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A good friend of mine recently moved to a small town in China. He has a position teaching English at a college there, and his familiarity with the Chinese language is, roughly, nil. I’ve been following his blog, and really enjoying the anecdotes and observations he’s shared about being a tall white man in a very, very foreign land. In a recent post, my friend describes a new feeling of settling-in coming over him, and he takes the proverbial step back to contemplate its part in his experience as a whole:

They say that the initial phase of coming to a place like China is the “honeymoon phase”, where you love everything and everyone. After that wears off, you start to get an idea of what you will really think of the place.

Following up, he offers a thoughtful observation on patience, contentment, and the will to live an inspired life. I recommend reading the whole thing.

At just about the same time that my friend moved to China, my wife and I moved to Brooklyn. My wife (hereafter to be known as Tea) is attending graduate school in Manhattan. I’m along for the ride, more or less, with an eye on graduate school for myself in the future. I hadn’t been to New York since I was in high school. For Tea, it was moving to a new place, sight unseen. But both of us are generally “city folk,” and the chance to upgrade to the city, the Big City, took about three seconds, collectively, to accept.

And we both, I think, loved the place immediately. I mean ‘love’ in the sense of being enraptured or entranced, like in a new relationship where your beau or belle can do no wrong, and every morning rises like a call to wide-eyed wonderment and excitement. By which I mean to distinguish from ‘love’ in the sense of that deeper sense of connection that, one hopes, forms the basis of longer-term relationships like marriage. These two concepts do bear some family resemblance, but their overall effects are mostly disparate.

But so anyway, I was no sooner sporting my MetroCard than one might hear me saying things like, “I can’t imagine ever wanting to live anywhere else!” Or, “The great thing about New York is that it’s just so vital, so thriving.” Or even, “The thing about New York is that it really eschews contingency,” whatever that’s supposed to mean. I was still getting that surge when I’d walk up out of a midtown subway station and into the corridors of ten- and twenty-story buildings running the length of the island. I’d still find myself grinning and agog at the pace, the pomp of this center of the universe.

Of course I’m sure you can feel the big contrast coming up here, even if I hadn’t condescended to rather naked foreshadowing a few paragraphs back. And I don’t want this to come off as some jaded lament, something that proves that I am no longer the hayseed I was those longs weeks ago, that now I am obviously every inch the sophisticate I’d always planned on becoming. I guess that, more than anything, it’s my own attempt to survey the landscape now that my own honeymoon period is over in this exotic and sometimes confusing locale.

So I no longer wonder aloud about questions like, “Why would I ever want to live anywhere else?” There are too many ready answers, I suppose. Firstly, there’s claustrophobia thing, which I seem to have developed in the last couple of months. It’s probably not a clinical, diagnosable claustrophobia or anything like that. I just find myself beset by flashes of acute anxiety when I’m pressed in a store with a few hundred other people and there’s nowhere near enough room for even a couple of unimpeded steps in any direction. Oddly, this does not effect me on the subway, which I would imagine is a classic claustrophobes idea of hell. And outside I only get it when I’m with someone else, like Tea, and trying to coordinate our movements through a throng. So I guess it’s usually in shopping situations, which I generally loathe anyhow. The epicenter seems to be the Park Slope Food Coop.¹

Secondly, there are some things that are just nasty about the city. The most noticeable, or at least the most pervasive, is that it smells like pee. And by pee, I mean urine. I don’t think I picked up on this specific detail right away, probably as my senses were under siege from a thousand new stimuli all at once, and it was difficult to pin-point one particular odor or another. But by now, it’s pretty unavoidable. The baseline aroma upon which the rest of the city’s quotidian potpourri is good old-fashioned piddle. I don’t know where it comes from, but it’s all over the place. Actually, I probably do know where it comes from, and I choose not to dwell on it for long.

But there are other layers of filth, too. Last weekend, Tea and I were walking in SoHo, on Bleecker I think, both eating bananas. We were involved in some conversation, probably about art or something else equally as impressive for the purpose of making my blog seem cultured. I’m vaguely aware of a haggard looking, I’m assuming, homeless man sitting atop a plastic milk crate on the sidewalk. I’ve been here long enough that I’m no tyro when it comes to avoiding eye-contact with pretty much everyone,² but as this guy was sort of mutter-singing, I looked over as he neatly turned his head to the side and vomited some bright-orange mostly-liquid all over the ground next to his crate with a splash. I had the last bite of my banana in my mouth. But it didn’t seem to faze the guy at all, he kept mutter-singing. And then, as we’re sort of edging toward the curb, he just as nonchalantly turned his head, spewed another throat-full, a little less orange this time and probably mostly vodka, took a pull on his paper bag, and kept on keeping on.

I’m not a germaphobe, so I don’t want to belabor this to the point of neurotic screed. My only point is that, with this many people living so close together, there is some inevitable and severe accumulated nast.

These are probably minor things, typical the-honeymoon-is-over things, like the first time you hear your beloved one pass the gas. I still enjoy the sight of skyscrapers as the train crosses the Manhattan Bridge. I am still consistently amazed by the surfeit of cultural activities everywhere (early premier of an anticipated film? Yep. Museums with permanent collections worth more than the GDP of four of the world’s seven continents combined? Indeed. A panel discussion of Gravity’s Rainbow at the uptown Barnes & Noble? You bet!) I also still hear the opening of ‘Night Fever’ looped in my head every time I walk around Manhattan, even during the daytime.

So I think we can work through these little issues, New York and I, and work together to make this thing last.

Tags: new york

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 at 6:44 am and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.