I had so much trouble sleeping on Sunday night because of my jetlag. I ended up getting out of bed many many times in the wee hours of Monday morning to go online and do some work. Xes who was sharing room with me though slept all the way through! After being restless for as long as I can remember, the sun began to come up. It was 6AM. I got Xes.cx out of bed so that we could start early on our sight-seeing.
After a quick breakfast, we decided that we were going to see the Statue of Liberty first… you know… with it being one of the most famous landmarks in New York. So we went over to Battery Park, queued up to buy ticket and were on the first ferry off from Manhattan to Liberty Island. Kiasu huh?
Some 10 minutes later or so our ferry reached the Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island. Xes.cx and I were very very surprised.
I mean … I don’t know if it’s just the both of us but we both expected the Statue Of Liberty to be a lot bigger than it actually is. I don’t know if it’s from us watching it on TV or in movies or what but when we got there Xes was quick to say “Eh… are we at the right Statue of Liberty? Did we kena con and brought to a fake one?”
Either ways bigger or smaller, it was the real thing and it was still quite something to look at. After so many many years of seeing pictures of it, watching it on TV and so on so forth, it was great.
Here are the very touristy pictures I took with the Statue of Liberty in front…
and at its back.
Liberty Island also overlooks New York City so the view of the skyline was quite something. My poor camera skills don’t do justice to how nice it really looked. Carol just complained to me a few days ago on why I constantly just use the “intelligent auto” settings of my camera without playing around with its features to take better shots.
After Liberty Island we hopped back on to the ferry to Ellis Island.
If any of you remember, Ellis Island was featured in that Will Smith movie Hitch where he brought his date to find her ancestors that first moved to the USA. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, America had acquired lots of land towards the west (from the middle of the USA all the way to California). So what the government then decided it needed was people and immigration was their solution.
They went around trying to get as many people from all over the world to come to the USA to pursue the American Dream and these people passed through Ellis Island which was like an immigration point for them.
Ellis Island had a museum in what used to be the actual administrative building where the immigrants would come and then get their documents approved to see if they were allowed to go into the USA or not.
In there they had all the old records of people who came here a hundred years ago. Even down to the shoes the young immigrant children wore when they came. For the more educational part of it, they also had all sorts of stats and figures about immigration in the USA and even all over the world.
There was this chart that showed how people moved around in the past few hundred years and I managed to see this record… of Chinese from China migrating to Malaysia between 1890 -1915. Between that 15 years, over 1/2 a million Chinese from China had moved to Malaysia to do tin mining or whatever… which is where a lot of us Malaysians today come from.
I thought I learned quite a lot about immigration in the USA there. There were lots of quotes from leaders of the USA back then, one of them was this.
“Everywhere immigrants have enriched and strengthened the fabric of American life” – President John F Kennedy.
Basically there was inherent theme there that American wouldn’t be what it was today if it wasn’t for many of the immigrants who came over 100-200 years ago and made this place their home.
One of my other favourite quotes though was this one by Theodore Roosevelt in 1915.
“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism…. A hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true for a man who puts ‘native’ before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any other man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good as American as anyone else”.
That’s reminds me of what 1 Malaysia is about. From now on, I will no longer refer to myself as a Chinese Malaysian, but a Malaysian.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space