Y's Babbles: New York: Day 24 and 25

Day 24: Flushing Chinatown

Robert and I went to Flushing, NY.

It took half an hour to go by subway from Manhattan. Longest subway ride in the US to date.

I do think it's cool that the New York subway extends so long. Perhaps I'm being impressed by something very trivial (after all, doesn't the Seoul subway also extend to Incheon, Cheonan, and other nearby cities?), but nevertheless, it was fun looking at the outside view while on the train.

When I first went to the Chinatown at Manhattan, I was admittedly a bit disappointed. I was expecting an actual ChinaTOWN, you know, with Chinese malls, Chinese restaurants, everything looking like a slice of Shanghai or Beijing.

Well, I'm glad to say Flushing delivered just that. For a split second I had a wave of odd nostalgia upon seeing Chinatown.

I thought I was in Beijing for 1.5 seconds. I mean it in all seriousness, not because "lolol everything's in Chinese". It felt like when I used to walk around downtown Beijing twelve years ago.

Food court.

So we walked around malls, looked around Chinatown, and had fun.

And look at the best house name ever:

"WELCOME TO BLAND HOUSES"

"BLAND PLAYGROUND"

Day 25: Galaxy Phones and an Old Friend

First, I went to a Samsung Galaxy S3 launch with Mr. Yoo at the Soho area. Twas a rather small venue to be doing a phone launch, but I suppose that won't be the only launching party. The weather was crazy hot, which me and my formal jacket did not approve. SWEAT DROPPING DOWN LIKE RAIN.

The new phone was pretty cool, had a lot of interesting features, such as a photo-sharing option (via making the two phones touch each other), multiple user sharing of docs, PowerPoint, and games a la Google Docs or multi-player games, and it also had an additional add-on called tap tiles, a tile-like item you can tap with your phone to gain instant access to a given website. We were also invited to play an interactive 3D game (and could keep the 3D glasses).

My only proof of having gone there.

I also said hello to a lot of other Korean journalists working at different newspapers. They (along with Mr. Yoo) also tried to tell me pursuing journalism wasn't a good idea.

"Ah, there are better things to do than come into this industry," one of them said.

"My seniors were also telling me 'Why the hell are you trying to be a journalist?' I should have listened to them more," another one sighed wistfully.

...

Holy shit, does every journalist hate their job? Is this a joke that I'm not getting? Is it just the Korean journalism industry, or is it the same for everyone? What the hell? What am I supposed to make of this?

BUT ENOUGH ABOUT PHONES AND JOB-HATING PEOPLE.

How does one approach a friend one hasn't seen in thirteen years?

That was the situation I was faced when meeting Ga Young in the evening.

She and her sister and I were good friends (perhaps, maybe, best friends) in Shanghai. We haven't seen each other since 1999, but thanks to the power of the Interwebz, I ran into their Facebook profiles by chance, and re-connected. And found out that Ga Young, the younger sister, was attending NYU.

We were to meet at Washington Square Park, and I was a bit late from my internship work. It was there when I realized that I didn't quite know what I should do.

We haven't seen each other in thirteen years. I had friends who I made later on in life that I lost contact with already. We're not eight/nine years old anymore. Would there even be anything to talk about other than the past? Also, despite having seen her most recent photos, I realized I could not immediately identify her. The image kept on being replaced by an eight-year-old girl.

After mistakenly staring at a random Asian lady (she gave me a nervous "hi". I'm so sorry, random stranger), I called her to locate where she was. She was sitting by a bench not far away, holding a book in her hand.

I approached her slowly. We stared at each other in silence.

"Hey," we said nervously.

"Wow, this is so surreal," Ga Young uttered in amazement.

"Have you been doing well?"

"Yeah, have you?... this is so surreal!" she exclaimed again.

Ga Young kept on exclaiming her disbelief throughout the entire meeting. It is rather amazing, to meet a person who you thought would forever be a part of your distant memory.

We had dinner at a tiny pasta place, where we caught up with each other's lives. It was interesting to see that though the location and minor details were different, we had a pretty similar status, what with briefly staying in Korea, returning overseas, spending the majority of teenage years there until attending an American University.

Suffering under the hot weather, we then prowled the streets for an air-conditioned dessert-type place to evacuate, and eventually landed in this chocolate place not too far from the dorm, where we continued to talk. The chocolate drink we got were delicious.

I need to go here again.

It also seemed that by and large, we had similar views and outlooks. Ga Young was chill and down to earth, dressed comfortably and easygoing.

"I'd totally shave my head if I were a man, I wouldn't have to worry about it," she said.

I absolutely adored that statement.

I also felt a sense of familiarity one feels when being with another Third Culture Kid. It's interesting how much relatability comforts you. I am very much at ease and comfort with my American friends, but there is a different sense of comfort when being with a fellow TCK. A sense of comfort where I don't have to explain my experiences of moving around and how it feels. Where I don't have to try to "prove" my identification with culture XYZ, because they know you're an odd mishmash, and it's OK, because they're also an odd mishmash. And mostly it's the feeling that you can be more honest, because you can be the oddball, mishmashed, semi-nomadic, culturally jumbled mess you really are.

(I'm not trying to do a ranking of friends, btw. It's more of an apples and oranges thing. Both are equally delicious, but different. And I just happened to not have had oranges in a long time.)

So yes, it was fun. Seeing as we're both going to be here a while, I think we'd both be okay with meeting up more often in the future to hang out and eat and such. It feels nice to reconnect.

BONUS:

I FINALLY SAW THE NYU HAWK UP CLOSE, AND HAD A CAMERA READY.

I swear, this bird knows he/she's hot shit.