That’s when he found Staten Island. A colleague stepped in, organizing a house-hunting trip through the borough, assuring Gunaratne that it was far more congenial than Manhattan--and cheaper.
Gunaratne was charmed by Staten Island’s slower rhythms and small-town feel. The streets were quiet, and there was lots of open space for his children to play in. “I simply fell in love with Staten Island,” he recalls.
For the Gunaratne family, Staten Island was a convenient respite, a lucky accident. But for the thousands of Sri Lankans that were to follow them, this small neighborhood was to be an outpost of home.
Leslie Gunaratne says that his family was the first from Sri Lanka to settle on Staten Island when they moved into their three-bedroom apartment on Targee Street on May 1, 1967. Then, a few years later, Gunaratne got a phone call from the Sri Lankan mission to the United Nations. A young doctor due to start a job in the city was stuck at the airport with no place to go. Gunaratne instructed the officials to send the young man and his wife to Staten Island, and he promised to pay the taxi fare. (A foreign exchange shortage in Sri Lanka allowed travelers to change only $3.50 before coming to the U.S.) The kind gesture took root. “Leslie was nice enough to allow us to stay with him for almost a week,” recalls Dr. Fauzy Saleem, who still lives in the borough almost 30 years later.
After that, the pace picked up. Many of the early Sri Lankan settlers on the island were members of Gunaratne’s extended family, who began to come over in 1973 after he became a United States citizen. In just a few months, he helped his five brothers, four sisters and their families move to the U.S. By then, he’d bought a four-bedroom house in the New Brighton section of the island. Each sibling “would come and stay with me for a month, till they found a job,” he explains. “Then they’d rent places around the neighborhood.” Soon, many of his married nephews and nieces were bringing over their in-laws as well. By the time Gunaratne moved to Houston in 1979, he estimates that 80 percent of the roughly 500 Sri Lankans on Staten Island “were connected to me by blood or marriage.”
Gunaratne’s relatives became the kernel of a community that has since expanded to nearly 3,000 people, serviced by a restaurant, a Buddhist temple and a cluster of grocery stores. The island is the New York hub for the approximately 5,000 Sri Lankans in the tri-state area. “Staten Island is a name that’s known in big Sri Lankan cities,” says Bante Kondanna, the chief priest at the temple. “People know that if they run into trouble while visiting New York, they can come to Staten Island and find a Sri Lankan who will help them.”
The newcomers are most visible in the knot of businesses at the crossroads of Victory Boulevard and Cebra Avenue in northern Tomkinsville. Parkland Grocery is piled high with cans of fried jakseed and soya curry, as well as newspapers and videotapes from home. At Good Spicy Taste Restaurant and Bake Shop, Sri Lankans stop by for meals of such staples as kottu and rotti, topped off with creamy vatilappam, a flan-like dessert garnished with coconut and raisins. Often, the lilt of “baila” pop music--which fuses Portuguese colonial influences with rhythms from South India--floats out from a boom box on the counter. Images of the Buddha, Mary, the Hindu god Shiva and an Islamic inscription decorate the eatery, testimony to the religious diversity of these immigrants.
