Allan Appel photo
Pengyan Sun and daughter Sophie with (now retired) longtime NHFPL employee Xia Feng, at Tuesday's meetup.
English lessons for Chinese grandparents. Exercise equipment for the elderly. And a library-hosted WeChat channel for Chinese New Haveners looking to connect.
Those recommendations rose to the fore as a dozen people gathered for the city library system’s first ever meeting held entirely in Chinese — to help think through how New Haven’s public library system could improve over the next half decade.
That meeting took place Tuesday night at the Ives Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library (NHFPL), at 133 Elm St.
It was the tenth of ten workshops the library has been convening across the city — and the first ever conducted entirely in Chinese. (Previous meetings were held in English and in Spanish.)
These meetings have aimed to guide the library brass as they develop a strategic plan for the years to come and want to drill down on who uses the library, how people hear of library programs, what existing services need to be enhanced, and what new ones should be created.
At Tuesday’s meetup, a picture emerged of New Haven’s downtown library serving as an informal yet essential pop-up Chinese community center.
For example, every Monday and Wednesday afternoon you can hear children’s books read at Chinese-language story time in the second floor kids’ area at the Ives Main Branch.
And the beneficiaries are not only the kids but the dozens of their grandparents, their caretakers, often recent arrivals from China here primarily for short stays to provide child care as their adult kids attend Yale University’s graduate schools. This is a large group that comprises several hundred people.
And for the Chinese adults and grand-adults who bring the kids to story time, the gathering is far more than a place to get a break from child care. Kids’ story time is also for isolation-relieving socializing, getting info on transit, passports, what’s on sale at the Hong Kong Grocery on Whitney Avenue, and local gossip.
Guopeng Liang, a post-doc in ecology and environmental science, was among the attendees at Tuesday’s meeting, along with his wife Pengyan Sun and their daughter Liangfen, or Sophie.
The five-year-old popped about during the hour-and-a-half session in twinkling pink sneakers.
With the help of my friend, Anne Stevenson-Yang, who is a fluent Chinese speaker and translated throughout the whole session, I learned Guopeng was thrilled to discover the library had so many Chinese children’s books.
He said his daughter in particular liked reading about the Chinese festivals.
Fiona Bi, a graduate student at the Yale School of Management, said she thinks the Chinese collection at the NHFPL is the best in the state.
The session was conducted by Xia Feng, a NHFPL retiree who had been its only Chinese speaker on staff for several years. Lynn Lee, a Yale College Presidential Fellow, is filling in for that role for now.
Xia Feng said that 30 years ago, when she was a young person in China, there were simply no public libraries. While that’s changed and there are huge buildings and extensive collections today, most books are not loaned out, and there are few if any services provided by the libraries.
That’s why, as the session at Ives pivoted to services for adults, and specifically the grandparents, there was such amazed pleasure expressed by the grandparents about the services of the NHFPL, that there were so many of them — like books that could actually be borrowed, computers used, and documents printed — and all for free.
“They are like warehouses,” Xia Feng said of the Chinese libraries, “with no services like story time.”
And the attendees on Tuesday had lots of suggestions for more.
One grandfather, for example, said he liked New Haven’s walkability but especially in winter time might the library consider providing “some mild exercise equipment for old people to use?”
Guopeng wondered if through the library the grandparents might be provided free public transit, as he has experienced in other American cities.
Guogpeng Liang and his daughter Liangfen (Sophie), who loves the Chinese language kid books
“Could Yale medical students provide services” somehow through the library’s programs? he added
Part of the library staff’s questioning also asked for attendees to express what concerns they have about the library in particular and New Haven in general.
Guopeng said parking near the library was a challenge, and others expressed concern about their cars being broken into and windows smashed.
That was not a concern specifically about the environs of the library but throughout the city and particularly in the apartment blocks on the stretch of Prospect Street around Division where many of the grandparents live in Yale-connected housing.
As the grandparents are involved in transporting kids to school — and are largely non-English speakers here for, on average, short stretches from between six months to a year — they wondered if the NHFPL might provide Chinese-language programs explaining the New Haven Public Schools system and its options.
Among other kinds of orientation programs, Fiona Bi suggested English lessons specifically for the Chinese grandparent population to make basic communications easier, and to cut down on isolation.
Uniformly the attendees expressed concern with the homeless folks who sometimes cluster about the library entrances; and they asked for more security and cleanliness.
But the suggestion that by far elicited the most enthusiastic interest — perhaps because it seemed the most doable — was to ask if the library might establish its own WeChat channel. Anne says that everyone in China is on WeChat and one specifically for the Chinese in the Elm City might make it possible to grow participation.
City Librarian and Director Maria Bernhey closed the session, as she has the others, with thanks and the promise of more “check-ins” with the community as the strategic plan is written and rolled out in early 2025.
What’s emerged from all the sessions, not just this Chinese language one, she said, is that patrons are asking for improved spaces and that the library buildings, especially Ives, should receive what she termed some serious TLC.
“It’s a well-loved community hub,” and there’s not been serious work done on the building since 1989, she added.
Like the Chinese participants, community members have in general been asking for more expansive services for seniors, she added, as well as programs for young people, with a focus on literacy.
All that of course requires space and equipment. “A building upgrade will address that,” she added.
While the Chinese graduate student and trailing grandparent population is indeed transient, it is a large group, said Xia Feng, numbering in the hundreds. Some come for three months, then leave, then return for six months, all depending on family needs. However, very few stay.
More would, Guopeng speculated, if they found teaching positions or opened start-ups, and that could be facilitated by building on what the library already does.
“It’s a little weird,” Guopeng concluded, “how so many Chinese students take resources from Yale and then leave. It’d be nice to have more opportunities for employment” and thus to encourage them to stay.