“I Felt My Color For The First Time”

By Christine Jeanjaquet (narrator) + Storm Garner (interviewer, editor), 2019

Christine Jeanjaquet, an Industrial Design professor from Manila, left the Philippines for NYC in 2003 and started her own business a few years later–an online gift shop called The August Tree. She has been one of the Queens Night Market’s most consistent vendors since its opening in the spring of 2015, and can be found most Saturdays between April and October selling her carefully selected gifts and toys from her tent there, always smiling. In this excerpt from her interview with Storm Garner for the Queens Night Market Vendor Stories Oral History Project, Jeanjaquet shares her experience of “feeling [her] color” and facing discrimination due to her foreign accent for the first time when she moved to the US, and speaks to the sense of “belonging” she has since found in the sheer diversity of the Queens Night Market vendor community.