I was very encouraged to read the February 6 comments of Sue Ferrara of Hamilton to the Trenton Times regarding the proposed pocket park in West Windsor. This is the second time in as many months that I have seen or heard comments from an outside observer affirming the positive things going on in the township regarding vision and community relations. My time here has convinced me that our strength is our vision. I have seen vision take tangible shape within the school system, recreational sports, commercial development, human relations, interfaith dialogue, and cultural affairs, first a center and now a garden.
Ms. Ferrara’s comments seem to affirm my observation and put things into the context of the thinking of Victor Hugo, the French author, when he wrote, in sum and substance, “no force on Earth is powerful enough to stop an idea whose time has come.”
In 1999 my wife and I made a conscious decision not return to New York City, but instead to remain in West Windsor to raise our three children. I was raised and educated on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a place commonly referred to as the “melting pot.” My upbringing exposed me to a myriad of people, food, music, religion, entertainment, dress, and language in close proximity and proudly informed by cultures different from my own. I wondered whether settling in the suburbs would deny my children the same formative experience of exposure to a world community I had growing up.
The recent community conversation about an Asian-themed pocket park brings the thoughts I had for my young children more than a decade ago back into focus. I will share experiences of my children believing they are not much different from others who were impacted by the gift of diversity we share in this township.
By the time our oldest graduated from high school she had traveled to and performed in great concert venues in Russia, Scotland, even Trenton. She returned home with cultural artifacts from those places, which, though different from our own heritage, remain prominently displayed in our home. In some way she created mini pocket parks of cultural awareness in our living room, which includes a photo taken in Scotland of a statue of cultural icon William Wallace. The cultural diversity West Windsor exposed her to at an early age and nurtured her on throughout her education came full bloom when she graduated from college, to our amazement, with a degree in Asian studies and fully fluent in Mandarin. She now lives in Harlem just steps away from the Schomburg Center, one of the great African American cultural institutions, and works supervising translation of legal and financial documents back and forth between English and Chinese.
Last summer our second child spent a month working in Zambia and enjoying many forays into the African bush. He returned home for a week, then immediately hopped a flight to Beijing for a week-long leadership conference followed by a three-week teaching assignment in very rural China. While in China his team gave a presentation on eradicating global poverty. He too returned with pictures and cultural artifacts we now prominently display in our home. What if anything did his upbringing in West Windsor contribute to his desire to be a citizen of the world? I suggest our town’s openness to conspicuous display and celebration of many cultures and our willingness to embrace the culture of others as our own had something to do with his choices.
Last August we deposited our youngest child into the custody of a university to fine tune some of the educational ambitions my wife and I had for our children when we chose to move to West Windsor. We envisioned our strapping, shy, fully American scholar athlete making his mark on a basketball court or baseball field. To our amazement he found inspiration not in sports, but in a student-run organization devoted to promoting fashion talent while celebrating Chinese New Year at an annual fashion show called “Lunar Gala.” I have to believe that his exposure to conspicuous cultural diversity here gave him the courage to step out of his comfort zone to celebrate a culture other than his own before nearly 1,000 on-lookers.
Despite no longer having children in the school district we’ve chosen to remain in West Windsor and do our part to promote positive community relations. To that end I serve with others in an initiative called “Interfaith Community Bridges” (ICB), which works at keeping constructive dialogue open among the many faith communities and people of faith in the West Windsor area in the hope of building a better and “beloved community.”
A culturally themed pocket park encourages many of us involved in the ICB dialogue because it suggests that we do not need to obscure our cultures, backgrounds, or faith systems to build a better and blessed community.
If the comments received from persons like Ms. Ferrara and others, who do not live in the township, are an indication of positive things happening within this community, then I have to believe that Victor Hugo is right, and the time has come for the idea of the Asian-themed pocket park to be realized.
Rev. Cornell A. Edmonds
West Windsor
