Jiro Dreams of Winchester

It was a few days before Commencement and we were eating at a sushi restaurant on Chapel. Seated next to us was a table of graduating seniors and their parents, so thrilled to stop paying college tuition, that no extravagance felt too great. Courtney and Kyle had each finished their last final exams, and along with Kyle’s fiancée Jean, the four of us were out celebrating, too. We wouldn’t have been able to articulate it at the time, but we were not just celebrating graduation, or even the end of the year – but what felt like something bigger.

Kyle is over six feet tall and lanky, with the kind of exaggerated limbs that bring to mind the inflatable tube men outside of used car dealerships, and a head of red hair so at odds with his skin tone you could swear it was dyed. Jean, his fiancée of four months, is nearly a foot shorter, a Korean American as at home in New Haven as anywhere, but nowhere more proud than of her hometown of Cleveland. It wasn't the first time we were out like this; I was living with Kyle when I started dating Courtney, and the two first met on wooden stools in our kitchen.

I caved and ordered a Yale Roll – the sweet taste of eel heightened by wasabi and paired with the crunch of tempura, the fried tails of the shrimp still on. Jean ordered a couple of smaller rolls, and took generous swipes at Kyle’s plate of chicken teriyaki, the way Courtney and I sometimes end up eating more of each other’s meal than our own. It reminded me of the sushi restaurant on Whalley that the four of us had eaten at two years prior, right before my own Commencement, back before I could even imagine ever moving back to New Haven to live in the same city as them again.

As if reading my mind, Jean started in: “If it weren’t for you meeting Courtney,” she asked me, “do you think we would all be together here like this?”

I looked down at my plate and scenes from the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi filled my mind. The film profiles Jiro Ono, a consummate perfectionist and 80-year-old owner of a Michelin three-star restaurant in Tokyo, who has dedicated his life to the craft of sushi. His attitude toward making sushi extends to parenting: the younger of his two sons, Yoshikazu, who has worked under Jiro since he was a teen, will eventually face the prospect of taking over the restaurant and working there until he retires. Whenever I think of him, I can’t help but feel a little remorseful: a man forever bounded by circumstance, never able to escape the seeming inevitability of his lot. 

The answer, of course, was no. Had it not been for speed dating, Courtney and I would never have met, and, by the odd and serendipitous turn of events that is some combination of choice, chance, and destiny, would not have made it through twelve months of long distance, culminating in my decision to relocate – jobless and without direction – from Beijing to my once-temporary home of New Haven. To their credit, Kyle and Jean would have tried to get me to come back regardless, but leaving any college town is like ripping the bandage off a big, nostalgic wound; no one in their right mind would willfully incite the same pain again.

And yet, there had already been a precedent. When I graduated from Oberlin, I moved to China for two years, only to return, living less than a mile away from my old house, working, and taking classes with undergrads who resembled my old college friends in everything but name. It was lonely and isolating at first. There is always unease about returning to a place, like society reminding you that you couldn’t hack it in the real world, or that you had failed to launch in the first place. But consciously or not, I have lived on college campuses for nearly all of my adult life. I thought about Jiro’s son Yoshikazu again. There seemed to be an inevitability about moving back to New Haven, some incorrigible cyclical fate that pulled me and wouldn’t let go. 

*

I went over to Kyle and Jean’s apartment four times in the week leading up to Commencement. I knew this would probably be the last time I would see them for a while, and, like replaying the boss stage in a video game, I wanted to get the ending right. Before Jean moved to New Haven, Kyle and I had been housemates in a fraying, purple house on Winchester, in a two-story apartment that we shared with three other people. Two years later, he still lives in the same building, but on the ground floor apartment much better suited for a couple, with a guest bedroom and a bathroom that doesn’t smell like college. Even still, the place conjured memories of our old life together: the morning oatmeal, movie nights with the rental projector, the compost bin that everyone loathed but me. 

When I came over, I drew from his stable of sundry alcohol and watched the Cavaliers game on TV while Kyle packed. Jean wore a pair of striped pink pajamas like we were still living together, her mood riding on every made basket or missed shot. Kyle had three huge piles in the living room: things he would keep, things to giveaway, and things to throw out. He was deliberating over the sum total of his possessions, planning to take what he needed in a car across the country to Denver, where he and Jean would be living for the foreseeable future. 

He wasn’t the only one planning to move; in August, Courtney and I will be making our own road trip across the country, terminating in Seattle, where Courtney will be working. It is not unusual to want to leave New Haven; I don’t know many recent graduates who will be sticking around. The plan is for me to eventually move out there too, after I finish my work contract next February. After the drive, Courtney will stay in Seattle and I’ll fly back to New Haven, to move into a shared house much like the one I left on Winchester, in the city I can’t seem to leave. 

During the halftime show, Kyle reached from the top of his keep pile and tossed me his old high school yearbook. It wasn’t long before I found his photo. His face looked the same, but his hair was longer then, a thick red fro that encircled his head like a rainbow. The back page was full of autographs and messages – jokes, memories, hopes for the future. I remembered my own high school yearbook then, back before Facebook existed, even before permanent email addresses were widely used. My mom’s home address was printed along with our landline number, like we didn’t have another way to stay in touch. It felt like there was so much at stake, a time in our lives when we actually had to worry that we might never see each other again. 

