434A — All those people, sharing all the world…

I’m writing the majority of today’s post at a similarly unconventional place as yesterday—this time, it’s a Greyhound bus somewhere in the midst of Connecticut on our way back to Boston. The bus was initially nice and toasty, but it is getting kind of cold, and I am regretting more and more not bringing my jacket.

This being said, today was fantastic. I have so much I have to say pent up over the course of the day that this post will surely be gargantuan, but here goes nothing. Let’s start immediately following where we left off: South Station.

After finishing writing up the blog for yesterday, I attempted to sleep, but found no solace, so instead comforted myself with pretend belting various songs and considering various aspects of random topics which shuffled in and out of my head. At 3 AM, the three of us on our collective journey headed over to the main part of the bus terminal in a quest for McDonald’s, which ended promptly when we saw that, although the lights were on, the whole store was behind a grille. Plans foiled, we returned to the gat, and we eventually got on the bus at around 3:20 AM, staking out some nice window seats on the second level of our Megabus.

The bus left promptly at 3:30 AM, and this, for some reason, provoked a random string of profound thoughts that I sometimes have at times when I am relatively sleep-deprived. In particular, some part of me really wanted to think about the purpose of my writing. The phrase “you write so much and say so little” comes to mind—I don’t know where I first heard it, or if I heard it at all, but I think to some sense this is true of my writing. I write a lot of stuff, and make so little meaning out of it. Then again, this true of a lot of writing.

This distraction aside, I was promptly reminded of a different experience upon exiting the bus terminal. It turns out the buses exit in the area where CJ and I took our downtown walk (described here in 411A and on the MIT Admissions blog in a post titled "Downtown"), above the very vertical private/public park, and immediately before the Underground Ink Block. Thoughts jumped back to the conversations we had there—ideas about living on the hyphen, about yearning for both cultures and yet being neither. Interestingly enough, there were a lot of feelings like that today, like when we passed over the Amtrak platforms and I felt this desperate longing for Chinese infrastructure, with trains that run all night to destinations all across the country, both slow and fast. There’s something weirdly romantic about it, about being on a vehicle with set tracks and schedules and which runs unimpeded by traffic; defined stops and destinations, which are the only places the train ever stops. I guess, in summary, I had a lot of feelings at 3:30 AM, when we left, and I was desperate to put them into any entity or train of thought I could find, which were these.

I eventually, however, found that it was time to go to sleep, as staying awake became more and more painful with the moment. Fortunately, I find it very easy to fall asleep on buses, and, having a row to myself, I quickly entered the land of dreams.

Unfortunately, I found it difficult to stay there. I woke up throughout the rest of the bus ride feeling a distinct sense of cold. I eventually turned off the vents supplying some of the cold air, but the whole bus was air-conditioned to an uncomfortable temperature, and I did my best to sleep through this. Night slowly became early morning, and eventually we were in midtown Manhattan, moving past various sights, and I sat up and began taking pictures, waiting until, eventually, we were dropped off at a random street corner around 8 or 8:30 AM, and the day began.

Our adventures began slowly—our first stop was a Dunkin Donuts, where the other two members of the trio got some amount of breakfast and caffeine. We made some sort of sketch of a plan and listed out the places we wanted to go. These totaled 8 or 9, and seemed kind of ambitious at the time, and also extremely touristy. The first, most definite part of the plan was to head south first—this seemed like the correct decision as most of our midtown interests were going to be more interesting later in the day, when the city was actually awake and people were there.

This being decided, we followed the ever-wise instructions of Google Maps down into the New York subway: the F train, from 23rd Street Station towards Downtown and Brooklyn. Single-ride tickets in hand, we crossed the ticket barriers, and got onto the train.

Some thoughts about the MTA: It’s kind of an interesting place. Although the MBTA beats it in age by a tiny amount, the sprawling expanse and tiled walls of the New York subway stations, along with their iconic entrances, make it seem like it has a lot more history than Boston. Boston’s system, however, has one major benefit—it actually has reasonable places to transfer. The MTA is the system with the most stops in the world, but this is actually a result of inefficient placement of stations, where multiple stations are on different lines and right next to each other, but require one to exit and enter to move between them, costing another fare. There are also not enough interchanges on the MTA for the sheer number of lines, which sometimes makes it much more difficult to get where you want to be. At the very least, this was our experience with it. Oh, also: its size does kind of make it confusing (although Google Maps is pretty good at this), but this is not necessarily its own problem.

