Liu's Ends

Roosevelt Island — In the muted precincts of Pricewaterhouse Coopers, City Council hopeful John Liu holds his listener with a steady gaze, the rehearsed earnest look politicians get when they are trying to be convincing.

"This is the fourth year of a five-year campaign," Liu says with a smile. "2001 is when it's going to happen."

Liu, a compactly built, articulate and photogenic 33, has positioned himself to be the first Asian-American in New York's history to be elected to the City Council. The seat he wants is from Flushing, Queens. It's not just any of the dozens of seats that will open up when term limits hit the council next year. Flushing is currently represented by the famously cantankerous Julia Harrison, a Democrat who has been a political force in the neighborhood for nearly 50 years. Liu has been trying to win it for the past three, tirelessly courting Democratic party support. He is now prepared to spend up to $400,000 to ensure his victory.

Liu has his work cut out for him like a juggling act with flaming torches. Flushing's strongest voting bloc is white middle-class homeowners, many of them senior citizens who look with suspicion at the profusion of Chinese and Korean signs in downtown Flushing. Born in Taiwan and raised in Flushing since he was five, Liu will have to convince them to look beyond his ethnicity, and at the same time persuade Flushing's identity-conscious Koreans, Taiwanese, mainland Chinese and South Asians that he is the one and only Asian capable of representing them in the Council.

Liu recognizes his precarious situation. "I am going to have to build bridges over intra-Asian groups," he says at one point, leaning back in his chair. "People of the older [Asian] generation are more closely identified to their ethnicity." But moments later, he changes course: "I never say I am Asian or Chinese. I am a kid who grew up in Flushing."

As Harrison prepares to leave office, she has yet to anoint a successor, someone who could count on her white working-class loyalists to deliver their votes. This is Liu's opportunity, and one he intends not to waste. He is carefully nuturing an image as an "Asian-American." It's a nebulous identity that means little to Flushing's partisans but usefully points out what Liu is not: not foreign, and not white. In Flushing, where the tensions between Taiwanese and Chinese are nearly as fierce as they are in the Far East, appearing to be neither is his safest bet.

Less visibly, Liu is breaking Flushing's other political barrier, the rules that require young politicians to pay their dues in the Queens machine. In the past, Flushing's elected officials rose through the ranks of the Democratic Party. They were foot soldiers first. Liu is something entirely new, and therefore threatening to people like Harrison. He intends to win with money and political savvy--and by tearing through the intricate web of promises, understandings and favors that make up politics as Flushing knows it.

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Flushing is a town divided. Rather than a melting pot, it might more accurately be described as an assortment of disparate ingredients, loosely held together by the civilizing effect of tolerance.

The lines of demarcation are clear. The center of town, six long blocks on Main Street, is split down the middle into Taiwanese and mainland Chinese spheres of influence. Here, decades-long geopolitical tensions are as much part of everyday life as the pungent smells of spices, rotting fish and stale cooking oil. Nowhere has it been more apparent than Flushing's annual Chinese New Year parade, where for years the two groups refused to march alongside each other. This year, for the first time, Taiwanese and mainlanders agreed to come together, and the results were comic: Onlookers watched as delegates from both countries jostled desperately to get ahead of one another during the Main Street parade. North and east of Main Street is the Korean enclave. Relative newcomers to Flushing, Koreans only began arriving in strength in the mid to late 1980s. Their population in 1996 was only about 3,300, about half that of the Chinese.