An unlikely love letter

Originally published on Cathy's Substack

To most people, New York is a fantasy. They dream about it as wide-eyed teenagers while tailgating at their local Dairy Queen. They make Pinterest boards filled with hundreds of photos of 5th Ave and SoHo architecture. Heck, they even make it their birthday party theme (something I will never understand). But born and raised in Hong Kong, a proud cosmopolitan city dweller, I didn’t think I would ever get the hype. Rather than dreamy, it was just loud and rat-infested. And worst of all, painstakingly pungent.

My first encounter with New York is too unrepresentative to carry any real significance. Staying at The Intercontinental and spending my afternoons strolling in upper Central Park, I was a beautifully sheltered 12-year-old. I didn't even step foot in the subway — maybe because I was too preoccupied with gelato, or maybe because the whole idea of it felt vaguely terrifying. I only spent 36 hours in the city — a two-day layover from a Florida vacation — which is hardly enough time to take in New York, let alone for a tween to truly grasp it.

I returned to the city last year for a month-long stay, which included a summer program at Barnard College. The moment I stepped outside of the JFK airport, New York instantly struck me as too much. In East Asian culture, we're taught to value humility. To be humble is one of the best qualities. We're taught to never speak too loud and never attract too much attention to ourselves. New York was so aggressively unhumble. Spending a few sweltering days down in the Lower East Side, I immediately registered that the streets were too loud. People were too crazy. The subways were too old, too disgusting, and jumping the turnstile was too normalised; in fact, the entire subway system seemed like an affront to the definition of a metropolitan city. What was Angelica Schuyler (or Lin Manuel Miranda) on about? This is so not the greatest city in the world.

For those four weeks, I harbored a deeply contemptuous attitude towards New York. I firmly believed that cities like London and Hong Kong were more "civilised." There were too many things I didn't like, and not many things that I loved. Perhaps the puffs of weed were so thick they clouded my vision of the rest of the city and the real New York. But when I hopped on the 16-hour-long plane ride back home, something like fairy dust trailed my memories of New York. The fairy dust was lightly speckled amongst my Instagram posts. It was infused in the perfume I used that summer. 'Brat' by Charli XCX and 'Good Luck Babe' by Chappell Roan were the two fairy-dust duopolists. The magic was subtle and brief. The memories of New York still bubbled and fizzed even when I was long gone. Maybe it was just retrospection that added the magic. Regardless, the magic lingered even when I didn't think it would. Over time, perhaps subconsciously, my intense feelings (whether performative or not) had dissolved.

Arriving in New York this summer for another summer program, my contempt had dissolved for the most part. I was also extremely fatigued from 10 days of National Park hopping in Utah and Arizona. While in the Grand Canyon, I couldn't believe my own words when I exclaimed to my mom that I was actually looking forward to going to New York after our hiking days were over. (But to be fair, I only had Caesar salad and burgers for eight days in a row and couldn't remember the last time I saw a Trader Joe's.) I looked to New York only for the promise of better food and the familiarity of urban life (a sense of home?).

The city still stank like piss. And I was still subject to second-hand marijuana — in fact, probably even more than the last time I came. But this time, I could see (or smell) past these superficial things. Slowly, but surely, the subway stench didn't matter that much, the addicts on the street weren't so menacing, and the city wasn't as bad as I had remembered. However, this change in perspective could have happened for a multitude of reasons: summer wasn't as hot; I stayed on the Upper West Side; my summer program's boundaries weren't as strict, so I got to see much more of the city; I got older.

Every day after my classes ended, I packed my free time with plans. (My plans and adventure-seeking were perhaps tinged with the tiniest bit of aggression: I couldn’t attend the summer program I most looked forward to in California, so I was determined to make the most out of my time in New York, and not sulk in misery.) The moment I said thank-you to my instructor and strode (or leaped) out of the classroom, another day began. In those two weeks, I felt like I lived far more than I would in two months back in Hong Kong. I did so much that I had to make a new Notes app page to record everything I had done: Bar hopping in the Lower East Side (no alcohol, bar snacks only, of course); taking the $4.50 ferry from East 90th street down to Pier 11, wandering in the West Village; getting late night ice cream in SoHo (Rivareno has the best gelato I've ever had, and I don't say that lightly)…

It’s so cliche to say this but New York makes me feel so alive.

In New York, the air itself hums — sweet, sharp, electric. It is New York’s too-muchness that makes it so filled with vitality. The summer steam is luminescent in a melliferous way. The squiggly hot air carries the humanity of halal cart owners. Every street corner, although terribly disgusting, overflows with the excitement of graffiti artists or ambitious young gallerists. And the music, in subway cars and in hotel lounges, is injected into the veins of the city. The music is so loud I see colors.

Between the hours of 5 pm and 9 pm, I feel rejuvenated, or rather, reborn. The city never stops bubbling, and for once, I don't want it to. It is effervescent. In the afternoons, when we rush from the Financial District to a Korean BBQ restaurant, then scurry up some shady building in K-Town, then scurry back down to get in our Uber that drives all the way up to Uptown to catch the last ferry going down to Wall Street, time moves differently. Each moment feels so long — our teokbokki seems like it’ll steam forever, our Uber seems like it’ll never get un-stuck in traffic, the summer breeze is so lovely it seems like we’re stuck in a sunset diorama — and also so short at the same time — we scarf down the kalbi, we rush to the pier as we see the ferry pull in right when the Uber gets there, we see the sunset extinguish in front of our digicams. And in the evenings, when I meet my mom’s work bestie for dinner, and then join my friends for drinks afterwards, our conversations fizz. I meet such interesting people who think so differently from anyone at home, and our interactions are so much clearer — maybe it’s something in the New York tap water, but over those meals, I register each word and syllable with so much clarity it’s like there’s a scribe between the folds of my brain. Just breathing in the New York air, though most times thick with marijuana and sewage, the world is more vibrant. It’s kind of like doing drugs, I’d imagine.

Sitting in the subway with one of my other friends during a long night out, I felt sonder wash over me. Everyone in New York had such a unique story, and although I hadn’t heard too many of these stories, I could feel it. It was only in New York that I felt how small I am in this huge world. We learned about the sublime in English class, a sense of greatness that inspires awe, overwhelming wonder, vastness, and a sense of fear. Sure, the Grand Canyon was pretty vast, but in New York I was entirely consumed by the sublime. I felt so small amongst all the other interesting personalities in the city. Yet at the same time, I didn’t feel overlooked. Although the city was already so full, it didn’t exclude people from it — you simply had to jump in yourself.

Sometimes I can't even believe that I feel this way. Growing up in Hong Kong should have left me jaded, regardless of where I have been and where I have not. But there is something undeniably vibrant about New York City. This may be all teenage infatuation, a canon-event. Nonetheless, I'm glad to have experienced the magic of New York City, setting aside my personal pride to just enjoy the fairy-tale too-muchness that is NYC.