5 Years of NYC!

Note: This essay was meant to be published in June 2023, but I went on a writing hibernation again and never ended up finishing it. Today at the end of 2024, I wish to come back to this article and give it the ending it deserves. Enjoy!

I visited New York for the first time in the Spring of 2016, when I nervously flew in from Chicago for an internship interview. Being a naïve college junior that I was, I booked a very old hotel in Times Square, where rats came out in the middle of the night and chewed on my suitcase.

Still, I was excited to take a yellow cab for the first time (just like the movies!), and watch the city unfold outside my taxi window. I saw all the skyscrapers, the neon lights, and the street artists dancing at Times Square. Bars and vendors bustling with energy. People walking their dogs at 3am in the morning. I was in love with the liveliness of the city.

200 job applications and 2 years later, I finally moved to the city of my dreams, with a job of my own. I couldn’t believe it! This was too good to be true. In this city, I slowly grew into myself.

Sitting in the subway, I no longer felt self-conscious as the only Asian on the train, because there will be other Asians too in the same car. On the street, I not only saw people from all ethnicities emerge from different corners, but they also walked together as the same friend group, or as a couple. One day at work lunch, I found myself listening to my colleagues each explain New Year traditions of their own culture (Indian, Arabic, and Jewish), and then they asked me about mine. We then bonded on food - giving recommendations of the best Greek food in Astoria, and trying out the best Vietnamese food truck of New York right outside our office. Having used to being perceived as a minority, I felt more comfortable in my own skin living in New York.

I also opened up my own senses to all the arts and culture in the city. One cold winter afternoon, I took a walk at the Central Park, and ran into a girl, dancing ballet as a street performance. I was so deeply touched by the music and the dance, that I started my own journey of dancing adult ballet, even though I had never danced my whole life. I was able to sign up for beginner adult workshops at one of the best ballet schools in the world, and going to classes in a typical west village brownstone building felt like I was living in a movie.

Another time, I was brought by a friend I met at a party to a tea saloon in Chinatown. Having previously only drank from tea bags at big chain supermarkets, I was introduced to the academics of tea for the first time. There, I was taught to open up my senses, and connect myself to tea and nature. I drank tea like tasting wine, and sat around to chat with guests who were strangers a few hours ago but soon became my friends.

Time flies, and now I am over 5 years living in the best city in the world. I am grateful for my younger self who followed my curiosity, who enabled the older me today to say that I have explored everything I wanted to in New York. This city truly taught me that everything is possible, and I can’t wait what adventures follow up next!

Dinner at Boucherie in West Village

How Much Can Your Life Change In One Year?

Hello, readers!

It’s been a year since I last posted anything on my blog, and lately I’ve been thinking to get back to writing. After a busy year filled with food and booze, my writer’s block finally resolved itself. I want to experience the joy of creating once more, and I want to write little essays that make people feel relaxed and connected. Thus I made a return to this blog to say hello again.

Ciao!

How much can your life change in one year?

To me, the world just became bigger and smaller. Last spring, I attended a spontaneous meet-up in the backyard of a barbecue place in Brooklyn, filled with people from all over the world who just recently moved to New York. One year later, the people I met there became my core friend group in the city.

Last October, I replied to a message from a cute guy who played guitar on his Hinge profile. We went on our first date taking walks and people watching at the Washington Square Park. A few months later, he became my boyfriend and my best friend.

In my first few years in New York, my friends and dates mostly came and went, moving to new cities and establishing new routines. This year, I finally had a group of friends that stayed, in a city that I can finally comfortably call my home.

For the last 3.5 years, I couldn’t travel outside the U.S., because my H1B visa stamping was too tricky to sort out during the pandemic. This March, I finally did my visa and started traveling.

For my first trip, I flew to Milan to celebrate my British friend’s 30th birthday, and then to Paris to reunite with my best friend from college. I got to admire the white marbling on the magnificent Duomo Cathedral, the golden hour at Lake Como decorated with colorful houses, and moonlight reflected from the river Seine just like the movies. I got disoriented in the Paris subway, and I ordered breakfast in Milan with 5 Italian words and many hand gestures. The world is my oyster again.

Lemon gelato at the Milan canal

It is pretty unreal to think about how much change can happen in one year. A lot of serendipities occurred and grew into amazing relationships, and a long-lasting norm ended within a few weeks. I came back from my blogging hiatus, and I’m ready to write regularly again.

How has your year changed? Can’t wait to reconnect with you again and hear about all your stories :)

Stay tuned,

Xoxo

Before Our Moms Became Moms

A writing workshop I have been attending over the last two months had been asking us to write about a mom we knew when we were a child - not our own mom, but our friends’ moms. Together, we marveled at all the different personalities that revealed under our pens - the one that would rush out of her showers naked to answer phone calls, the one that was always looking for things in her house, and the one that visited all the street vendors during family trips.

And I realized this one thing: now that we are adults, having reached our own child-bearing years, we saw these moms as if they were one of us. The moms that we wrote about are no longer distilled to the giant, larger-than-life figure that made noble sacrifices of themselves to take care of their kids - they had real personalities that belonged to real human beings.

Today, as I browsed through all the mom photos that my friends shared on social media, I also discovered this trend: almost everyone shared a picture of their mom when they were young. The mom before they were born, or the mom that just got started with motherhood, before years were taken from them to nurture a baby. The mom when they were still mostly themselves.

To put it in other words, it was the non-mom traits that attracted us to them in the first place, and it was the non-mom traits that we inherited from them, which made us proud of being their daughters and sons.

My mom is the most living-in-the-moment person I’ve met in my life, and I proudly inherited this trait from her. A great bundle of joy bursts through her like sunshine, as she smiles and dances, just eating a piece of candy. On another day, a little bunny-shaped calendar at a gift shop would humor her enough to make her day, which she would end up taking home for her to stare at every day in her home office. This joie-de-vivre attitude was part of what drove me to cooking, as I chased after the deliciousness that would make me smile and dance just like her.

She was also the most adventurous and courageous person, having lived in North Africa and the Middle East as one of the only Chinese women there, back in the 1980s and 1990s. Growing up admiring the handicrafts she brought back from all over the world, I never questioned my dreams of studying and living in a foreign country. I now have spent almost 9 years in the United States, 7,000 miles away from my hometown, Beijing.

Most of the time, a parent’s biggest influence on their kid was their non-parental traits - their love of fashion which inspired a kid to later become the editor of a major fashion magazine, or their firm belief in social causes which inspired a kid to go into politics. Yet, a lot of the times, a woman’s traits would only be reduced to a mom figure, once she had a baby. She is expected to devote most of her time, if not all, nurturing a baby. If she chooses to take time away from her baby to pursue her personal interests, her career, and her dreams, the society put blames on her. And nowadays, if a woman finds out she is accidentally pregnant when she’s not prepared, laws in certain states may even force to take away her rights to pursue a life she wants, because she is obligated to her undeveloped fetus that needs her body to grow into a baby.

And in return on Mother’s Day, we paint a holy picture of this larger-than-life mother figure, who sacrifices herself in order to care for her baby.

But today, I hope to celebrate my mother, and all the other mothers, as the person she is, despite of being a mother. Let’s celebrate her qualities that deeply influenced our lives, and giving us a world that we experienced, as a result of all of her pursuits in her personal interests, her careers and her dreams. Let’s all create some space in the society for the moms to live outside their mom life, so that we all can catch some breath.