what we really mean when we call someone a "transplant"

on fruit stands and location essentialism

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Yes, I know this is from New Jersey—but it’s a photo of New York City!

i've been seeing a lot of discourse online about new york city transplants: particularly young, often rich, white women (many of whom are aspiring content creators) who live lavishly in upscale neighborhoods, only hang around trendy spaces, and generally treat the city as their playground with little regard for native new yorkers. a recent discussion online revolved around a transplant who said she felt the fruit vendors on the streets were unhygienic, prompting strong responses from native new yorkers (a link if you're unfamiliar: https://www.tiktok.com/discover/fruit-stand-girl-marielle). i'm curious to know if you would label yourself as a transplant despite living in new york for a number of years already, and your broader thoughts on the topic as a whole!

- Chris

Ahh yes… the NYC transplant discourse. When I first moved here, I remember being at a dinner party debating a variation of this exact topic: How many years do you have to live in New York before you can call yourself a New Yorker? We agreed that while there was no definitive number, it was likely anywhere from 7-10 years. Since then, I’ve watched various NYC transplant moments go viral no less than, oh, once every few years. With the advent of TikTok, the half-life has shortened even more. It seems we are increasingly spending time arguing over who belongs in the city than actually living in said city.

The NYC transplant moment du jour was a TikTok about fruit vendors. (For those who aren’t chronically online, this article has a good overview of the debacle.) The key points are:

• A TikToker posted a video asking whether “New York City people” buy fruit from “those stands on the side of the road.”

• The TikToker notes that she says hi to the fruit vendor in her neighborhood (she lives on the Upper East Side) before adding—and this is really the part that got her in trouble—“I’m just, like, scared of getting sick or something. It doesn’t seem very sanitary, but I see a lot of people going there, so it must be decent. I don’t know, please advise.”

• The video went viral; someone called the video a microaggression; parody videos were made; the original TikToker deleted her account.

To me, the entire situation exemplifies the power and the ugliness of the internet. The power to connect with, and educate, tens and even hundreds of thousands of others about the history of street vending in New York City—the iconic Russ & Daughters evolved from selling “schmaltz herring out of a barrel” to a pushcart, a horse and wagon, and finally a brick-and-mortar store—but also the ugliness of tribalism when we sniff a possible outsider in our midst. Was the TikToker’s comment about sanitation in poor taste? Yes. Should we run her off the internet for it? Hmm…

Humans are tribal by nature. We no longer live in tribes, but we are still aware of the metaphorical “tribes” to which we belong (or think we belong). These nouveau tribes are most apparent when engaging in small talk at a cocktail party or BBQ or other social event not centered around a particular person or couple. Next time, pay attention to what people ask about you, what they share about themselves. I usually come across nouveau tribe affiliations such as the state you’re from (e.g., California, Arizona, Iowa), college or graduate school, and career (law, medicine, finance, journalism, tech, etc.). But I’ve also been at parties where the nouveau tribes were sports teams, Rationalism, or influencer niche (e.g., beauty, skincare, fashion, comedy). The ways in which we determine in-groups and out-groups have continually changed, but the fact that we draw those lines has not.

Because of this tendency towards tribalism, I don’t usually refer to myself as a transplant or a New Yorker at all, unless in jest. The terms are too fraught to be used casually. I’d say I’m an immigrant—just like I was an immigrant to the United States, and then to the East Coast—but that word, too, feels inaccurate. Mostly, I tell people, “I live in New York.” If they ask how long I’ve lived here, I’ll tell them and let them make their own judgments about whether that is long enough for them to consider me a “New Yorker.” Being a New Yorker is much like beauty: it is in the eye of the beholder.

For what is a New Yorker? There are so many people—about 8 million—each with a multiplicity of experiences. I don’t call myself a transplant or a New Yorker because that suggests a singularity of experience, or at least a representative experience. The dictionary defines transplant as “a person or thing that has been moved to a new place or situation.” Using that definition, I am often a transplant. I did not originate in New York City, so I must be a transplant.

But you also say above that one subset of transplants involves particularly young, often rich, white women (many of whom are aspiring content creators) who live lavishly in upscale neighborhoods, only hang around trendy spaces, and generally treat the city as their playground with little regard for native new yorkers. This picture—vividly painted!—holds quite a different connotation than the dictionary definition of transplant. I am less comfortable getting lumped in with this definition of transplant, even though, strictly speaking, I am a transplant.

The question, then, becomes one of location essentialism. What do we really mean when we say we are, or call someone else, a New Yorker or Texan or Midwesterner? What are the experiences we’re trying to signal to others when we use these terms, the experiences we’re implicitly saying are necessary to understanding who we are? For me, those include: sneaking out of my house at 2am to drive through the suburbs with a boy my parents hated; my high school friend group being my entire social existence; sleeping through, or socializing during, AP classes; hiding in bed the day I was deferred from Yale Early Action.

I hope that by saying I’m from the East Bay, I’m successfully hinting at these experiences. But that’s also a lot of mind-reading to ask for! Who knows if others from the East Bay had similar seminal experiences? The difference is that in person, I can explain what these experiences are; online, no one will tell you the reasoning behind their proxies. They’ll call someone a transplant without elaborating on what, then, constitutes a real New Yorker in their mind. Commentary videos will be made about “the discourse” when, in fact, very little discourse is happening.

What bothers me about “the discourse” is that it distracts, and detracts, from the day-to-day of living somewhere. Because living somewhere is about paying attention to the people and places around you—all of the people, all of the places. The major criticism levied at transplants is that they aren’t paying attention: they are selectively patronizing select parts of a city, aren’t even seeing other parts of the city. And the only way to remedy this “little regard for native new yorkers” is to begin regarding New Yorkers and the spaces they occupy.

Do you check out the food cart parked outside your office on the sidewalk? Do you interact with your barista, bartender, bank teller, ask them a bit about what life is like for them? Do you help the mom at the top of the subway stairs move her stroller down? Do you see the people at the park, what they are doing, rather than Hot Girl Walking solely to capture vlog footage? I’m not saying you need to do these things all of the time, but you should be doing them at least some of the time. Because that’s what it means to pay attention, look around, to regard.

And it shouldn’t matter whether these people that you’re regarding are native New Yorkers. They could be born and raised here; they could be transplants. It doesn’t matter—they are around you, and we are in New York.

A few years ago, the founder of Born in the Apple—a native New Yorker, born and bred—gifted me a sweatshirt. The sweatshirt said, yep, Born in the Apple.

“I can’t say I was born in the Apple,” I sheepishly told him. “I’m a transplant.”

He looked at me, genuinely confused. “Why? If you live in New York, you’re born in the Apple. You were born here when you moved here.”

I accepted the gift; I couldn’t argue with that. ◆

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