I looked up at Kyle and sneaked a glance at the other things in his keep pile, mostly notes and books and old memorabilia from Yale. But when I asked him about it, he said that a lot of it was actually from his undergraduate days, in 2007, long before he came back to New Haven for grad school. 

“Did you have any idea four years ago that you would end up here again?” I asked him. In his hands was a bulldog plush toy, which he moved haltingly between the three piles as if it were a planchette for an Ouija board. Four years ago, he and Jean were both working in New York, and had only recently started dating. Now they were engaged to be married, ready to start a new life together halfway across the country.

“It’s useless to try and make plans that far down the line,” he said finally, relegating the stuffed toy to the giveaway pile. He spoke with the careful, deliberate tone that politicians sometimes use to deliver speeches. “It’s futile to try and predict the next four years, given how unpredictable the last four were,” he said. “No one can foresee the future.”

*

A few days after we had sushi together, Kyle’s upstairs neighbors threw a going away party. Kyle and Jean were out of town at a wedding, but I knew Morgan, one of the guys who lived there, and practically invited myself over. They called themselves MAMBA now – nearly all were graduating with MAs and MBAs, like getting one degree wasn’t enough. It had been a few years since I'd lived there, but the apartment was a lot like I remembered it from the days Kyle and I hosted parties: silver disco ball hanging from a ceiling beam, metal folding table stretched over the second floor balcony, beer and liquor on the checker-tiled island in the kitchen. 

“Welcome home,” Morgan said, when I reached the second floor landing. It was the apartment I had introduced Kyle to at the outset, setting off a chain reaction. I agreed to move in on the spot, never having seen more than a photo, and without knowing who I’d be living with. Unconsciously, I kept searching the apartment for vestiges of my former life: the IKEA bedframe and desk in my old bedroom, the leather couch I hauled in a trailer from Queens. I delved surreptitiously in kitchen cabinets for mugs I’d never recovered, tried to exhume memories from DVD cases, dishrags, magnets – the mundane objects I’d left behind. 

When I first met Kyle, we were both in long-distance relationships, making twice-monthly trips to New York. It was the most significant relationship I had been in before I met Courtney, and I thought about how in the four years that Kyle had known me, just how much had changed. The one constant, though, was the parties on Winchester: the speakers that skipped and overheated, strangers dancing in dark corners, Jell-O shot stains that still clung to the wall – immutable as the passing of time. It wasn’t like graduating from high school; I wasn’t worried about not seeing Kyle or Jean again. But it didn’t lessen the degree to which I would miss them, miss Winchester, miss this whole city when I eventually leave it. 

Seeing Winchester from the outside felt like coming full circle, jamming the first memories I’d had of this place right up against some of the last. New Haven, unlike most cities, is small enough to feel ownership over, to know when a business is foreclosed on, or to get a call when an old acquaintance passes through town. I thought about the two brand-new colleges being built catty-corner to the street, and how that was going to change the neighborhood. I felt like the last guy hanging around a college town after all his friends had left, wondering how nothing ever stays the same for too long. 

On the way out, I paused near the front door. I remembered one time when a drunken neighbor had come to one of our parties, thrown up on the sofa, and started to get physical with some of the other guests. We dragged him to the door, and he promptly fell down the stairs on his way out. Part of me wanted to know what would come of the place next, to see who would be there to take up the mantle. I contemplated what it might be like to move back to Winchester with an entirely new group, and how, after living in my first grown-up apartment with Courtney, it would almost certainly feel like regressing. But I remembered, too, that had it not been for living with total strangers, I might never have met Kyle and Jean to begin with.

I thought about how Yoshikazu must feel about his father’s imminent retiring, that amidst the pressure and the speculation, he’s still taking it one day at a time. He may continue in his father’s footsteps or, against all expectation, he may not. He knows as well as I do: the only surefire way to plan for anything is to let it happen.

White Wedding, Red Wedding

The fireworks started just after midnight. The four of us – me, Andy, Rebecca, and Eric (their English names) – stood outside, waiting for them to go off. A large, red papercutting hung on the front door of the apartment complex, its Chinese characters signifying “double happiness” – two stick figures joined in an embrace, the perfect pictographic embodiment of marriage. 

An archway composed of pink and red balloons swayed in front of the weather-beaten doorway. Staring up, I counted at least seven stories, the lights either dimmed or absent in every window. Nothing about this scene struck my companions as unusual—they had partaken in multiple weddings as guests, but I was attending my first. It would take place in the northern city of Taiyuan, fifty miles from the rural Chinese university where I taught English. 

Taiyuan served during the 19th century as the center of the Chinese banking industry. It is now better known as a seat of heavy industry dominated by coal barons. The region produces a quarter of China’s coal, which is used primarily to fuel the country’s bustling steel industry, currently the biggest in the world. Coal also transformed Taiyuan into one of the ten most polluted cities in the world and a boomtown home to the triumvirate of Western globalization: Walmart, McDonald’s, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Like all get-rich-quick cities in China, Taiyuan was prone to its share of ostentation.

