Dear New York,
I hope you’re well.
I still haven’t truly gotten over how incredibly beautiful you are. I loved and will never forget how you made me feel — you made me feel like I could do, and be, anything.
There’s nothing like the feeling of taking the subway into Manhattan, with your magnificent skyline slowly coming into my view. I felt so small and insignificant, totally swamped by all your skyscrapers. In a good way.
I adore you, New York, you bring people together from all over the world to celebrate and embrace diversity. You give their stories a voice for the benefit of those who choose to listen. All those nights of poetry, live music and spoken word in a basement bar in East Village…
They gave me the privilege to learn about so many different cultures. And the complex, nuanced lived experiences of fellow PoCs — Latinx Americans, Black Americans, indigenous Americans and Asian Americans — and our shared struggles.
It is truly amazing how many similarities and differences can co-exist amongst us all. My heart jumped at their immeasurable courage to share their stories. Their stories had me laughing out loud and in tears. Their words lifted my heart, and many others’ — including white allies’ — in the room and gave me the strength to gather mine.
I miss you, New York, your bustling energy, your dazzling city lights, and all your magic. My soul soared at the sight of your live music venues dotted around Lower East Side — it high-fived that whitewashed part of me.
An air of unmistakable, genuine optimism permeated the night of New York, so palpable that everything seemed infused with unstoppable, relentless energy and boundless possibility.
I admire you, New York, the charming ethnic hood of Sunset Park in Brooklyn taught me how to recognise, reconnect and reconcile with that vulnerable, “undesirable” ethnic part of me that I didn’t know I was desperately trying to push away and with which I wouldn’t identify.
Sipping vegan taro-flavoured bubble tea and sucking up the tapioca pearls through the fat straw in a scruffy, cheap dumpling place deep in this Chinese neighbourhood, away from the white gaze, in this safe havens, I felt safe.
I felt safe in your presence. I felt free of judgement in your company and the child in me, that Southeast Asian boy in me, no matter how deeply buried away, had been fed and freed. I was rejuvenated.
New York, you make me feel like I could combine the two worlds I’m caught between into one.
Maybe, just maybe that means these two dichotomous worlds of East and West I have within me could finally and peacefully coexist. And that these two opposing cultures that make up who I am, can, in time, harmoniously reconcile.
New York, I’d be lying, if I didn’t admit that I always have my gaze on the horizon, always looking for the next opportunity to call you my home again.
Much love,
That immigrant nobody