We got off of the subway at East Broadway, which happens to be vaguely in Chinatown. Funnily enough, some portion of the area looked kind of familiar, since I had seen some rendering of this in some playthrough of the recent Spiderman video game. It had also all the Chinese aspects to it that brought me back into this mode of contemplation about fitting in one place or another. For some reason, I feel like I need to prove my Chinese-ness in environments like this—speaking Chinese, reading it, etc.—even when I’m speaking with people who are not Chinese and absolutely do not care how “Chinese” I am. (“as if you could box culture to be a single thing.”) I think I’ve talked about how “living the on the hyphen” means that one is not both Chinese and American, but rather neither. In some sense, then, we go through our entire lives trying to prove that we are both, because that’s what the identity feels like it should mean, and we fail, over and over again. Or maybe that’s just me.

In any case, we stopped by a McDonald’s after this, where I bought a hash brown so we could justify our use of the McDonald’s bathrooms. Interestingly enough, we got a lot of advice from some older individuals who could just read our total incompetence in the big city, which is generally not, I guess, what I expected from New Yorkers. It was kind of funny that, in this context, New York City did feel a lot more Chinese than I thought it would—the same contrast between the old and new, the same imperfections, the same society that will quickly rob you blind if you are willing to run a public bathroom, and the same pungent odors emanating from god-knows-where. (In this sense, having visited China prepared me more for visiting NYC than perhaps anywhere else in America could. At least one of my compatriots was less prepared for this.) Eventually, our bathroom break was complete, and we headed down to the side of the river (?) dividing Manhattan and Brooklyn, starting by the Manhattan bridge and walking towards Brooklyn, taking photos all the way.

We arrived at a relatively interesting part of town following this. Although we were initially tempted to find the beginning of the Brooklyn Bridge and walk some portion of it, we were dissuaded by the long walk, and instead headed up into the Financial District. We stopped by Wall Street, which was kind of fun (although the construction seemed to inhibit us from enjoying the place in its entirety), and then moved on towards the World Trade Center complex, this time via Trinity Church cemetery, where we saw the burial site of Alexander Hamilton, Elizabeth Schuyler, Phillip Hamilton, and other key figures from history/the musical Hamilton. This resulted in me doing two things: first, singing some of the quieter songs from Hamilton, and, second, thinking about when it is appropriate to take photos. Although I really enjoy taking photos, I found it kind of distasteful to photograph such a memorial out of respect for the dead. Why I had such a conviction is interesting to analyze, but, in any case, I felt that reducing the memorial to these individuals to a photo was somehow disrespectful.

Those of you who are observant will notice that this also applies to the next place we visited—the 9/11 Memorial. We arrived here via some of the other World Trade Center buildings, starting in what I believe was four, which included some mall aspects, and passing down and into the oculus, which is kind of a magnificent building, both in scale and in artistry. I instantly recognized it as the place where they had filmed the music video for the song Connection, which was pretty interesting. We headed up from the oculus back onto ground-level, where we arrived at the memorial.

The memorial itself was a visceral experience. If the Vietnam War Memorial in DC forms a scar in our national conscience, so too does the 9/11 Memorial. The water flows from under the panels of names rapidly down the sides into a central hole that seems to have no end, falling directly into the abyss, out of our line of sight. It contrasts with the shard that is One World Trade Center immediately next to it, and reminds one that negative space is just as powerful as positive. It’s like a pause in the whole city—a rest in an otherwise cacophonous symphony, an emphatic breath in the middle of a powerful speech—a hole into which the water and tears of the city flow eternally on bold rock that has been carved out of it, because when New York City says it never forget, it makes damn sure that you won’t. I put my hand on the name panels, and although I was not even born at the time when the event happened, a powerful feeling of loss permeated me. Each one of these names their own story, cut short. By some sort of coincidence, I spotted two Alan’s next to each other nearby. I shuddered, and we moved on.

Surrounding the memorial is a lot of public art. This reminded me of Rent, a musical about this same city, where the main characters boldly declare, “the opposite of war isn’t peace. It’s creation.” I think the art and the growth in the area around it is just as much a response to the horror as the memorial is a reminder of it. To create in the face of fear and the face of pain is perhaps the best we can do to elucidate it, and, from there, combat it.