When the fireworks went off, they sounded like an artillery shell exploding, and I had to cover my ears. A light rain began to fall in neat symmetry with the combusted paper. No one seemed concerned that the noise might wake up the other residents – they knew they could get away with it. The fireworks, I learned, warded off evil spirits before the wedding day; it would have been bad luck for anyone to protest. 

The display felt both familiar and foreign. As a half-Chinese American, I had spent all my life cognizant of Chinese culture but had few chances to engage with it directly. The decision to teach in China, conceived partly as an effort to better understand my identity, ended up only obscuring it further. I was seen not as Chinese but as a Westerner, a harbinger of American culture. It didn’t matter what traditions I professed to know; cultural rituals appeared rooted firmly in place. 

Weddings are perhaps the most enduring cultural ritual of all, a rite of passage celebrated in one form or another by practically every culture in the world. As strange as it felt to be the only American, it was also exhilarating, like I was party to a secret. I wanted to understand what it meant to be both Chinese and American, where one ended and the other began. 

Something about that image – standing, as an anomaly, amidst the fireworks – came to mind again, nearly five years later, on the eve of my first American wedding – my sister’s – in a suburb of Philadelphia.

*

Allentown, Pennsylvania might rightly be called the Taiyuan of the American Industrial Revolution. Located firmly in the Rust Belt, the city was once a hulking industrial powerhouse, home to the largest known deposits of anthracite coal found in the Americas and the second-largest steel producer in the country. But it was a city already in decline for decades due to the rise of automation and deindustrialization. On the commute to the hotel, I passed a neighborhood housing office, two police precincts, a Western Union, and a 24-hour laundromat across the street from a cemetery. 

I drove to Allentown with my girlfriend, my Chinese American mom, and my mom’s boyfriend. For the better part of a week, my mom and I had debated the merits of conducting a Chinese tea ceremony as part of the wedding. The tea ceremony is usually the centerpiece of a Chinese wedding. The bride and groom pay respects to their elders by serving them tea, often in exchange for money-filled envelopes. In so doing, they are welcomed into their spouse’s family and – because in China weddings are not typically presided over by a minister – become symbolically married.

The plan was to stage the tea ceremony at the rehearsal dinner on Friday, the evening before the wedding day. The Italian restaurant had been notified, and the bride and groom had already purchased matching red and yellow changshan and qipao. But at the last minute, my mom backed out.

“It just wouldn’t feel right,” she said, by way of explanation. Our extended family arrived Saturday, and thus would miss the ceremony. 

“Wouldn’t it be more respectful doing it partway than not doing it at all?” I countered. The majority of my younger Chinese relatives had, like my sister, married outside of their race. Almost none chose to have a tea ceremony. “I just think having something celebrating our heritage should be at the wedding,” I persisted. 

All of John’s, my sister’s fiancée’s, family was white; Allentown, as of the 2010 census, was 2% Asian. The absence of the tea ceremony felt to me like a loss – both to my heritage and to the wedding. The sum total of Chinese culture could be boiled down to the sugar-dipped fortune cookies sitting beside our name cards at the restaurant. 

“Some things about tradition can change,” my mom replied to stave off the conversation. We both agreed on this point, only in different ways. Change for me meant altering the guest list for the tea ceremony; change for her meant doing away with it entirely. I was the only one who had lived in China, but I could never claim to have two Chinese parents. Between place and identity, what, in the end, should be the greater arbiter for culture?

*

Rebecca and Eric’s apartment was both newly renovated and almost completely empty, save for a big screen TV (a wedding gift) and a gigantic wedding portrait that spanned nearly one full wall of the living room. In the photo, they were wearing all white – Eric in a tuxedo and bowtie and Rebecca in a tiered wedding dress topped with a veil – and standing in a bright green field beset with palm trees. The whole scene looked patently un-Chinese, a feature I would continue to ponder throughout the wedding. 

Rebecca was one of my most competent graduate students. In a class of 35, she easily outpaced her peers in English. When Rebecca invited me to the wedding, she insisted on a “Western” ceremony, uttering the word like Marco Polo might have spoken about “The Orient.” Traditional Chinese elements would remain, she told me, but she wanted to be married to Eric the way she saw it done on “Friends” and “Gossip Girl” – with a priest. The priest, naturally, had to be a foreigner. As the only foreigner Rebecca knew, I was quickly enlisted.

With an influx of money pouring into second and third-tier cities like Taiyuan, China had undergone a cultural transformation. Westernization, once viewed as a foreign scourge under Mao, was embraced during the period of opening up and reform as a metric to compare the development of one Chinese city from another. This attitude was no more prevalent than in Taiyuan, desperate to elevate its status from a provincial mining town to an exemplar of China’s new role on the world stage.

It didn’t matter to the couple that I grew up in an areligious household and never attended church; my identity as an American superseded my cultural allegiance. Nor did it matter that the ritual felt completely incongruous with place or that I had no authority to marry. But like the city of Taiyuan itself, I latched onto the quixotic notion that I could be anyone. I borrowed my roommate’s Chinese-English bible and downloaded a set of vows from a wedding company based in Toledo, Ohio.

