Conversations with a New Yorker

Four students’ experiences in the city

It’s a deepening Saturday night. I sit on the candy orange plastic seats of the 1 line, hurtling down Manhattan to my seven am flight from Newark Airport. A band of jersey-toting dads share a gyro on the opposite bench. A leather jacket-clad couple make out on platform railings. The concrete chaos of this weekend weighs heavy on my eyes. The city taunts me — where are you going to be, if not here tonight?

Cole was wearing a gray zippered sweatshirt, a baseball cap, and an easy laugh as we shared face sized slices of pizza at a pizzeria on University Place and sent selfies back to mutual friends from home. It was a crazy Friday afternoon. Cole and I had met through Cross Country and Speech and Debate practices during our first weeks of high school, while arguing over friends we did or didn’t like. Now pre-law at NYU, he planned to become a prosecutor or defense attorney after law school. Before taking the subway uptown to his coaching job for a high school cross country team, he told me, for New York, it was “Probably just some random night in October, where I laid down on my bed and I was just thinking, man, I'm cool with this place, you know?

“This is home.”

Sofia’s home was delightfully disorganized. Armies of books and papers covered her kitchen table and marched up to a heaving A/C unit fighting the sweltering New York day out of the apartment. Living in the city had changed the way she dressed. Her love of Minions now manifested itself in a little knitted Stuart hung on her bag by a carabiner. Her purple hair complemented a thick checkerboard tie with the word “Tie” sewn on in white. In senior year of high school, we would go on spontaneous night drives to the beach or the hills with friends, or hang out at her house and design bead bracelets. After coming to Parsons School of Design, her Instagram feed had gotten more and more eclectic and she told me how the city had given her the incentive to play more into her personal style. She talked about the art collective, CHISMOSI (@chismosi_nyc on Instagram), which she founded at her school in Freshman year, “we basically wanted to connect with other bad bitch Latinas and make art together.” We rifled through some of her past zines as she gushed about the community she’d created and the artist retreat they had hosted last semester, complete with dance movement and collaborative quilt workshops in a Pennsylvania camp center.

After leaving her apartment, we walked around St. Mark’s place, famous for once housing sites like an Andy Warhol nightclub or the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti. Cole, just having returned from coaching, joined us at Astor Place, where the three of us soaked up the busy street, strewn with as many hungry pigeons as ravenous pedestrians.

Cole told me New Yorker culture was its busy pedestrians throwing their trash feet away from an empty garbage can, or the shop owners in Chinatown lowering their prices to be more affordable for their community. Sofia said it was the finance bros, the art school hoes, and the East Villains (skater boys full of STDs with little beanies and vintage t-shirts). Personality wise, New York was “maybe like a subway rat wearing a suit” she laughed. The New York culture was also the countless “expats,” not born in the city but choosing to call it their home. Their every day was a cycle of disappointment and rediscovery of a love for their city. Cole recounted his feeling of just waiting and waiting and waiting while taking the train to his coaching job one day. Checking his phone, he saw his eta locked behind 30 more stops — just to pass one borough. And he remembered thinking, “We managed to build all of this… and it comes back every so often. Like the sense of wonderment at— how much there is.”

My eta at Newark Airport from the PATH line is five thirty now (would I be leaving enough time to get through security?) The city is so big — while I worry, roughly eight million pairs of hands are clapping at a jazz club, chugging the last shot of a red bull while flying across a business portfolio, fucking another pair of hands for the two hundredth time, sitting on a fire escape and flicking a Marlboro stub onto a pile of ancient butts. I can’t miss my flight, I can’t. I am in a state of motion. If the wheels lift off I will don a pilot uniform like Frank Abagnale and fly to one of the hundred international destinations from Newark. The city seems a many limbed spider with legs arching into these countless cities. I think I will write now — people have read almost eighty thousand books written about New York. Where else would you write, if not here in this city?

Andre and I hugged at an Ethiopian restaurant just north of Columbia Campus. He sported a trimmed goatee and two small silver earrings now. Having grown up together in a small town in New York State, we swapped gratitude for where we were now. He’d always been the class clown in our mutual friend group and we shared the quality of having been nonwhite stem track kids from a suburbia that was over eighty percent white and ninety percent athletically focused. It was a town where the Fall football games drew all eight hundred members of the class out, D.A.R.E. drug programs tried desperately to curb the smell of mango JUULs in the middle school bathroom, and the class would trudge obediently back home clutching a diploma won from four years at a local college. The guarantee of leaving that stagnant town was never quite certain. The city felt like it couldn’t have been more different, as we surprise Facetimed mutual friends from back home and talked about the art Andre was making outside of his Biochem major. After his first time selling art at an event called the Morningside Art Exchange, people would send him photos of the prints they’d bought from him posted up on their walls. “It made me feel like I was a part of something so much grander,” he told me, “I didn't just passively live in New York anymore… I'm partaking in the greatest form of creativity and expression.”

After paying our egregious lunch bill, we squeezed an hour out to wander around the Moma (students get a discount of $17) for a Ferris Bueller’s day, before meeting Emily outside Tomi, a Japanese jazz club in Midtown. Just coming from an event by Columbia, she was wearing a white button down shirt and several silver rings, and the three of us caught up on lost moments from the past year. Emily and my parents being friends, we’d known each other since first grade, when she used to bully me for wearing a layer of pjs under my pants in the winter. We’d gone to the same Chinese community classes, we’d competed in the same math programs and Science Bowl team. We joked about old friends with Andre and she reflected too on how different the city was from home. Living in the city was like drinking from a fire hydrant, “there's so much stuff everywhere that you just take in what you can.”

In New York, there will always be someone weirder than you. “There's always going to be that person wearing the crazy outfit, doing the crazy thing, saying crazy things.” Andre said, but that broadens the scope of friends you can make. The city is designed to be walkable, social, active. People were constantly putting together events, like huge picnics in Central Park, so as a student, you just had to make an effort to meet people; though never having skated before college, Andre would now find time to skate with friends from Upper East Side down to the tip of Manhattan while sightseeing on weekends.

“It's a perfect place to try things.”

After the show, Andre and I embraced again, and Emily and I trained to the Brooklyn Bridge with my Caravan friends. Though the Statue of Liberty was hidden in the darkness, Manhattan’s countless lights still beat back this jealous night. Because they were surrounded by so many cultures and differences, kids growing up in the city tend to develop their identity early on, Emily told me. You have to lean into your thing heavily. Living in the city, “It feels like the center of the world in a way,” Emily said. “And that sounds so conceited but it's one of the few places that has worldwide recognition and a worldwide presence within the city.”

The last stop of the 1 train before the PATH line, the sparkling hall of the World Trade Center is lined with rows of thin white arches like the rib cage of a massive whale. It is still the picture from my camera roll, taken ten years ago when my hair was buzzed short like a little monk’s. Outside the doors, one solitary piping hot dog stand is my only defense against the cool city air and the looming heights of the WTC. Its silvery gray scales outstrip the glassy windows of countless surrounding buildings, each competing for first place in a world stripped of the dark. Starry eyed and blind to any blotches on the building walls, I’m loathe to leave my friends and this weekend behind. Would you do it anywhere else? Scale the heights of the Empire State Building. Take the train over thirty stops just to pass a borough. Would you have it any other way?

Words: Andrew Tao

Photos: Montserrat Urbina, Kyle Garcia Takata

Design: Michael Kong