What We’ve Built is a series of portraits and conversations with AAPI business owners and leaders who’ve created space for their community in their neighborhoods and beyond.
Since Julia Wijesinghe was 3 years old, she’s visited her immigrant family’s home in Sri Lanka during summers, speaking Sinhala (the language of the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka) with her cousins and experiencing the culture.
“I’ve been dancing Bharatanatyam [an Indian classical dance that’s very popular in Sri Lanka] since I was a baby, and I love the food so much,” Wijesinghe, now 23, says. “The island life and the music were very important to me growing up, and my grandmother showed us around, so it was a bonding experience for us as well. She has my heart.”
Growing up in Queens, New York, where she attended an all-girls Catholic school, Wijesinghe was quick to discover that not everyone had the same fascination for the South Asian island that she did; in fact, many of her classmates hadn’t even heard of the small island-country in the Indian Ocean.
“I’d try to keep incorporating elements of Sri Lanka at school, at all my school projects, even if the topics had nothing to do with Sri Lanka—things like the food, or the clothing, or something cool that I’d seen on my trips. I wanted to help them learn, because it’s such a fascinating culture that I feel so connected to and it’s something I want more people to know about.”
The fondness for those summers led Wijesinghe to open a Sri Lankan museum in New York City—an idea she first had when she was just 15 years old—that would teach others about the region. With a population of roughly 22 million, the country is now going through a huge economic crisis, another reason why Wijesinghe feels a particularly strong need to educate the public on Sri Lankan history and culture. “You have people who can’t get gas, they’re losing electricity, they can’t bring food home to their families,” she says. “We’re trying to help fund some of these families in Ratnapura [a Sri Lankan city that’s home to some of her family], but there’s only so much we can do to help.”
“Sri Lanka is just my happy place,” says Wijesinghe, whose eyes light up as she remembers playing around the beaches of Sri Lanka with her cousins and joining them for traditional family meals. “Instead of having different projects at school where I talked about one aspect of Sri Lanka like the food or the music, I thought, Why can’t I have a space where I collect and create all of it, like the artwork and history and culture, and then explain things to people in that way?”
With her parents’ support, Wijesinghe got to work collecting items for what would become the Sri Lankan Art & Cultural Museum; she had relatives send souvenirs, artwork, instruments and clothing from Sri Lanka in order to create a sacred space in which to showcase them. “I remember when I asked my dad if I could create a museum; he laughed so much!” she says. “He said, ‘That isn’t what a normal teenager asks for; they’d ask for cars or dolls or something like that.’”
Yet Wijesinghe was only taking a cue from her father, Lakruwana Wijesinghe, who opened the first-ever Sri Lankan restaurant in New York City in 1995, which he named Lakruwana. The first location, on 44th Street and Ninth Avenue on the edge of Manhattan’s Theatre District, burnt down years a few years later in 2004, when Wijesinghe was young. At the time, the family had decided to migrate to Staten Island anyway, in order to provide a more suburban home for their newborn. So it just made sense to reopen the restaurant close to where they lived—first on Corson Avenue, before moving to its present location on 668 Bay Street around a decade ago.
Julia with her father at Lakruwana in 2020. Photo: Ismail Ferdous
“I’ve been working in the restaurant with my family since I was in middle school,” says Wijesinghe, who now serves as the general manager at Lakruwana. “I love feeding people, teaching them about the different foods and spices available to them, and seeing them love the food as much as I do.” Wijesinghe’s favorite food, which she eats almost every day, is lamprais, a flavorful dish consisting of meat or vegetables mixed with rice, wrapped in a steamed banana leaf. “You can add so many spices to it and make it in many different ways,” she says. “It’s the one thing I always recommend to people.”
The Sri Lankan Museum, on the other hand, got its start in 2017, when Wijesinghe was only 18 years old. She’d spent a few years collecting the items that she needed to build the space. “To be completely honest with you, I didn’t even know it was the first Sri Lankan museum in the United States until the mayor came to see it,” says Wijesinghe. “I’m just really lucky that my parents invested in it for me, because it was something that was really important to me.” Wijesinghe’s father, an artist, contributed some of his pieces from his restaurant to the space.
Located at 61 Canal Street, the Sri Lankan Art and Cultural Museum is just a block away from the Lakruwana restaurant and is a nonprofit that Wijesinghe opens up for appointment-only tours on the weekends. The space holds everything from traditional instruments and Buddhist statues to recipe books and old paintings and photos of Sri Lankan tribes, and each tour runs about two to three hours. “Most people who come to the museum actually aren’t from Staten Island; they’re from all over the world,” says Wijesinghe. “But that’s also what I love about the City and where I live. Everybody comes from all over the world to eat at the restaurant and asks so many questions about my heritage.”
Wijesinghe also appreciates the fact that her Staten Island neighborhood has a large Sri Lankan population, so much so that the only place she could think of opening a museum was right there in Tompkinsville—or, as many refer to it, Little Sri Lanka, situated at the border along Victory Boulevard and Bay Street. Home to a population of around 5,000 people of Sri Lankan descent, the area includes a Sri Lankan grocery store specializing in spices and snacks and has a Buddhist temple nearby in Port Richmond.
“The support of the community here is really incredible,” says Wijesinghe. “I feel so welcome here, and I don’t think I ever want to leave Staten Island. In fact, my parents met each other on the Staten Island Ferry; so many miracles happen over here. Staten Island provides a safe space where we all can learn about each other’s cultures, and I hope I can help future generations of Sri Lankan kids connect with their culture and not lose it. Your culture is your foundation, and we should all have a strong foundation to lean on.”
Nikhita Mahtani is an Indian American freelance journalist based in NYC. She graduated from New York University with a Master's degree in magazine journalism, and her work has been featured in numerous publications, including GQ, InStyle, Conde Nast Traveler and Allure. Her favorite NYC neighborhood is Dumbo, and she loves to stroll by the water with an iced coffee in hand.
