to residential spaces.
And unlike America's dying malls, they're really, really busy.
Chen showed us the newest and swankiest of them all,
Tangram, a commercial and residential behemoth that'll be finished next year.
The building is named after a Chinese puzzle game.
It'll have a 4D movie theater that shows American movies with Chinese subtitles,
and a 5,000-square-foot hotpot restaurant.
- Notions of immigrant settlements are... They are ghettos or they are ethnic enclaves.
Because they are poor, they don't have the job skills needed in the receiving country.
They are less educated, so they cluster together.
Wei Li is a geographer who studies migration.
She says places like Flushing have been changing traditional ideas about how immigrants settle.
- So a majority of these new immigrants, they are highly educated.
And as a result of Chinese economic growth, these new immigrants have financial resources.
In 2016, over half of Chinese immigrants to the US had a bachelor's degree or higher.
And now China produces twice as many university graduates than the US every year.
Li has a term for the places created by these kinds of migrants: ethnoburbs,
suburban areas that are more well-off than traditional immigrant communities,
and where one ethnic minority makes up a significant portion of the population.
A few things go into the creation of an ethnoburb.
As the global economy has become more interconnected, skills are less tied to one place.
Immigration policies in the US and elsewhere now pick people based on their skills
or the amount of money they can bring to the economy.
And immigrants continue to arrive in large numbers
and congregate in areas with people like themselves, making it even more attractive to future migrants.
Ethnoburbs don't have to be Chinese.
One study argues that the Armenian community in Glendale outside LA should be considered one.
They're also usually a mix.
Flushing has large Korean and South Asian populations.
But more often than not, the dominant ethnicity is Chinese.
And that's because even though China's on the rise, many people who live there would rather not.
One survey found that one out of three Chinese millionaires were currently considering moving abroad.
Another found that over half of Chinese parents
would send their kids to study abroad if they could afford to.
Competition's not as severe as their home country.
So either for their own job, or their career development, or for their children's education,
they still want to come.
Chinese ethnoburbs are growing, both economically and in terms of population.
And they're appearing around the world, primarily in English-speaking countries.
There's Monterey Park in LA,
Box Hill in Melbourne,
and Markham in Toronto to name a few.
Richmond, outside Vancouver, is one of the largest of these neighborhoods.
Its transition has had plenty of tensions.
In 2015, a third of Vancouver home sales went to Chinese buyers,
sometimes very wealthy ones who are just looking to park money in Canada.
Some Richmond residents have long tried to ban
the Chinese-only signs and advertisements that appear in the neighborhood,
though they haven't succeeded.
One researcher called what's happening in these places "super diversity gentrification."
Usually gentrification in areas with immigrants pushes those immigrants out.
But here, they're the ones causing it.
Wealthy Chinese immigrants can basically live wherever they like,
and they don't always go to ethnoburbs.
But enough of them have ended up in Flushing, that rents there
are starting to rival those in the trendiest neighborhoods of Manhattan and Brooklyn.
For centuries, wealthy Westerners have ventured out into the world,
using their financial resources to demand the kind of lifestyle they were used to at home.
These people weren't called immigrants, but expats.
As China continues to grow, so will the ranks of its expats.
They'll make their mark on places around the world,
not marginalized in ghettos, but as equal members of diverse communities,
exposing Americans, Canadians, Australians, and others to life, not in Chinatown, but in China.
You're watching a Quartz member exclusive, part of our series Because China.
Stay tuned to find out how China's changing everything, from tourism to music to trash.