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That's an impossible question! I think I check more like three dozen sites every day to keep up with news and trends. What are three websites you absolutely must check every day and why? Now the tech scene is so much bigger that there's less of that intimacy. I guess most people say things seemed more innocent in the past, but back then, there was a small blog-photoblogger community and we got to know one another pretty well. We were only in our first Bloomberg term and the culture stories were mostly about metrosexuals, not Brooklyn hipsters. Given that we have dozens of posts everyday, it was definitely much more low-fi in those days.Īs for New York City, it was only three years after the dot-com bust and two years after the Septemattacks, so while the economy was getting better, things still felt a bit uncertain. How is the site different today than when it first launched? How is the city different? And why?īack in 2003, there would only be a few blog posts a day, sometimes just a sentence or link, just things that caught a few people's fancy (sort of the way you might share a link on Facebook). Gothamist recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary. I'm trying to convince my mom to write all the stories she knows about my grandparents' families, because they're wonderfully sad, inspiring and even operatic. I hadn't realized that my mom was a baby when she left Shanghai on the last commercial flight from Shanghai! So I've been on a decades-long trajectory of trying to learn more about my roots. When the film adaptation of The Joy Luck Club was released, suddenly people were curious about my culture, including myself. But kids can be cruel and terrible - I had "GOOK" written on my high school locker. My Chinese life - where I'd eat with chopsticks, help my grandmother make egg rolls, go to Chinatown in Sundays - was associated with my family, while I'd try to fit in and be a regular American kid during other times. Of course, now I regret not sticking with the classes, the same way I wish I practiced piano more. I convinced my parents to let me drop out, which I thought was a victory since I could go back to watching Saturday morning cartoons. When I was six, I attended Chinese school on Saturdays but it was so startling and such culture shock to be in a setting where you had to say the Pledge of Allegiance in Chinese, which it seemed like everyone else knew. I grew up in predominantly white suburbs in NJ and, as a young child, I didn't have any Chinese friends. My grandmother even had a Chinese restaurant for a while, but that closed before I was born.

My mother's family eventually emigrated from Hong Kong to New Jersey. A few years later, my dad decided to follow, becoming the first of the 11 kids in his family to settle in the U.S. They met in Hong Kong, but then my mom came to NYC for college. My parents were born in China - my dad in Canton and my mother in Shanghai - and grew up in Hong Kong. How has it impacted your life? What does it mean to you? We caught up with our favorite " mommy blogger" via email. Along with co-founder Jake Dobkin, Chung also oversees Gothamist's global network of nine city blogs, which includes popular sites in locales such as S an Francisco, Chicago, D.C.

Read them all here.įor more than a decade now, Jen Chung's Gothamist website has been a daily read for thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers. To mark Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, we'll be running Q&As with noteworthy Asian Americans throughout May.