Ya See It?

We rode along with the Manhattan skyline in the distance.  I made a big deal of it.  “There it is.  Ya see it?”  Certainly in the twenties or the thirties or the forties or the fifties or the sixties or the seventies or the eighties or the nineties or perhaps even most of the naughts it was unique unto the world.  My brother in law has landed in the U.S. first time and I want him to be blown away by things.  The skyline though, cannot pack the same punch as it might have once done.  “That part up there is mid town, and that is the Empire State Building.  And that’s . . . that’s down town.  That is where the twin towers used to be.”  You can’t introduce the city without a discussion of loss. 

Up out the Holland Tunnel.  I imagine that the quality of the buildings up close will be different.  Now you’ll be impressed.  “New York City isn’t the capital of the country, nor the state, but that is the City Hall.” The driver plods across lower Manhattan and gets us on the FDR Drive.  We’re heading up to Third and Forty Second.  I need to take a call with my brand new US SIM card and I can only break away for a moment to say to my brother:  “That there’s the U.N.”

Later, after we’ve checked in and splashed water on our faces, the cab up to Central Park South is plodding.  “Wow.  The traffic is awful, just like Beijing.”  Yes.  I suppose that's about right.  “It looks like Shanghai.”  I can understand why you’d say that.  I’ve known my brother in law for nearly twenty years but this is his first few hours in the U.S.  Usually I am welcoming people to China and expect that they will be suitably impressed.  They generally stitch together a combination of things that dazzle and things that disappoint.  This direction is less familiar for me but no less laden with expectation.  I have to control myself from disagreeing with and lecturing on every epiphany he offers up. 

The dinner is excellent.  His first bite of local food elicits an “ooh. “   I’ve been warned that the chicken here at Jams is their specialty and it is indeed remarkably juicy.  The wine is memorable for the first glass or so.  “I am a foreigner” he realizes for the first time in his life.  And he needs a lighter.  He hasn’t had a cigarette in fourteen hours or so.  I march across the Korean market and, spying a tray of mini lighters behind the counter, ask the proprietor for one.  Instinctively I thank him in Korean and he takes this with a smile, nonplussed.  Now my brother-in-law can stand outside and have his first ChungHwa in Manhattan.   

Tuesday, 12/12/17