The grasping of straws

alienation and locality in nyc

Witnessing two in-state Berkeley students ask each other “where are you from” parallels a game of ping pong in which the paddles edge closer and closer, moving faster and faster.

SoCal, LA, a neighborhood, a school, a point of contact two degrees away.

I see the narrowing in and remain a mere oblivious observer, as if the conversation slowly slips away from what my naked human eye can see. It disappears into the microscopic. I’m asked the same question.

The east coast.

Where?

Delaware.

Oh.

Although it’s unstated, I zoomed in too far, too fast. I can see the uncomfortable surprise, the uncertainty, the unfamiliarity — see, I’m stepping on toes with my proximity. My next breath is usually an apology.

South of New York.

Ohhh!

Delaware is a 4 and a half hour drive south of New York — a drive which bleeds beach towns into highway foliage into stained city sidewalks, a drive my eyes have seen many times over. My eyes have seen the mood swings of the city: stripped down in the sticky humidness of an east coast summer, bundled and adorned in holiday attire, chirping and dethawing in the spring. But to say that I am a New Yorker is not even a misunderstanding. It is a claim to fame that is simply untrue, a lie, a misdemeanor, an offense to the locals who stand in as the rooted trees in a concrete jungle. But I cannot shake the precedent that to be from New York is to be from somewhere. The only remarkable thing people know about Delaware is that it’s home to Joe Biden, who is actually from Pennsylvania.

As we navigate the subway, my friends look to me as if I am a local. What would we do without Waverly here? Suddenly my origins are worth something. And I find myself stepping into the role of a resident, familiar with the streets and public transit and geography of Manhattan. Most of me revels in the recognition, the opportunity to show what years of weaving in and out of the city have taught me. But I am a princess sleeping on an unknown pea. And there is a lump somewhere unplaceable, a tumor growing in my subconscious.

I am not from here.

No matter how hard I try, I cannot make myself be from here.

It is a part, if not the entirety, of the human condition to want to feel special. We grip onto the strands of our identity which differentiate us, yank them into the center of ourselves, give them enough attention until we question who we are as individuals without them. And so I find myself desperate to prove that, here, I am not like everyone else. I am not a tourist. I am better than a tourist.

And I am clawing

grabbing

grasping

for straws.

For pieces of evidence from my past which prove that I am somebody from somewhere. When I turn around on my knees, holding scraps in my hands, begging and pleading to be seen, I face no one but myself.

[either go into how no one else really cares about this or save it for the end]

In reality no one else cares if I am a local or a tourist, a somebody or a nobody.

Decades of honeysuckle

The first time we drove into New York, my mother still called me bumblebee. She says she still remembers me looking out the car window as a baby, eyes glued to the city lights. That’s what I forgot to mention about the drive. Before you hit the stained sidewalks, you see the city sparkling, and it makes up for the lack of stars. And it is the nature of the night which makes the bright brighter, the city more vast, the eyes wider.

Bumblebee is an apt name because every time I return to the city, I am buzzing. In every encounter a new flower trembles and wakes — each a honeysuckle I picked apart, ate, and savored as a child. When I am honest with my origins, I am pushed to belittle the garden to nothing. What hurts the most in this denial is that as much as I have seen the city in her complexity, she has seen me in mine. She has seen my family visit the Christmas market in Bryant park year after year. Seen my sister and I bake brownies in a Queens apartment at 2 AM and eat all the edges before the morning. Seen me awake screaming from a nightmare, breathless on a lumpy futon. Seen me nearly faint on the Brooklyn Bridge. As I stayed with my brother throughout the summer, she was able to see me grown, tipsy in jazz clubs and studying in the Stavros library. She has seen me smile and buzz and cry and scream, held me throughout time, borne witness to my vulnerability and nakedness.

During our short weekend trip, my parents make the drive up from Delaware, eager as always to treat friends and family to dim sum in Chinatown. I find myself placed in the center of busy carts buzzing around me. My mother has always been one to do things for herself, but I hear her over the din.

Wilson, get me those durian pastries.

My dad asks the waiter for them in Chinese, and I realize for the first time in my life that I have only ever heard him speak Cantonese in Chinatown, Manhattan. Even though I was not born here, he was. And even though it is not my history to take pride in, this is one of the straws I show to people as evidence of my roots. Suddenly, I am presented with the knowledge that my father is a bumblebee who has honeysuckle of his very own. And together we create a field that spans across time and space, across decades, across lifetimes. When we return to this place, the place of his birth, the place where his father ran a Chinese restaurant for years, does he face himself as I do? When he sees his reflection, does he see somebody from somewhere?

Words: Waverly Choy

Photos: Waverly Choy

Design: Khankamol Chor Kongrukgreatiyos (Jan)