For Movies, Some Immigrants Still Choosing to Hit Rewind
By KIRK SEMPLE
South Korean immigrants flowed into Hwang Jae Video in Queens on a recent afternoon, dropping off their rentals and picking up new ones. Beloved South Korean soap operas, including “Dumb Mom” and “Delicious Life,” were especially popular.
But the customers were not dealing in DVDs. They wanted their movies and television shows on videocassette.
Thousands of the cassettes lined the store’s shelves. Thousands more were stacked in neat piles on the floor.
“I’m old-fashioned,” Youngae Park, 66, said as she picked out three videocassettes, her weekly allotment.
In this age of online streaming and Blu-ray Discs, there is still a place where the bulky VHS cassette endures: the immigrant communities of New York City.
The survival of the format may speak to a frugal strain among some immigrants, particularly those who are older, who seem more reluctant to embrace the throwaway, ever-modernizing consumer culture of America. Why upgrade to today’s technology? Those old cassettes do just fine.
“The immigrant very much values what they did not have,” said Orlando Tobón, a leader in the Colombian community of Jackson Heights, Queens, who runs a travel agency and tax-preparation office. “And if it still works, they still use it.”
In Harlem, a Senegalese-owned store stocks cassettes with movies from the expanding African film industry, and at least two shops in Queens, one owned by a Pakistani and the other by a Bangladeshi, supply Bollywood films on videocassette to the borough’s large South Asian population. Latinos with a lingering preference for the format shop at a Peruvian-owned store in Jackson Heights.
In interviews, the stores’ owners said videocassette sales and rentals, though now only a small and shrinking slice of their business, were sustained in part by older immigrants who seemed less inclined than the young to adopt new gadgetry.
A South Korean immigrant named Jesook Choi, 60, another customer at Hwang Jae Video, said she owned a DVD player but never used it.
“Whenever I want to watch, I cannot play it,” Ms. Choi said, as she rented two tapes, both Korean television dramas. Anyway, she added, using videocassettes “feels like an old Korean tradition kind of thing.”
The owner of Hwang Jae Video, Young Woo Kim, 52, opened his shop in Elmhurst soon after he arrived from South Korea in 1989, when videocassettes were still the reigning format. They now account for about 30 percent of his business, he estimated — a far higher percentage than at many other video stores that still stock videocassettes. Many of his customers come for a steady diet of new Korean television shows and films. Everything on cassette is also available on DVD, but many people prefer the old format, Mr. Kim said. He charges $1 for each weeklong rental.
Sensitive to the demands of immigrant life, he said, he does not charge late fees.
Asked how he sustained a business at those rates, Mr. Kim smiled uncomfortably. “It’s a bit hard now,” he said.
A few store owners said some of their videocassette clients believed that tapes were more durable than DVDs.
But the survival of the format among the city’s immigrants appears to have as much to do with the store owners as with their clients. Though the proprietors complain of the burden of thousands of cassettes that clog store rooms and eat up valuable shelf space, and though they have trouble selling cassettes, even for as little as 10 cents apiece, they seem unwilling to take the easiest path to liberation.
“Throw them out?” asked Mamadou Sangotte, 55, the owner of Yatt Ndyndory Video in central Harlem.
Since 1998, Mr. Sangotte has operated his small shop on Lenox Avenue. The videocassettes, like “Two Bad Boys” and “Billionaires Club 3,” from Nigeria, have been relegated to the hard-to-reach upper shelves. But the thought of tossing them out seems to perplex him.
“How can I do it?” he said.
Mr. Sangotte and other shop owners said that as long as there remained a possibility of eking out some revenue from their cassette stock, they would suffer the clutter.
“I’ll have 20 and say: ‘Give me $10 and take them away. Please!’ ” said Rana Ghufran, 40, a Pakistani immigrant whose brother owns Bollywood Video, wedged in between two South Asian delis on Hillside Avenue in Hollis, Queens.
At Video Express on 30th Avenue in Astoria, Queens, the owner’s loyalty to the format appears to be driven not by potential revenue, however slim, but by nostalgia.
“The profit is practically nothing,” said the owner, Constantine Matsoukas, 65. “But I will not throw them away. I will not do that.”
Born and raised in Greece, Mr. Matsoukas came to the United States in the late 1960s and opened his first video store in 1979. He expanded the business to encompass a mini-empire of video stores around the city. But with the rise of online streaming and the demise of the rental industry, he has closed all but the shop on 30th Avenue.
Mr. Matsoukas is now saddled with about 40,000 videocassettes, a vast majority of which are stuffed into the boxes and garbage bags that clog the shop’s basement. Others line bookshelves, or are stacked in blocks on the floor and the counter.
They take up a lot of space, Mr. Matsoukas acknowledged, and they are hard to sell, even when he offers them at 10 for $1, which he does from time to time. The last time he tried to donate some to the public library, he said, he was rebuffed.
But for him, there is no other option but to hold on. Like a patron saint of the videotape, he buys up the stock of other stores going out of business, including Blockbuster stores, most recently in October.
Mr. Matsoukas offered a practical reason for his devotion: not all tapes have been transferred to more modern formats, and among them may be a rarity, if not the only surviving copy.
But he also speaks of his videotapes as if they were old friends.
“I love movies,” Mr. Matsoukas said, his voice tinged with melancholy. “I don’t want to see a movie in any form go in the garbage.”
“They’re not living things, but it’s alive,” he added, his eyes brightening. “There’s something there. You put it in the VCR, and it comes alive.”
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