We headed down towards the Battery after this, preparing to get on the Staten Island Ferry in order to get a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty. The walk was not bad, but it was filled with random people trying to get us to go on their much more expensive and probably worse trips, which, became easier to push through after this first experience. After some photos down on the Battery, we eventually got up to the ferry terminal. I was initially warned by one of our compatriots that the ferry would be ugly. When I saw it, however, I was still pretty surprised—the boats are orange, bidirectional, and kind of clunky in general. We eventually got on one, however, and let the thirty minutes pass on the way there, taking photos of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline. On arriving in Staten Island, we quickly made a U-turn at the terminal onto a different boat that was just leaving, and slept the way back, having already seen the skyline.

Being done with our downtown adventures, we got onto the 5 train at Bowling Green and headed up to 84th Street (passing through plenty of stations as the 5 train is apparently an express), where we got out and ate lunch at a Shake Shack, which made me pretty happy. We were now in the vicinity of our next targets: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Central Park. After lunch, however, we had one slight tourist detour to make: getting a photo of the Guggenheim. After this requirement was satisfied, we headed back down to the Met.

The Met was an absolutely amazing experience, although, similar to memorials, I find that taking photos of art is not very meaningful (since there is something visceral in art that is difficult to capture in two-dimensional pixels, although it can be alluded to in writing). I will give fair warning before this section: I know very little about art and artistic critique, and a lot of what I say here is probably some form of intellectual bandwagoning from people who know a lot more about art than I do. Now, for the actual meat of the experience.

We got our tickets from kiosks in the main hall and quickly headed over to the exhibits. I grabbed a map along the way, this time in Chinese, as a sort of test of my abilities. We started by heading towards the contemporary art, but, at some point, we walked past an exhibit of European art. Upon looking in, I was quickly struck, and something in my brain just clicked and said ‘Monet!’ This having happened to two out of the three of us, and we headed into the section for a little bit, the first room of which was, indeed, Monet. I was drawn to some of the Pointillism-type paintings, because the technique seems extremely cool to me, but there was also just so much iconic art, from Van Gogh to Cezanne to Gauguin. Eventually, we stumbled out of this era and into contemporary/modern art, starting with the striking “Diagonal of May 25, 1963.”

I’ve always had a kind of weird fondness for modern art, and I don’t really understand why, because I feel like many of the critiques the general public has for it are valid, but I can’t help but be drawn to it. We moved from Pollock to various color fields to a painting where the artist focused on “[painting] the white as well as the black” (reminding me of some of my earlier thoughts on the memorial), and then to various artists who focused on the three-dimensional form of the canvas, from simple shapes to draped, fluid canvas which came out of the wall. This was very distinctive, and although I’m not sure how to critique it or properly appreciate it, at the very least, I thought it was pretty cool.
We then moved down into a different section of contemporary art, which included a lot of designs based off of functional objects that had interesting shapes, such as various lamps or tables, which I thought were pretty cool. We then bumped into a variety of cool things: “I Saw the Figure Five in Gold” which was inspired by a William Carlos Williams poem, part of one of my favorite poetry movements, imagism; a variety of Fabergé eggs and whatnot, and then we took a detour to the roof deck, where there was a very interesting installment. Perhaps prettier, however, was the city skyline itself, which pushed the phrase “the city makes its own art” into my conscious, especially as everything in New York comes up to the edge of Central Park, which appears as the city encroaches upon (but does not quite disturb) nature.

We returned down into the Met proper after this and continued pushing towards our destination, which was the musical instruments room. We detoured briefly into the European sculpture atrium, and then past a collection of ceramics into the Asian art section, which was interesting. I really enjoy being in the historical section of Chinese art, but notably, as pointed out to me by one of our tripmates who is Filipino, the use of the phrase Asian art often restricts to East Asian, and, particularly, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean art, and, “it’s much better if you can read it” (which is interesting, given that a writing system is shared between them, meaning that my attempts to prove myself do not end at Chinese). We moved eventually, however, into a little bit of South Asian art, and then up through more contemporary Japanese art (including some pretty interesting items, such as an illustrated biography with scattered but numbered scenes, or a smooth fountain with flowing water that is almost imperceptible. Eventually, we made it to our goal however: musical instruments.

There were a lot of different and very interesting musical instruments in this section, from old pianos/harpsicords/other variants to weird brass instruments which were made on the way to the modern standards. There were, however, three Stradivarius violins, which, to me, seemed kind of wasteful to have just sitting in a glass case in a museum. Maybe this is just personal opinion, but these kinds of instruments deserved to be played, given their quality. Some of them are, in fact, lent out on occasion, which is good, but perhaps more should be done. I’m not sure what the academic consensus on this is either, since there is the possibility that wear would be irreparable. Hm.
At this point, all of us were tired enough that we decided to find out way out of the Met and sit on the steps for a while, where a saxophone player was playing random music which happened to include, for some reason, the Chinese National Anthem. We entered Central Park after this, but our stamina yet again faltered, and we sat on the grass near the Bethesda Fountain for a little while, before getting up and forcing ourselves towards the C line station at 72nd street, passing through a little sing-along of “Imagine” at a little area with the word ‘Imagine’ inscribed in the ground.