On the morning of the wedding, an armada of white and red BMWs picked the wedding party up from the hotel. Rebecca wore curls in her brown-highlighted hair and a large hoop dress – her first of four outfit changes of the day. We drove in a caravan across the city, Rebecca and Eric’s car in front, a small fleet following dutifully behind. 

Outside of the wedding hall, a band of red and yellow-clad performers chanted, beating on drums and crashing cymbals. The ground was still wet from the night before, and firework confetti stuck to the concrete. The venue would host four weddings simultaneously that morning; a photo of each bride and groom, blown up to billboard-size, towered at the entrance. 

Guests seated themselves banquet-style by table, each with a bottle of good baijiu and a tablecloth adorned with traditional wedding sayings. The food arrived, all of it Chinese dishes I recognized—dumplings, cold meat, fish, green beans, dried tofu.

The ceremony started when Eric and Rebecca – newly minted in a frilly light blue dress – rode in on a Jeep. The master of ceremonies gathered them up front on a stage bedecked with a giant LED screen. He had perfect skin and bangs so neatly coiffed that he could have passed as a Korean popstar. There was something oddly incongruous about the whole thing, a Western-style ceremony but in a fundamentally Chinese place.

When my name was called, in both English and Chinese, I introduced the couple and had each recite their vows. Eric, in English, struggled with the line, “I give you this ring, as a symbol of my love,” despite all the times we had practiced it beforehand. I realized he had done it just to appease Rebecca. They said, “I do,” resoundingly, as if declaring a campaign victory rather than a covenant of love. I was reminded of the skits my class performed to practice English vocabulary – students and teacher playing the role of husband, wife, and priest. 

Americans, whether we like to admit or not, find comfort in aspects of our culture projected abroad. Whether it’s Starbucks in Beijing or Coca-Cola in Laos, we like to see ourselves in everything. But at the wedding, the Chinese fascination with the West appeared more like imitation than homage. Taiyuan could afford to create its own traditions in an era of unprecedented economic boom. I couldn’t help feeling that China’s rise, in its quest for reinvention and Western validation, came partly at the expense of its own culture.

When the ceremony ended, I exited to find the street sweepers cleaning up the paper confetti and preparing to usher in the next four couples.

*

John refused to see my sister, Hannah, on the morning of the wedding. He wanted to stick to tradition.

“I’m not going to see her until she’s walking down the aisle,” he said, raising a glass. The decision, like so much of the ceremony, intended to preserve the stalwart, if stodgy, rituals passed down by generations of Americans. I found it oddly charming. Raised by a Chinese mom in New York City, I was enthralled with the idea of participating in my first American wedding.

At 5:30 in the afternoon, we gathered on the second floor of Allentown Brew Works, a downtown restaurant and brewery part of the city’s larger effort to reinvent itself and attract a young, creative class. The redeveloped central business district includes a one-block “Arts Walk,” though it features more juice bars than galleries. Neighboring cities have tried other strategies for revival; Bethlehem converted its foreclosed steel mill into a casino. Reinvention in the Rust Belt is slow and has taken decades. Allentown suffers from double-digit unemployment and a shrinking population. Even if the Chinese tea ceremony did go off as planned, there was still something too affected about it. Unlike Taiyuan’s slick, modernist facelift, Allentown still clings to its old world sensibilities, a relic of a bygone era. 

I watched my little sister walk down the aisle to a keyboard rendering of “Canon in D Major.” We were crowded around two small aisles, John’s family on one side and Hannah’s on the other. Standing at the center of the stage: a genuine ordained minister. She wore long, gray flowing robes and possessed a voice like liquid silver. The bridesmaids wore strapless purple dresses, a nod to my sister’s favorite color. The groomsmen sported purple bowties paired with dove-gray suits that gave us the vague appearance of small-time criminals. 

After the exchange of vows, we shifted upstairs for the reception. The dinner menu offered a choice of crab cakes or filet mignon – neither particularly memorable, but I was comforted by their appearance. I thought an American wedding would never come across as authentic to my Chinese roots, but my family’s presence proved me wrong. At the end of the day, we were all American, no matter the “place” we had come from, the languages we spoke, or the cultures we held dear. 

Couples started getting up to dance. My Asian American relatives swarmed the photo booth, forcing the DJ to make a special announcement to corral them when the couple cut the cake. As I watched them with amusement, I came to a realization: my sister and my married cousins had neither foregone nor forgotten their Chinese culture – they’d simply adapted it. Chinese culture is a part of the fabric of America in a way that American culture is only starting to develop in China. Even this manifestly American-style wedding had become a part of our tradition, too. 

I spotted my mom, standing near a crowded table.

“Isn’t this just great?” she said, throwing her arms around me.

“It is,” I shouted back over the din of Justin Bieber. “But for my wedding, I’m still having the tea ceremony."

*

Originally published in Sage Magazine.

As Pretty As You Make It

It is 8 o’clock on the dot and the asphalt is spread out like a giant blackened fish – yellow stripe down the middle, white markings on either side like scales. The street is dark, save for an errant streetlamp and the light reflecting off the neon sign from the carpark across the street. 

