Lucid in New York City
Yet Another Ode
Ce n’est pas avec des mots que je saisirai New York. Je ne pense plus à la saisir : je m’y décompose. Mots, images, savoir, attentes, ne sauraient me servir a rien ; dire qu’ils étaient vrais ou qu’ils étaient faux n’a pas de sens. Aucune confrontation n’est possible avec les choses qui sont là ; elles existent d’une autre manière : elles sont là. Et je regarde, et je regarde, aussi étonnée qu’un aveugle qui vient de recouvrer la vue.
Simone de Beauvoir, L’Amérique au jour le jour
It seems that any writer, or artist for that matter, who has ever lived in or passed through New York has written some kind of love/hate letter to it. The theatricality of the city demands commentary. I have felt the same pull multiple times in the short, fragmented years I have been living here. When I began writing about New York, I started by compiling into bullet points my reflections on long subway rides from the Upper West Side, across from park benches throughout Manhattan, and in the middle of sidewalks filled with single-minded pedestrians. As I tried to render my observations into a single narrative, I inevitably abandoned the task out of frustration for fear of exuding pretension. What did I have to say about New York from mere months of living here even as I reaped its treasures? What can I say or show about New York which isn’t already out there and infinitely more profound? What story can I tell that isn’t about a young person romanticizing anything and everything about the city, including the state of dubious melancholy?
There was a night that was not particularly consequential but one to which I often return. On Black Friday, 2019, about fifty of my classmates from high school came to visit the city from other states for a reunion. It was our first major vacation in college. Some of them were lifelong friends while others still reminded me of the tired teenaged antics which I routinely avoided near the end of 12th grade. I was to be the tour guide for my friends and their friends. I also had to help them coordinate Black Friday shopping in SoHo and a big family-style dinner in Chinatown. I am usually quite enthusiastic about taking close friends to my favorite spots in the city, but I had not realized my stupidity in agreeing to that task until I was in the throes of herding people left and right on Spring Street. Knowing so many familiar faces were to visit, I felt for the first time in the city since coming to study at Barnard three months prior.
It was at midnight when something snapped in me. Ten of us were gathered in a hotel room at the Marriott Marquis. We had just returned from the Lower East Side, where, as per someone’s request, I led everyone to the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge before turning back because ruthless winds changed the group’s ambition for a late night adventure. While I slumped down on one of the hotel beds, the others gathered around the group’s ring leader, who was performing gossip with her usual flair. As I listened to these people I’ve known forever laugh with the venom I did not know they still held, my heartbeats began to crescendo and tears slowly dropped onto the sterile white sheets. Then, I sat up, waved a lackluster goodbye to no one in particular, and fled out of the door before anyone could register my departure. I held in my tears just long enough before the lock could click.
I stomped out of my hotel lobby onto 44th Street in an angry haze of my cold breaths. The red neon sign of Junior’s Restaurant and Bakery flashed before me as I tried to recall a destination I was still formulating. I turned the corner and stumbled onto 7th Avenue as the voice of my neurotic mother droned in the back of my mind. You shouldn’t be out alone at this hour! You could die! She had warned me about all the stabbing and punching months before people started stabbing and punching those who had my eye shape and skin tone in America. I ignored my mother as I wandered around in my too thin coat.
I had already learned by then to huff and puff about Times Square in Fran Leibowitz fashion while muttering about the insufferable hell that was Times Square. Earlier that morning, I snaked through slow-walking tourists anticipating the Macy’s parade and cursed like a bona fide New Yorker. That night, I saw, through blurred vision, the skeletons of the so-called heart of Manhattan, now looking sobered with its stage devoid of an avid audience. The billboards and screens were still flooding the plaza with blue light while workers picked up chairs and trash. The air was frigid. The first snowfall of the season would descend upon the city in two days.
