the Snakehead Dorm

43-02 56th Street, Woodside Queens

From the outside, this 2 family brick semi-attached house looked ok. We had walked passed it a few weeks ago and wondered about it. We went to an open house last weekend and found out that it has been chopped up in to tiny rooms, so that in the basement there must have been at least 10-15 people living there. When you stepped into the dimly lit drab, filthy atmosphere of the basement, it was as though we had stepped into a third world country. A Chinese man sat in the midst of this filth smoking a cigarette and reading a newspaper. On the first floor, the owner's daughter was wearing pajama's (it was 3:30pm) eating cereal. That apartment was in a little better condition in that it had not been rented out to 10 people, but not by much.
Now mind you, this was an open house. YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO FIX UP, OR AT LEAST CLEAN YOUR HOUSE FOR AN OPEN HOUSE!!!!!!!! The house had not seen a drop of cleaning fluid in years. The realtor showing the property was from Mongolia with a Japanese name: Arashi Ayushin.
As he toured us around the place, he said- "The Indians split up this floor into 3 apartments and rent it for a lot of money." We told him: "Do we look Indian to you? and anyway we don't want to be slumlords!"
After we left the house, I started to cry. It was the most depressing thing I'd seen during the months of house hunting. I've read about the status of Chinese immigrants, but never had I come so close to the reality of their situation.