People say that New York is a dangerous place for a woman, but they also probably haven’t lived, like I have, in Nairobi or Delhi or St. Louis. Besides, I haven’t once had to use the Day-Glo pink mace that I keep looped around my keychain like a warning. Still, arriving alone to a stranger’s apartment at night strikes even me as a little dodgy, so I stop outside and fish around in my bag for my phone.

“Pulse check,” I text Mark, just before ringing the bell. There is an elevator just past the all-white vestibule but ever since I convinced myself that not walking up any building less than six flights is eventually going to kill me, I opt instead for the fire stairs nestled by the back wall.

The staircase opens up to a kitchen island flanked by tiger lilies, high ceilings, and stain wood cabinets. To the left are six or eight desks with monitors arranged in a square, and a large couch with a coffee table and projector. The space is immaculate and takes up the entire story, with the kind of checker-tiled floors and mounted artwork you might find in movie depictions of penthouse apartments. I thought for sure I’d be the first one here, but there are already a handful of other people in their twenties talking and sipping drinks in the kitchen.

“I’m sorry I’m early,” I blurt out nervously to the first person I see, a blue-eyed charmer in a blazer and slacks by the door.

“Not at all,” he replies, as he helps me out of my coat. He directs me toward the food and drinks, and, noticing my gaze, adds: “This whole space used to be a loft, but the owner had to convert it because of building codes.” He points past me to the end of the hall where two former bedrooms have been renovated as conference areas. Even the bathroom, with a glass chandelier, has a stick of Old Spice on the counter that makes it feel both lavish and lived-in. “We run our office out of here now.”

He introduces himself, and I recognize his name immediately from the invitation I received in the mail. I still am not entirely sure why I am here – whether this is a recruiting event, a cult, or – judging by the wine chiller and the dozen or so bottles spread out on the converted countertop/bar – a fantastically perverse AA meeting.

I place the Tupperware full of cookies I brought (the invitation said “potluck,” in curvy script) gingerly on the long table in the living room/workspace. 

“Did you make those yourself?” one of the men standing in the kitchen asks. He isn’t particularly tall, but he has nice eyes and is wearing a flannel shirt, and looks like the kind of guy I would have probably tried to go home with in college. 

I nod that I did and curl a loose strand of hair around my ear. I have on a white blouse and a skirt that rides up a little more than I intended. I don’t always like to mention Mark right away to new people. Partly it’s my independent streak – I want to be judged on my individual merits and let people get to know me first. And partly it’s because I like to have a little fun.

I tug gently at the end of my skirt and dart my eyes at the counter. The cookies had melted significantly during the commute over, and the peanut butter and chocolate have begun to congeal. I hide my momentary embarrassment in grandiosity, rocking the container alluringly from side-to-side in front of him. 

“I don’t know if I can trust you just yet,” he says, flashing a skeptical grin. “I mean, how do I know those cookies aren’t poisoned?” I can tell he is equally as curious about the event as I am. If this is indeed a cult meeting, I haven’t yet considered the proverbial drinking of the Kool-Aid, for which my dessert could be prescient. 

“What’s the worst that could happen?” I ask, feigning asphyxiation.

“These days you can never be too careful,” he says, gently waving off my request. I shrug and return the cookies to the table. I have a hunch that eventually he will end up trying one, and tell me that he likes it. 
 
When you live abroad for long enough, you learn to boil your life story down to a sound bite. For me, it is pretty easy: I left New York at eighteen and lived in a half-dozen cities on three continents, only to relocate ninety miles north of it a decade later. As an expat, these sorts of conversations are both unexceptional and integral – making new friends is a survival skill akin to eating or bargaining, and must be exercised like a muscle. So too is learning to recognize the creeps who want to sleep with you just because you’re new in town and don’t know any better. So often those friendships can make or break your experience, but they always start the same way: with you. 

“So, how did you find yourself here?” a shorter girl with curly hair asks, as I grab a spoonful of guacamole from the communal bowl. 

“I’m a sheep without a shepherd,” I hear myself say. “I just wandered into a pasture.”

By now, there are probably about forty of us milling around in the converted loft/office. And of everyone here – innovators, entrepreneurs, quants, creatives – the one thing that we all have in common is that we live in New York. People came to the city from all over, some lifelong residents and others new transplants. I still consider New York home, even though I haven’t lived here since before I was old enough to vote. But things change, neighborhoods gentrify, friends move on. At first they still send you invitations to weddings and baby showers, but pretty soon they get used to you not being around. After a while, you get used to missing things too. 

I still remember the first time I left. It was a few days before my flight and we were eating dinner in New Jersey (don’t ask me why): expensive steak and wine, to celebrate. My dad had Duke Ellington on in the car, and as we drove back home over the George Washington Bridge, he said out loud from the driver’s seat: “She sure is pretty, ain’t she?” 

I looked around, half expecting to find someone other than my brother sitting up in the passenger seat. But he pointed out the window at the skyline as it was coming into view, bright lights reflecting sublimely off the water. I looked up at the skyscrapers with a mixture of awe and revelation. It was pretty, I reasoned, and yet even from just across the river something about it had already looked different, like the city that I was born into was now resolutely and unsympathetically not my own. 

