“…according to the myth it is a town that has existed in many different
parts of the world in many different time periods…”

This is what the artist Cao Fei said about the myth she wrote for her film La Town. Sometimes, my Chinatown is like that mythical town.

I dreamed it up. I dreamed of living there. I dreamed of dashing down
flights of stairs in a hoodie to buy tea and bok choy and mushrooms. I
dreamed of being swallowed whole and anonymous in a sea of Chinese I
understood and Chinese I only heard. I was working at Café China in
Midtown. Most of the kitchen staff lived in Flushing and Elmhurst, and most
of the younger front-of-house staff lived in Bay Ridge and Sunset Park.
They thought I was nuts for wanting to live in Chinatown in Manhattan,
instead of Chinatown in Brooklyn. But they tried to help me. They told me I
should search through ads in the Chinese newspapers. Or go find the flyers
with little tear-off phone number tabs taped on traffic signal and street
light poles. I could barely read Chinese, so all I could do was walk around
looking for the flyers, and if it seemed like the ad was for a room in an
apartment, I would tear off the number, and then coerce one of my coworkers
to call the number for me and get me the details. I’d tried to make the
calls myself first, but when I asked where the apartment was located, I
couldn’t understand the Chinese versions of the names of streets in
Chinatown.

I looked at a bunch of rooms. I looked at the vacant bedroom for rent in
Siu Fung Chiu’s apartment. It had a bunk bed in it that she said had to
stay. Would I sleep on the top or bottom bunk? What would I do with the one
I wasn’t sleeping on? I still dream of this apartment I live in with Siu
Fung Chiu. For a long time, according to the unknowable algorithms of the
T9 predictive text function on my phone, her name—S-i-u—would pop up when I
was trying to text the word “sit.” In the life where I live with her in her
apartment, or rather, our shared apartment, I live in a room that has a
bunk bed in it. Sometimes I sleep on the top bunk, sometimes on the bottom.
Sometimes I miss having a full-size bed, a bed that is not attached to
another bed.

At a different place, the guy showed up to the door wearing sweatpants and
holding a big, rectangular knife; he had been in the middle of chopping up
some raw pork, which lay interrupted, lurid, glistening pink on the round
chopping block balanced over the kitchen sink.

I don’t even like taking baths, but I dream of another apartment that has
only a bathtub, no shower plumbing. In this life, I become extraordinarily
handy, somehow finagling my own makeshift shower attachment. Or I learn to
love taking baths.

Yet another Chinatown exists for me at Mee Sum Cafe. I wake up early and go
to Mee Sum to have 皮蛋瘦肉粥 (Pídàn shòu ròu zhōu) and read a book. Maybe I
have shed all of my old life, and nobody I know now knows me then. Maybe
the world has ended, and Mee Sum still stands.

Every Thursday, I go to Chinese class, through the volunteer-run ALESN and
the YMCA, in the middle school/high school at 100 Hester. It’s a Mandarin
II class that’s not really the appropriate level for me, but it’s
something. Before class I go to Tán tóu wáng Fúzhōu xiǎochī / 潭頭王記鱼丸 to eat
牛雜米粉 / Niú zá mǐfěn and a small order of dumplings. In class I look around
every week, the same one or two dozen students, and every week I wonder how
it is that we all ended up here in this room. Twenty year olds, sixty year
olds, black, white, Chinese, biracial, Korean, Italian, older Cantonese
speakers brushing up on Mandarin. There are a handful of other students
like me, heritage speakers of different levels; a couple of people who took
Chinese in college or studied abroad in China or Taiwan for a semester
decades ago; an EMT trying to learn some useful Chinese phrases and
vocabulary to better administer to the Chinese population in Queens. Almost
everything we learn is too easy, except the characters, which is the real
reason I am there, which nobody, including the teacher, really cares about.
I pipe up when it’s my turn to “role play” in our dialogue practices, and
then painstakingly copy out characters over and over again in my notebook,
nothing sticking. Most likely, though, this is the only way for me to tie
myself to Chinatown, to hold myself responsible to Chinatown, to say I need
to be there, at this time, at this school.

