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The mission of Oversampling, Inc. is, according to their website, "to foster… a renewed awarness of cities worldwide" by providing high-quality walking tours that take the curious "on urban tours no tourist riding atop a double-decker bus will ever see." Each of the company's Soundwalk tours is conducted by a neighborhood insider whose mission is to "take [listeners] on a walk and show [them] what's behind those doors," and in the fifty-minute process, make visitors insiders themselves. The goal of the program is to promote a deeper understanding of the realities of a neighborhood, and in the Chinatown tour, Jami Gong, a standup comedian, tour giver, and co-founder of ChinatownNYC.com, certainly succeeds in taking participants "into places where [they] are not supposed to go." He warns participants to "be very discreet" as he gives them a peek into a sweatshop on the fourth floor of a building on Eldridge Street and a glimpse into the apartment of a retired Triad leader. He urges them not to even try to enter a building on Doyers Street which is rumored to be an opium den. "They will not let you in. They do not welcome your attention." Indeed, the CD's packaging warns that Oversight, Inc. is not liable for any arrests or injuries that may result from participants' activities in Chinatown. Gong never mentions the Exclusion Era directly, though he makes allusions to the hard life of immigrants from the mid-nineteenth century to today, as he shows participants the lines of day laborers on Eldridge Street looking for work and as he talks about the importance of safes in stores like the General Store at 32 Mott Street, which were necessary in a community whose Chinese members were not allowed, by law, to have bank accounts. However, partly because the exclusion laws are never mentioned, Gong encourages the idea that stereotypical things that are "wrong with Chinatown" were the result of the nature of the Chinese immigrants. In fact, he tends to say so directly, in lines like "The police have always had a hard time in Chinatown. We're not used to dealing with authorities. It's hard to get rid of 3,000 year-old habits - girls, gambling, extortion. It's part of the whole business. What can you do." As if China has for three millennia been in a state of anarchy? In his attempt to make the experience illicit for the participants, Gong (perhaps unknowingly) encourages many of the conclusions outsiders made about Chinatown during the worst of the exclusion era. While he does talk about the positive, about laborers working hard to feed their families, about the strong sense of community, about all the nostalgia that surrounds family-owned businesses, the talk of crime and drugs tends to overwhelm. Opium is mentioned at least three times. On Doyers street the background sounds include a barrage of gunfire and Gong urges the participant to "take cover." A waiter in an Italian restaurant on Mulberry talks about how much more violent (yet incompetent) Triads are, compared to the Mafia of old. "Urban authenticity," the main feature of Oversampling's tours, is, of course, vital. Crime is a reality in Chinatown like everywhere else in New York City; red double deckers will never give a tourist any real sense of the neighborhood's history, any authenticity. Yet Gong's implications about the origin of the crime and decadence could have come from Dennis Kearney himself. "Yes, we never stop gambling," he says, while showing participants a Chinatown Senior Center. Less informed participants, while learning much, may also draw many unfortunate conclusions from this tour, conclusions that are not so far off from those which drove race-based immigration laws in the first place. Positive value stereotypes, which do not carry negative value judgments, but which, nonetheless, orientalize and compartmentalize the Chinese experience, also abound in the CD. Oversampling's remix of the soundtrack of The Last Emperor plays in the background during the walk down East Broadway from the Manhattan Bridge to Catherine Street. Gongs sound, "attention" when a new segment of the narrative is to begin. When Gong takes participants into a tunnel between Elizabeth and the Bowery, he shows them to a door on the right which opens into a Chinese herbalist's: "Take a look around," Gong says. "This is the core of Chinese culture. Thousands of years of Chinese remedies. Here we can cure you no matter what you have." After listing at least a dozen illnesses, he concludes, "you name it, we can fix it." He is almost inviting the corollaries many of his participants will add to these statement. "Isn't it exotic?" "How mysterious!" These reactions are almost certainly not Jami Gong's intention, but he doesn't effectively combat them with the kind of historical knowledge necessary for a deeper understanding of Chinatown. Like other Soundwalk tour guides, his mission is to make the tourist anything but a tourist. Though Soundwalk: NYC Chinatown is far from being awful, far from the gift-shop-only beef-with-broccoli tours that were once the only option available to those who wanted to experience Chinatown, its educational impact is, for the most part, dependent on the participant. The tour ends at the Mahayana Buddhist Temple at Canal and Bowery. Participants are reminded by Professor Robert Thurman, a Buddhist scholar at Columbia University and president of Tibet House, to "meditate on our connection to all beings… there's no real difference of blood, there's no real difference of gene, there's no real difference of race, these are all illusory constructs and spiritually we are all in one family and we should feel that feeling… of connection with every being." Whether the participant takes this lesson to heart or just files the tour, meditation and all, as a brief delve into "the exotic," wholly "Other," yet simple enough to be captured into a fifty minute experience, is left up in the air.
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