In New Haven, I don’t have the same problem; it was never a city that was mine to claim. I have Mark, my coworkers, my hairdresser. I didn’t think too much about moving there – it was a city like any other, replete with new friendships and new starts. None of my other girlfriends could understand it – with my entire social network still in New York why I was inventing reasons for living anywhere else. 

“It’s only two hours away,” I argued, trying to level with them. “It’s not so bad.” But even then, New Haven started to sound like an overcooked turkey or an iPhone 4; I knew no one who lived in New York would really buy it. 

By the end of the night, I probably had a dozen or more conversations, each one full of the life stories I came to expect from meeting people abroad, only it was here, just a few miles from where I grew up. And each one seemed to wear down my defenses. I still harbor some of my misgivings about New York – the artifice, the cost, the time it takes to get just about anywhere. But it is also exciting the way people described the city as a place of connection and transformation, of movement and energy, a city that’s truly as pretty as you make it.

It is almost midnight when I gather my jacket and get ready to leave. There are still plenty of people left, but the train schedule gets fickle after midnight, and I already know it will be a long trip.

“Those cookies were amazing, by the way,” I hear a voice say. He has a vest on over his flannel shirt and shoots me a look that is half-genial, half-pining. 

“Just don’t blame me if you don’t wake up in the morning,” I say, packing up what is left of them into my bag. 

I tell him that I would stay longer but I have to catch a train back to New Haven. I half-expect him to say something about the commute or whether it wouldn’t just be easier to stay in the city, but instead he asks, simply: “Do you ever think you’ll move back to New York?”

I loop the bag over my shoulder and peer at him from the door. There are some places you choose to go; others, it seems, you can’t fully escape.

From Malacca With Oranges

It was two days and thirteen hours before the New Hampshire primary, where back home Donald Trump, the Republican frontrunner, was inciting Americans to turn out and vote for him like it was their destiny. But halfway around the world, in the ethnically Chinese enclave of Malacca, people were met with a different kind of providence: the Lunar New Year.

For weeks, paper lanterns with golden stalks lined the crowded streets in and out of the city. Grass jelly and chilled longan juice were sold from large fish tanks at corner stalls. A troupe of young men, wearing gold pants tiered with white foil like a wedding cake donned a lion costume and lit firecrackers in front of freshly-swept storefronts, all while amassing red envelopes. 

Rajendra, Sebastian, and I drove down from Kuala Lumpur by taxi, a journey of two hours and almost 100 miles. In retrospect, it would have been vastly more economical to have taken a bus, but none of us, in nearly a week of journeying together, had carved out a particularly strong reputation for advance planning.

Sebastian stepped out of the passenger seat where he had been asleep for the last hour and stretched out his arms. “I can only sleep like that when I’m exhausted,” he professed, shaking his head, “and I haven’t slept well in weeks.”

Rajendra and I, meanwhile, had been talking nearly the entire time since we left KL – uncharacteristic, given my own propensity for sleeping in cars. But the conversation centered on couples and relationships, and whether or not we believed in the concept of fate. 

Shortly after we got out of the taxi, we passed a Malaysian man sitting on a low stool in front of a shuttered jazz bar. By his ankles was a striped Taby so small it couldn’t have been more than a week old. 

“Can I hold it?” Rajendra asked of the tiny kitten, her breath heavy with anticipation. The man shook his head sympathetically, a rueful smile across his face. Instead, he handed each of us an orange, carefully wrapped in wax paper that he picked from a heap by his side.  

“For the New Year,” he said, with a grin. “It will bring you good luck.” I clutched the tiny orange in my hand, the same hue and only slightly smaller than the cat. For someone who endorsed the idea of good luck, I had remarkably little trust in fate. 

“I don’t believe that there’s one person out there for each of us,” I said, picking up where our conversation in the car had left off. “It sets society up for failure by fixating on this idea of a soulmate.”

We were walking by a canal with water that was a muddy brown. A small ferry was guiding passengers around the narrow bends and allowing them to dock at points along the shore. I watched the people sitting out on window balconies and verandas and tried to imagine Malacca as Asia’s answer to Venice, a city I had seen in photographs but had never visited. 

Rajendra and Sebastian, by contrast, had spent considerable time in Italy, and joked that they knew their way around Europe the way I did Asia, as if each were a neighborhood one could inure in a day. Rajendra was about my age, and like me, was also in a relationship. Sebastian was nearly a decade her junior, and had been referred to by strangers interchangeably as both Rajendra’s boyfriend and brother. While I imagined us more as a polyandrous trio, I saw their point; I found myself wanting to hold Rajendra almost as much as I did protect her.

“I think there’s a time and place for a soulmate,” Sebastian said, not looking up from his phone, which he had used to switch Tinder to Discovery mode. “I’m just not quite there yet.”

Southeast Asia, as the epicenter of global sex tourism, presented no shortage of temptations. Within minutes, we had walked past a rent-by-the-hour hotel called “Fingers Crossed” and a half-dozen foot massage parlors moonlighting as brothels. At night in KL, it was not uncommon to be accosted by a woman with a plunging neckline and stiletto heels, all too eager to talk. For some, it was enough to override their defenses: the flash of skin under an anonymous guise.

