With thanks to dVerse for the prompt.
(more…)Tag: immigration
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At the Family Table
Dinner (takeout) in Madrid: biang biang noodles. I’ve had a lot on my mind over these past few days in Madrid (and back in Europe). My family and I have truly enjoyed spending time together walking the city and marveling at its urban landscape. In particular, we’ve been especially impressed by its wealth of art and food, and by the striking contrast between its fast-paced traffic and slower-paced rhythms of life. For my part, I’ve been inspired to learn Spanish again—not just because I’d given it up after high school, but also because there’s a wealth of poetry and fiction I’m desperately trying to catch up on.
There’s much that I want to write about these aspects, however rough my ideas and language about them may still be. But over the course of the past few evenings and mornings, I’ve been drawn to something far closer to home: our family meals, and the colorful conversations—in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin—that animate them. Beyond filling my life with laughter, wisdom, and excellent food, our meals have helped me understand the pleasures and challenges of navigating the richness of the world: one whose vibrancy seems to demand even more color from my ever-expanding palette (or, if you prefer, pallet).
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The City
The Lower Manhattan skyline as seen from Hoboken, NJ. For Mom and Dad, and for the city we love best.
How do you—how does anyone—come to know New York, let alone write about it?
I’d never asked myself this question until now, if only because I never felt I had to. Even as a native of “the city”—which, for the uninitiated, always refers to New York when uttered from anywhere within a roughly seventy-five-mile radius from the Empire State Building—I wouldn’t even know where to start. In fact, as someone who’s long spent most of his life in New Jersey, the state next door, I’ve inevitably lost much of the local ‘expertise’ that New Yorkers unabashedly pride themselves on.
For these reasons and others, I’d much prefer to leave the task of explaining the city to others who, “native” or not, have done it far more adroitly than I ever could. (One of the most compelling of these has only recently left our lives, and all too soon.) What I do want to understand more clearly, meanwhile, is the indispensable role that the city plays in my life story: not just in my earliest years or newfound present, but also in the ways I learned to navigate life in Ghent (a city which, for the record, I’d never confuse with New York despite its magical charms; even Brussels, for all its international character, sprawling beauty, and similar precarity, inevitably falls short). And that role, I’ve also come to see, could never be understood without looking back to the experiences of my parents when they first arrived in America via the city, decades before I left it.
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Between Two Rivers 