You don't like Chinatown/中華街が嫌い
An essay about NYC Chinatowns, food, complex trauma and the trans & immigrant experience.
You urge yourself to think twice before setting your feet on Manhattan Chinatown. Approaching from Park Row is probably fine, but the Canal Street side requires extreme caution. You just figured out how to navigate the winding underground tunnels between the R/Q/6 platforms last week. Up above ground, cars and pedestrians are flooding the street. Vendors hustling to sell fruits, cheap gifts, and bootleg handbags lining the sidewalks. Billboards, fresh fish on display, human bodies touching and inching forward. Cars revving and honking. Chatter in different languages and dialects. Words you understand and words you don't understand. You grow anxious, you want to get away from the overwhelming sensory input already.
Your peers go to Chinatown frequently, mostly for food and drinks. They say Chinese immigrants will always have a Chinese stomach. You wonder what a "Chinese stomach" is.
You try to remember the meals you had in your last few years in Beijing. When you had the chance to temporarily break free from the confined university campus, you mostly indulged in foreign foods: burgers, pizza, ramen, curry, sukiyaki... You once ate so much at a Japanese yakiniku buffet that you had severe stomach cramps for days. You always went on those little explorations with your only genuine friend in the city, a round-faced, slightly chubby boy studying at the neighboring university. You two would talk about school, life, politics, and the intense desire to escape life in some way, without forgetting to complain how much the meal costs. But you would always stuff your stomach full, maybe even bring back some pastry for the next breakfast. You knew these times were sporadic at best.
You never understand the appeal of traditional Chinese eateries. The food there was either too spicy, too greasy, or too dull. There were those one or two "authentic Beijing restaurants" that somehow parents from your hometown loved, but you found them unimpressive at best. Or maybe it was the people you were dining with. You remember the grilled skewers place that you went to several times with your roommates. You listened to them yapping about things you either didn't understand or didn't care about while swallowing meat pieces covered in too much oil and spices. And the countless places under that large shopping mall where you went with your ex. For don't know how many times, you waited awkwardly for her to finish her dish.
So now your comfort food has become Japanese hotpots at Ootoya, and the Georgian beef stew at Cafedelia. You think your stomach is indeed different, just like everything else with your body (and mind).
For those with a stomach more actively craving food from the place they were born in though, the Chinatown in Manhattan may not be good enough. Ten miles east in Queens, Flushing provides a more intense, and maybe cheaper Chinatown experience. You are constantly hearing stories about it. You have friends who live there. You read news about the shelter for people who just made a long escape from China. But you have never been to Flushing.
Or you are not being completely honest. The truth is that you have never been there since your last visit in the summer of 2019, when you were still a depressed teenager who looked like a boy, and you didn't want to talk about it. For three days, you stayed at a Flushing Airbnb during a week-long road trip across the Northeast with your parents. It was an attic on the third floor of a single-family home, without a window, working air conditioning, or sufficient ceiling height to offer any kind of depression relief. The house appeared too big for the number of people living in it, even after counting us guests. The second floor was empty, with expensive dark wood furniture silently collecting dust. It was a bit surreal, you felt.
In your memory, Flushing was like a 2010s Chinese small town transplanted onto a piece of land on Long Island. Or it was like the Manhattan Chinatown stripped of its historical heritage and spread out randomly. All the sensory stimulation was still making you disoriented. Each morning, you and your parents would take a bus to somewhere near Main St, and transfer to the 7 train to go to Manhattan and visit all the touristy places. You wished the commute would be quick, but often the bus was delayed or the subway broke down. So you were often stuck at Flushing and questioning your parents' choice to stay in this one hell of a neighborhood. You didn't even like New York then.
But now you love the city where you call home. Plus you don't look like a boy anymore.
Twice or thrice a year, you would crave a very specific food item and head to Chinatown alone. Maybe Shanghai-style wontons from Shanghai 21, or Pork and Leek dumplings from Shu Jiao Fu Zhou. On these occasions, you have wondered how to present yourself in those Chinese restaurants. Sometimes you choose to speak English instead of Mandarin to the waiters, in the hope of a fake linguistic identity covering up your queerness. You only open up English apps on your phone although no one is peeking.
You don't like the physical environment of Chinatown, but what you really fear are the people - fellow Chinese immigrants, especially international students like yourself. You are afraid that a friendly conversation will stir up the painful pieces of your memory. You are afraid that loudly discussing politics and activism would lead to hostility or even security risks. Even when you go with friends, you would tense up, look around, and rarely talk.
But you can't imagine living in a city where Chinatown does not exist. You want the comfort of knowing whatever you want from your home country is a subway ride and some crowd-battling away, although such desire has been rare. You want your soul floating up high and away, into the thin air between occupied spaces where nothing can find and hurt you, while also feeling the intimacy of being in a cloud of likewise drifting souls.
Such a self-contradictory little mind.