“I don’t necessarily believe in a soulmate,” Rajendra said, taking a sip from a whole coconut she bought off the street. “But I do think you’re with who you’re with for a reason.” Her skin, a light mahogany, appeared immune to the scorching midday sun. She was wearing a dress with an open back like a well that if you stared at too long you might fall in. 

“But how will you know if they’re the right one?” Sebastian asked, looking her in the face. Rajendra paused for a moment.

“You’ll just know,” she said, darting her eyelashes at the sky. “Everything happens for a reason.”

It took the better part of the afternoon before we realized we had no way of getting home. At the tourist center in the town square, we booted up Internet Explorer on a Windows 2000 desktop with a scotch-taped sign that warned “NO BROWSING ADULT CONTENT.” But no matter which booking website we tried, every ticket to Kuala Lumpur was sold out.

“It’s the New Year,” I muttered glumly. “Taxis won’t want to make the trip to KL at night.” I looked up at the large sun-bleached city map that hung from the wall like a scarecrow. “Our best bet is to go to the bus station in person.” 

Our driver was in his mid-40s, a Malaysian man with graying hair and a touch of whiskers, but who maintained the rugged handsomeness of youth.

“Work or play?” Talib asked on the way to the station, like they were two choices on a menu. He spoke with an American accent so impeccable I thought for a moment that he was imitating.

“Honeymoon, actually,” I replied, trying my best to keep a straight face. He lifted his sunglasses and looked over at me before inspecting Rajendra and Sebastian through the rearview mirror. 

“He’s lying,” Rajendra said, before Talib had a chance to respond. “We’re just traveling.”

Travel. The word reverberated in my head like a siren. For a moment, I remembered my first time in Malaysia, an age of daring impulses and lower stakes, when every day was a new adventure. A part of me still longed for that feeling, the desire to quit everything and set off on my own, to regain something from my past that was lost. But for the rest of me, travel also served as a reminder of my worst fears about myself – that I am restless, that I can’t stay in one place for too long, that I will always wonder about what could have been. 

As we rounded the corner, I noticed that we had left Chinatown and were driving through a progressively more Muslim neighborhood. I thought about the women we had seen in airless massage parlor windows and smoky Western bars. It was a marked contrast to many of the Muslim women – a majority in the country – who were covered from head to toe in hijab, as if Malaysia had taken extra precaution to safeguard some of its own.

“A woman with one man is difficult enough,” Talib said, noticing my gaze, “but two is just crazy.” He shot a smile at Rajendra and pointed outside the window at the women in the street. “The woman is expected to be faithful. But she also gets blamed for when the man steps out of line.”

I thought about the reasons for why men stray, and how so often the onus falls on the woman—that she didn’t love him enough or that she should have been more understanding. Western religion has historically painted women as temptations, and men, by extension, as slaves to desire, helpless to resist even in the face of moral discord. But most of the debate today still centers on the woman’s role—the best strategies for keeping a man or how she can downplay her sexuality in public. In all the talking, the discussion seems to neglect the more serious issue at hand: why do men cheat, and is there anything that can be done about it? 

At the bus station, we scoured our way around the ticket booths. They were arranged in a tight circle, like the nucleus of a cell, each nearly identical save for the company name on the awning and the teller sitting behind the glass. Radiating out from them in every direction was a corresponding gate where queues of people were lined up to board buses to Johor, Terengganu, Seremban. Everyone in the station was flitting from one ticket booth to the next, trying to outrun the signs in the glass windows showing which routes were already sold out.

“Last three tickets,” Sebastian said, noticeably out of breath. He had done a few loops before finding a booth that still sold tickets to KL. “I had to fight off another group of tourists behind me.” He handed them gingerly to Rajendra like he was smuggling contraband. “Unfortunately, they didn’t have anything later than 6.” 

I checked my watch; we only had a few hours before we would need to be back at the station. I started peering in and out of the other booths, somehow convinced that even though we had barely bought these tickets in time, that there might still be later ones for sale.

“I think it’s this idea that something better is going to come along,” I said to no one in particular. Infidelity stemmed from a kind of anxiousness, I reasoned, of never being satisfied. There is always a false hope that the next person who comes around will be the last.

“What?” Sebastian asked, shooting me a look of sheer bafflement. I shook my head, releasing my nervousness in streaks through my hair. I pointed at the tickets in Rajendra’s hands, wondering what would have happened if we hadn’t found them.

“Think about it,” I said. “Don’t you ever wonder what other directions your lives could have gone?” 

Sebastian fanned open the top of his polka-dot shirt, damp with sweat. “I try not to have any regrets,” he said, though I suspected he was still too young for them. Rajendra walked her sandals in front of her and tugged at the straps of her dress.

“It’s not an easy question,” she said, searching the room. Her lips formed the beginnings of a smile, black hair framing high cheekbones. “At some point you just have to be content.” She looked right at me, her eyes bristling at the ends. “I guess you have to trust a little in fate.”

I thought about where I had come from – how being in a relationship had brought me back to the states from Asia – and how, in a strange way, living in the states had now led me back. Maybe Rajendra was right: that everything happens for a reason. That we are standing at the crossroads of exactly where we need to be.

