Manhattan

Impinging upon a full year in New York is a whimsical sentiment, I feel these foreign faces have imprinted a familiar shade on me. 

Let me tell you, Reader, of a story when I was 11. Cindy, my only close acquaintance in elementary school in Toronto, had haughtily told her mom in English that Lisa hasn't ever read Nancy Drew nor Geronimo Stilton books. That, in comparison, she has finished both series and enjoyed them. 

She knew that I couldn't understand English well enough to answer her articulately in English, much less to read those books. It was my 4th month in the North American continent. 

Perhaps it was her effort to impress her mom, or a childish tease at an immigrant's poor English--- she succeeded. Her mom said that her Cindy is the smartest, and some children can't read yet. Cindy's mom wanted to see me hurt, so she said it loud and clear, in Chinese.  

But I was the Head Girl in Beijing! My fragile ego felt tremors. (Interestingly, they never warn you that you would endure much more degrading insults as you age--- but I digress). It was a slap across my face, nonetheless. 

I remember looking unwaveringly into Cindy's mom's eyes and said in Chinese: "it's okay if one can't read, but it would be detrimental if one doesn't know how to be a good person." 

My English grammar is perforated, my diction is seldom synchronized, many have tried and failed to decipher my accent. It's true. But what business do you have against me? 

I still haven't read a single page of Nancy Drew books. I liked Geronimo Stilton though. 

There has been since plentiful quiet antagonization and undue collusive efforts that I, again and again, invite graciously. It means that I must be doing a countercurrent act, a subversive act. My childhood was pervious to these mercurial social forces, mostly multicultural infiltrations. 

I've lived in Beijing for 10 years, Toronto for 2 years, San Francisco for 7 years, Los Angeles for 2 years, New York for 1 year. The bravest people I've met thus far have been in New York: must be something in the water. New Yorkers are apathetic multi-million leveraged investors, legacy journalists under chateau parkas, opportunistic world-class cyclists, and enterprising youths abiding hundred-year traditions... 

But more specifically, perhaps ever since coming to New York, the most comical I've heard on one company is Goldman Sachs. My mentor Iris Price tenured at GS for 10 years and found it too monotonic. I've spoken to a securities associate who didn't enjoy how little work there was--- he was averaging 10-15 hours of actual work, yet he came out to be the top 5% performer in the department. A friend of a mutual friend has voiced intention to leave GS for opportunities in the Bay Area. How goes the Goldman handcuffs? 

We must understand that all that pronounces status or grandeur are appealing to our pride, but they are ever so transient and inconstant. We should truncate our prideful nature, or at least base it upon concepts of longevity. Furthermore, it seems to me that to preserve and to ground the entity you must exist as an idea, to never deviate too far from it. The great men of our time have adhered to one principle and one principle only. The punishment for the great, to have their livers eaten by eagles, is to subjugate them to the state of mediocrity--- to make them assimilate with the generalists.

A Manhattan-dwelling corporate worker may disagree with me here: "curtailing one's desires for the greater good" is the most utilitarian form of indoctrination that any government can levy onto its citizens. Just like religious group can preach to its disciples that exercising self-control yields spiritual reprieve. It is utilitarian because they are so many disillusioned individuals who are comfortable churning inside a capitalistic mill. As am I. 

Restlessness overtakes me in passing. I sometimes glance outside of the office window, I imagine the skies concave in, crack, and burst open. I would see roaring riptides flooding the metropolis, purging the corridors like Holocene. Across the Manhattan skyline, I'd imagine a Leviathan's tentacles torching the towering cumulonimbus clouds. Over the train tracks, the subway would contort into a tortuous state underground.

I went to tycoon John D. Rockefeller Jr's Rockefeller Center where Diego Rivera's mural "Man at the Crossroads" was originally painted. Highly controversial, he provoked leftists and communists groups by installing Lenin in the painting. This commissioned fresco was chiseled off from the famous Manhattan lobby in 1934. Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, while a crooked depiction of architectural history, models Roark from Louis Sullivan. The father of architecture, Louis Sullivan designed the Bayard-Condict Building from his long-time beloved Chicago School architectural style. I saw the intricate designs from below on Bleecker street after work with some ice cream in hand. A hundred years ago, this city was the epicenter of zealots, patriots. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “it is up the introspective eye to find beauty in unruled land”, I am grateful to have touched that same wall that was once touched by a visionary, I am grateful to live in modern-day Damascus, modern-day Alexandria. 

Excelsior--- ever upward. That is the New York State motto. How exciting and how endearing!

Find me in New York!