mourning my new york
I think I've finally made my peace with the fact that I'm never going to be able to live in New York City or its vicinity. I always believed that somehow, I would be able to will myself back home again, not just to a place, but to a mindset that had to do with good public schools, progressive teachers, likeminded friends who were willing to fight for their convictions that might have to do with something about art and politics and a commitment to something more than hustling some one or something for profit. Well, amazing shrinking academia, the New Economy, Rudolph Giuliani, the real estate boom, endless it seems now, and my increasingly dissenting views in academia have made this dream almost completely impossible.
I always thought that eventually I would raise Leo in New York, however hard it was going to be. He was going to go to a neighborhood school (in my imagination, I started with Manhattan, and then had us move to Brooklyn) and then get into Stuyvesant High School. We were going to go to Curtis' and Tania's in Montauk for a little relief from the summer heat. The multicultural reality of everyday life would be more than some bureaucratic notion, thought up by reformists to make themselves look good.
I was going to be able to learn more Yiddish from cab drivers (except now it would probably be Sikh). I would be able to take Leo to the Met when no one was there. He would go to City Center with his school class and do the inevitable Children's Theater interactive activity just like me.
I left New York City unthinkingly after graduate school, never realizing what it would mean never to live on those mean streets again. I was sick of the noise and the hard commute on the L train, the perpetual financial uncertainty. I didn't realize what I was giving up until many years later. But then when I have returned for visits over the intervening years, despite my happy rediscovery of the accent, the hustle, I realize that it's not my city any more, and that maybe it never was. I was always for getting by on as little as possible and that is not really an ethic by which one can survive in that place. But New York taught me to be idealistic, just as it it taught me to dream tinselly dreams of glamorous impoverishment that are like the outdated currency of a deposed regime.
I always thought that eventually I would raise Leo in New York, however hard it was going to be. He was going to go to a neighborhood school (in my imagination, I started with Manhattan, and then had us move to Brooklyn) and then get into Stuyvesant High School. We were going to go to Curtis' and Tania's in Montauk for a little relief from the summer heat. The multicultural reality of everyday life would be more than some bureaucratic notion, thought up by reformists to make themselves look good.
I was going to be able to learn more Yiddish from cab drivers (except now it would probably be Sikh). I would be able to take Leo to the Met when no one was there. He would go to City Center with his school class and do the inevitable Children's Theater interactive activity just like me.
I left New York City unthinkingly after graduate school, never realizing what it would mean never to live on those mean streets again. I was sick of the noise and the hard commute on the L train, the perpetual financial uncertainty. I didn't realize what I was giving up until many years later. But then when I have returned for visits over the intervening years, despite my happy rediscovery of the accent, the hustle, I realize that it's not my city any more, and that maybe it never was. I was always for getting by on as little as possible and that is not really an ethic by which one can survive in that place. But New York taught me to be idealistic, just as it it taught me to dream tinselly dreams of glamorous impoverishment that are like the outdated currency of a deposed regime.
2 Comments:
Dear Ms. Lui:
after finished this artical, i sense a sadness about you might leaving New York.especailly you even imagined what kind life will be if you raise Leo in New York!
anyway, at the end of your story, i think it's must be complicated to describe your feeling to New York,was it home or just a spot in life?
student from TNUA
KiM
Let's just say that New York was a non-geographical idea of home that I have had to give up!
Now Leo will be Californian and not just Californian, but Orange County Californian, and I'm not quite sure what that will mean!
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