For the next three hours, we went back into town, and by 5:30, we were in the same position as we were before: desperate to get to the bus station. Only this time, it was rush hour, and there wasn’t a taxi in sight. The street was mired in traffic, and it seemed like the whole city had grinded to a halt. We started walking quickly in the direction of the station, snaking past the lanes of idle cars, and reached a small clearing near an intersection. 

By some miracle, a taxi approached with a gleaming red “empty” sign lit up against the windshield. When I hopped in the passenger seat, it took a moment for me to register. Without his sunglasses, he had looked like someone else, but it was Talib, the very same driver we had had on our first trip to the bus station. 

“I can’t believe it,” I exclaimed, swiveling around to look at Rajendra and Sebastian in the backseat. “This must be a sign.” Talib laughed, pulling the car out into the street.

“Yes, it must,” he said, his eyes trained on the road in front of him. “Something like destiny.”

Pilgrims And Indians

It was a week after the student protests at Yale, and I knew better than to engage in even the most minor form of cultural appropriation, so I passed on both the pilgrim hat and the Indian headdress in favor of a Thanksgiving turkey that I traced in the shape of my hand and cut from a sheet of construction paper before circling around my head.

There were about twenty of us crammed into the combined living room-kitchen of the Crown Heights apartment. It was a lively affair, with scores of strangers vaulting over and between one another for food, and when the couches and chairs finally ran out, Krista turned the bookshelf on its side and told us to sit on that.

The guy sitting next to me was a fellow alum, though we had never met at grad school. He and Krista were old acquaintances, who for a brief period that her friends liked to describe as “rock bottom,” also used to see each other naked. He brushed aside the pilgrim hat that Krista handed him at the door, but the girl he brought with him, waif-thin and holding an Urban Outfitters tote bag, gleefully donned the Indian headdress and sat at the head of the bookshelf.

Trish, like most of the people in the room, was a Manhattan transplant; she had spent most of her life in Tampa and moved to the city after graduation. She was wearing a cut-off graphic tee and a generous amount of eye shadow, and seemed to be one of those rare individuals who could chew gum and eat food simultaneously. She carefully opened her bag and slid her foil-covered dessert to the center of the table.

“Kevin and I met on JDate,” she said proudly, as if she had even lower expectations of the dating service than the rest of our generation. 

“They just make everything so convenient,” Kevin said with a smile, clearing his plate of the last bites of mashed potatoes. “It’s like Seamless, but for dating.” 

I mentioned that I met my girlfriend in New Haven during speed dating, a relic in the matchmaking arena by today’s standards, and Kevin cut me off, brandishing his fork in the air.

“Can you believe the race riots that are happening on campus right now?” he said, indignant. “It’s amazing what a goddamn thing people won’t do for attention.”

Kevin was tall and handsome, with the braggadocio of an ex-college athlete; I didn’t know whether I should hate him or want to be more like him. The desserts had begun to circulate around the table, and Trish’s pie was already on its second helpings.

“What is in this pie?” someone bellowed from across the room. “It’s angelic. I simply must have the recipe.”

“It’s nothing special,” Trish piped up, sporting a wide grin, “just an old recipe.”

“Whatever it is, it’s delicious,” she said again, to a chorus of nods. The pie was golden yellow and nested in a flaky crust that looked like it could have been a stock photo in a Betty Crocker cookbook. I sliced off half of what was left and lopped it onto my plate.

“They’re not riots, they’re protests,” I said, correcting him. “No one’s burning down buildings or anything.”

“Whatever it is, I just think it’s ridiculous that so many people could get offended over a Halloween costume,” Kevin said.
    
I looked around the table at the guests in gold-buckled hats and multi-colored feather headbands, and realized that I was both the most politically correct and also the most absurd: a paper turkey bristling with goose feathers flapping at the back of my head.

“It wasn’t just the costumes,” I tried to explain. “It’s the insensitivity of the administration, the institutional racism that people of color have had to endure for generations.”

I wanted to stop before I got too much on my soapbox. More than anything, I suddenly wished there was enough room to make an excuse about switching seats or getting up to use the bathroom. Instead, I took a bite from the piece of pie on my plate.

“It’s true,” I blurted out, looking at Trish. “This is really good, what’s in it?” 

Trish looked up from her phone, her eyes like two wide saucers gazing at the ceiling, desperately seeking to be anywhere else.

“Either way, you gotta admit,” Kevin countered, steering the conversation back, “the right girl would look damn sexy in a Pocahontas get-up.” 

For a minute, I pictured Trish in the full-on Pocahontas garb: braided black hair, frilled mid-drift, cloth skirt, fake tribal markings. Was it really all that different, I thought, than the versions of ourselves we already choose to portray.

“I’m stuffed,” Trish said, placing two hands on her non-existent stomach. And then, whispering to Kevin: “Can we go now?”

They both stood up from their seats and began to motion for their coats. I got up too, shaking both of their hands. Kevin said how nice it was to meet me before turning to say goodbye to the host.

“Can I tell you a secret?” Trish asked, lips still smacking against the chewing gum. I nodded my head, and she leaned her body in close.

“It’s pudding,” she whispered, pointing down at the dessert. “The whole thing is just JELL-O and pie crust.” She flashed a tight smile. “All you have to do is add milk.”