Nora Grace-Flood photos
Jason Chan checks out the city.
Architecture student Jason Chan landed on the New Haven Green Wednesday and noticed a plaque remembering the park’s history as the central square in America’s first planned city — which made him think about the contrasts between the Elm City and his highly developed hometown of Hong Kong.
Chan was visiting Yale, more so than New Haven, on Wednesday as part of an East Coast university tour.
Along the way, he observed substantial differences between the laid-back pace of New Haven and the bustle of his own hometown.
He spoke to those distinctions during a conversation on the “Word on The Street” segment of WNHH FM’s “LoveBabz LoveTalk.”
According to Chan’s assessment, “New Haven is more like a small town. It’s a rural area.”
The undergraduate caught a 22-hour flight from Hong Kong to the United States for the first time ever last week. New Haven is the fourth city Chan has visited so far during his short East Coast experience. He has also seen Washington D.C., Philadelphia and New York City, with plans to check out Boston before flying west.
After graduating from the University of Hong Kong next year, he is thinking of applying to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and Yale to seek a master’s degree.
So far, Chan has spent the most time in New York, where he intended to return once again after a mere 12 hours in New Haven, seeing Yale. “New Haven is just one day,” he rationalized, because “it’s pretty small.”
At least, it’s a lot smaller than Hong Kong, where apartment buildings average “50 to 60 stories even in a residential area.” He lives in a 40th-floor apartment.
Click on the video to watch the full conversation with Jason Chan on the "Word on the Street" segment of WNHH FM's "Dateline New Haven.:
Chan shared that he was excited by the possibility of studying architecture in America, where he believes beauty and innovation inspire creation and planning.
The University of Hong Kong junior said that he feels architecture in Hong Kong is primarily driven by “money making” and obsession with efficiency.
As indicated by the commemorative plaque and centuries-old churches and courthouses, New Haven cares about preserving and recollecting its own history, he surmised. In Hong Kong, however, towering skyscrapers dominate the landscape in an attempt to house the huge volume of people crammed into the city.
“We really don’t have any space,” he said. He noted that the city is currently planning to build artificial islands — creating land on water — in an attempt to address their affordable housing crisis and lack of developable land. (Read more about that idea — and its environmental implications — here.)
“The U.S. is really a big plain of land,” he compared.
The architectural realities in both Hong Kong and New Haven, he said, support a hypothesis he proposed about the kinds of people who occupy the respective cities.
“In Hong Kong, people are more introverted,” he asserted. They race through public transit systems, moving from work to home with little interpersonal back and forth on the streets and subways.
New Haven is far more diverse, he said, than Hong Kong. The most recent census points out that New Haven’s Asian-American population makes up only 7 percent of the total community, though that rose from just 4 percent back in 2010, an increase of 3,180 residents.
The laid-back transit system in New Haven, he posited, seems to accompany a slow, collective extroversion, where strangers chat on the sidewalks and New Haven Independent reporters avidly ask people, “What’s the word on the street?”
He warned: “Sometimes they can be crazy people.”
But on Wednesday, Chan played along, taking a selfie with two of those odd individuals — to share with his parents back home.
“Asian parents — they care a lot about their kids,” he said.
To keep them updated and sure he’s safe, “I send them one to two selfies per day.”
Nora Grace-Flood’s reporting is supported in part by a grant from Report for America.
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So sad that one of covids biggest fatalities was Hong Kong's brave call for the democracy that was owed to them, but stolen from them by the dictatorship in Beijing.