Most likely, even post-apocalypse, there is something static about my
Thursday evening ritual in Chinatown. The train stops, the smoke clears,
and from the ashes I am still on my way to Chinese class. The rest of my
life has been the fantasy, it turns out. It turns out the only thing that
was real was Chinese school, those torturous Sunday morning hours from when
I was four to when I was eighteen, and now this. It turns out the
intervening years, over a dozen years, all of my twenties and more, was a
fiction. I am back now. Back in a public high school during off hours, back
in Chinese class, this time on a different coast. There is a mystery here,
but it’s really only me. I don’t recognize myself, the one who has returned
to Chinese school. I slink around Bayard, Allen and Mott; Eldridge and
Pell, as if I’ve left something here, as if someone has left here for me
some notes, a few clues, essential for my survival.

Sometimes when I talk to my parents on Skype, having run out of things to
say, having run out of updates to give, my dad will ask me if I’ve been to
Chinatown recently. I’m not sure why he asks me this. Maybe he asks me this
because in the late sixties, around 1970, when he was in college in
Illinois, he would come to New York during his summer breaks, and work in a
restaurant owned by a friend or relative of a friend or relative. The
restaurant was in Brooklyn, but he hung out in Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Somehow, when we Skype, although I’m sitting in my apartment in Prospect
Heights and he is sitting with my mom in their house in Newport Coast,
California, our halfway point is in Chinatown. We are meeting in Chinatown.
We’re waiting, sitting on a bench, three in a row, on Forsyth, just outside
the park. We’re sitting at the corner table by the window in Spicy Village,
gathered around the Big Tray Chicken. Maybe I imagined it, but there’s
truth in there. Through the drifting of time and space.

***

There are other Chinatowns in my dreams. The one in Downtown L.A. The
sprawling ones of Alhambra, San Gabriel, Monterey Park. Once, I walked
miles, hours, to get to a Chinatown of sorts—a shantytown Chinese market—in
Budapest, which consisted of rows and rows of shipping containers turned
into stalls and stands and shops and everyone sat around makeshift tables
playing cards with stacks of cash and outside this little city of shipping
containers there was a sign that signaled no cameras and no guns. Everyone
had walkie talkies and as I walked around there was a wave of activity, a
flurry that traveled like a wave, and like a wave, all the shops and stands
and stalls shut down, as I walked through the rows, until there was nobody
and nothing. Maybe I made all of it up.

The truth is, I go to Chinatown to disappear. Sometimes I do. Disappear.
The bus, the train, the bar, the bookstore, anyone, at any point, can
narrow me down: Asian. Chinese. I’m conspicuous, but in Chinatown, I am
gone. Sometimes an old woman will come up to me and ask me directions in
Chinese. Sometimes I can answer, sometimes I know where. But even then, I
am barely visible, just one more person in a crowd.

I am a ghost, careening through the streets of Chinatown. I float to the
shops on Grand Street and hover over the house plants. I float over to
haunt Tasty Hand-Pulled Noodles on Doyers, 21 Shanghai House on Division,
Shanghai Asian Cuisine on Elizabeth. Detached from everyone and everything,
I float over to Pho Grand and Taiwan Pork Chop House, my favorite places to
eat by myself. Read a book while eating. For a post-meal treat, I buy a
knife at Bowery Restaurant Supply.

Cao Fei says that it’s “impossible to tell where or when ‘La Town’ is
occurring.” The Chinatown of my dreams is also something that mysteriously
occurs. It is slippery. It is surprising. Chinatowns in Budapest, in London
or Paris, San Francisco, Philly. In 1982. In some year far off into my
future. In the 1920s on Doyers Street, known then as the Bloody Angle for
its Chinese gang violence. In a boba shop. On a small white plate of 皮蛋豆腐.
Like La Town, the story, the myth of it, comes together organically, “one
piece at a time.”

In this mythical Chinatown, I step carefully through the wet floors of the
fish vendors to the stairs going up to my apartment. But I’ve never lived
in Chinatown. Once, three years ago, I was drunk and vowed I wouldn’t leave
New York without having lived in Chinatown. I haven’t lived in Chinatown
yet, but I haven’t left New York either. Not yet.

On the bus in Brooklyn a few teenagers bump up against me, and I move to
the side. They shout, watch out, don’t scare all the Chinese people! I look
around, but I am only one Chinese person. Somehow I have been multiplied,
funhouse mirror style. In the mythical Chinatown, I undo this. I am
divided, again and again, chopped apart, stripped and sublimated into smoke
and mirrors. A sliver in each bunk bed, a sliver on the chopping block, a
sliver playing cards and smoking slim cigarettes with the cooks at Tasty
Hand-Pulled Noodles.

The illusion is so perfect. Maybe I didn’t make any of it up.