We got off the C line at 34th Street-Penn Station, and walked towards the High Line and an interesting structure known as the Vessel, which is some form of mix between modern art and a testament to man’s hubris. It is extremely hard to describe, but imagine a 10-story pinecone of just walkways that’s made out of metal and costs money to go up, and that’s what it is. After taking some photos of it, we walked a little up the High Line to enjoy the scenery and get some photos with various “love” sculptures in a garden across from it. At this point, however, we were starting to get a little more crunched for time, so we left quickly following this, and headed towards a bus line, which would bring us to the Empire State Building and Koreatown.

Getting on the bus was kind of a struggle—the ticket machines would only take coins, and the bus driver would not let us on at the first stop, meaning we had to move up to the second stop pretty quickly. We eventually arrived in K-town, took some photos with the Empire State Building, as is required for tourists, and then had dinner at a small Korean buffet-type place where I did not eat a lot of food, having eaten probably too much at Shake Shack for a late lunch. It was cheap, however, so I did not complain, and after a quick stop at Gong Cha (which was right next door), we aimed for our final destination: Time Square.

We walked up Broadway towards Time Square, and sort of just drank in the sights around us. This portion of New York seems to just be designed to generate sensory overload, with so much happening above and below that it is hard to keep track of it all. Indeed, at one point I neglected to look up for a while, and when I did I realized how tall the skyscrapers actually were in front of me, which is kind of a stupid thing to forget in New York City, but still possible, somehow. At some point, we stopped at a street art vendor (if those are the words for it; I admit my cognitive processes are starting to lose their coherence at this time in the morning), and, having saved my money for the whole trip, ended up buying a souvenir for about $25 dollars. It seemed like the right thing to do, although it is interesting to think why this specific case won out, given my general tendency to avoid spending money.

We eventually arrived at the center of all of the action, Time Square. Standing at the corner of the square proper, I happened to see one of the RSI kids who had been at MIT the day before for Math Prize, which was kind of an insane coincidence, and kind of a nice end to the day. We got all the photos the tourists generally get, and then headed back towards the Port Authority Bus Terminal via a section of Broadway which included a lot of interesting theaters (Frozen, Aladdin, Phantom, etc.), satisfying the last checkbox on my list. We eventually made it to the bus terminal, albeit with a little bit of a time crunch, and, after long delay, got on the bus. (I bumped into a friend from RSI 2018 in the bus line as well, which was also pretty insane.)

The bus ride home was kind of miserable—I found it very difficult to fall asleep and very difficult to write, which is not a good combination. I somehow survived the five hours, however, and upon arriving back at South Station, we called an Uber, which rushed us to Next House. Home is where the sidewalk ends.

Final thoughts on New York City, before I embrace the sweet release of sleep:

First, it is much more real and alive than Boston feels. Maybe this is just because I spend most of my time in Cambridge and on MIT campus, but there’s something different about New York and I can’t really put my finger on it. I’ve been in Boston proper plenty of times and it just never seems as vibrant as today was.

Second, it somehow feels less like home than other big cities have felt like for me. Maybe it’s because of the vividness of the town, but I wrote, for example, on Pi Day of 2018, “as we got into Chicago, I felt like I was coming home.” New York does not seem like a place that could be home. Maybe it’s just Manhattan, but it feels like it is simply too much.

Third, this trip was actually kind of insane in that it was utterly non-stop. This is the kind of thing that you can only do when you have the energy to do so, which is probably rare in life. That is not to say that I will be doing this again anytime soon, but rather just an observation on the plausibility and intensity of today’s trip. To be able to go to New York, hit a lot if not most of the major tourist attractions, and then return to Boston in less than 24 hours is pretty amazing, especially for the cost.

Tomorrow, I will be getting up early to go apple picking, and then I have various pieces of work I want to do and various acapella rehearsals I have to attend. We’ll see how it goes/how tired I am in the morning. Honestly, there’s a non-zero chance I’ll skip apple picking, but it seems like a fun experience nevertheless. Hm.