Walking in Manhattan was a liminal experience. One where you could at once sink into the sobering weight of your strides above the concrete while growing buoyant as each block came into focus like a curtain drawing back for a new act. When I arrived near Broadway, I probably felt as though my emotional breakdown warranted cameras to encircle me, and why not? Many filmmakers opt to portray peripatetic urban habitants in a trance of slow shutter speeds. Truffaut’s Jules, Jim, and Catherine race on the bridge over the Seine. Wong Kar Wai’s fallen angels stumble through Hong Kong in greenish haze and smoke. Kieslowski’s Veronique fast walks against blurred reflections basked in golden hues. New York is no different just as Greta Gerwig’s Frances Ha runs and dances on the sidewalks in her grand entrance. I can always seem to find pockets to improvise within the routine of traversing the grid.
At the height of my tearful outpour, I could no longer see or breathe properly. I found myself arriving in front of a hot dog stand across from American Eagles Outfitters. I stood wordless in front of the staffer for a few seconds. Before I could muster up the courage to utter my plea, the man, unfazed but not unkind, handed me a stack of thin tissues over the steaming cart. I proceeded to sob even harder. In the ensuing hour, I relished in knowing that absolutely no one I passed by on the sidewalks knew or cared who I was as I wailed unintelligibly to my sister on the phone.
I gather now that whatever transpired during that hectic day barely warranted the emotional reaction which overcame me. And yet, stumbling through the quiet of the night, I found a rhythm in walking with no end in sight. It was also a night when I recognized a burgeoning affinity I had with the city.
Personne ici ne se soucie de ma présence, je suis encore un fantôme et je me glisse dans la ville sans rien en déranger.
Most people coming to New York for the first time arrived with a set of expectations curated by the media they have consumed and the cultural discourse they have inherited. My mental inventory of New York City when I was growing up in Taiwan included rom-coms about good-looking, white, and middle-class individuals strolling through the city and falling in love (My mother absolutely loved Meg Ryan). For my generation, there was also the addition of the now cliched cultural phenomenon that was Alicia Key and Jay-Z’s “Empire State of Mind.”
Over the years, I only allowed myself to know New York as an acquaintance, a place to visit, a site of glitz and glamor which existed in the vacuum of vacation escapism or what Joan Didion calls the “mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.” My memories of visiting my big sister who was going to school in the city happened when I was between the ages of five and seven, I associated my two trips to New York mostly with hours spent dancing on the giant piano at F.A.O Schwartz and chronically jetlagged at dimmed restaurants in Little Italy.
I had never thought New York would be part of my life trajectory. The city had always seemed like somewhere other people would live, but never me, even if it now seems that I cannot live anywhere but a giant city. But then again, to Didion, to think of living in New York was tantamount to reducing “the miraculous to the mundane,” for one does not “‘live’ in Xanadu.”
That night, and many nights since, I receded into the background of the streets behind me as the buildings in front of me rose and deepened in the cityscape’s infinite linear perspective. Every entity rose before me like turning to a new page of a pop-up picture book. I let the sheer volume of the city swallow me whole. Before I knew it, the Midtown high-rises gave way to Chelsea brownstones. Even at this hour, I thought I could hear the drums of Washington Square Park echo before me before the arch came into full view. I don’t remember when I returned to my dorms that night.
Against my mother’s wishes, I somehow ended up in Xanadu. I continue to contend with this predicament. Even if I cannot call it home just yet (perhaps ever), I have carved out a borrowed existence in which I allow my mind and body to roam without anticipation. For now, that is enough.
台北紐約
清晨的光線 透過薄紗的窗簾
凌亂的桌面上有一杯隔夜的咖啡
沒有你的台北 不屬於我的紐約
或許時間能帶走一切
(Trans.) Morning light through tulle curtains
A cup of overnight coffee on a messy tabletop
Taipei without you, In a New York which is not mine
Maybe time can take everything
new york, i love you but you’re bringing me
But you’re still the one pool
Where I’d happily drown
And oh, take me off your mailing list
For kids who think it still exists
Yes, for those who think it still exists
