On Chinatown
Once, during a summer break in between my mostly forgotten but unquestionably nostalgic years of elementary school in the mid-2000s, my mom took me on a day trip to New York City. We woke up at six in the morning on a Saturday and drove to a Kmart parking lot, the meeting place for our Coach bus trip to New York. On the bus ride, I’d been too excited to fall asleep. Despite growing up in a white, Irish Catholic family, I knew that fortune cookies had actually been invented in San Francisco, could tell if the kids in my class were rabbits or tigers based on the zodiac placemats they brought into school for show and tell from Joyful Garden or First Wok. I couldn’t wait to get to Chinatown, to eat lunch and dinner at a Chinese restaurant, to use chopsticks twice in one day.
The air around us might as well have been steam. I could have sworn the heat melted the blue right out of the Manhattan sky. My mom and I wove in and out of all kinds of shops searching for but never finding air conditioning. We walked by buckets of wrinkled herbs, open-eyed fish cooling over ice, and spiky-shelled fruits I’d never seen before, passing glossy duck breasts hanging in the windows of restaurants. The scent of roasting meat mingled with the humidity, and my hunger made me believe that the salt of my sweat tasted faintly of smoked spices. The streets’ storefronts were named with yellow characters that my mom and I might have been able to read if we’d kept up with our weekly Mandarin lessons through the Families With Children From China association. I stared at the store signs, searching for any kind of meaning, the name of a restaurant or a gift shop, but their color was the only thing my eyes could take in, and even then, the neon characters were so bright I had to blink after looking at them for a few seconds.
Somewhere in the sea of what I guessed to be bakeries, laundromats, and jewelry stores, I saw a clothing rack in the window of a boutique packed with a rainbow of dresses embroidered with golden feathers, deep red leaves, and ornate swirls stitched in silver. When I stepped inside the store and saw it hanging on the torso of a headless mannequin, I’d never wanted anything more in my life. Even if I would only wear it twice a year—once for the Moon Festival and then again for the Lunar New Year, both of which were held at the Unitarian Church— I loved the cheongsam, a word I didn’t have the language to pronounce.
The knots that ran asymmetrically from its collar to the sleeve were so smooth that my mom had to place her hands over mine so we could button the dress for me to try on. Pink cherry blossoms bloomed from the pale silk. The patterned fabric was an imitation of spring but somehow more beautiful, maybe because the petals would have remained on their branches if the slightest breeze from a speeding taxi would have fanned them.
After I’d left the boutique with the cheongsam in my hands, I’d looked at the people around me in awe of everyone who might have been related to me. Statistically improbable, I know, given the population of Chinese people in the world, but I imagined the dress my mom had bought me being made my birth mother, an aunt I’d never met, or someone else who looked like me. I hadn’t needed more clothes, and I would grow out of the cheongsam too soon to justify the price of the dress, but how could my mom say no to a souvenir that reminded me less of New York and more of a country I had no memory of?
I haven’t worn a cheongsam in years. I’ve never been back to China, but last summer, I lived in New York. Once in the July of that summer, I took the D train to Chinatown. I walked out from the station and felt the city’s same heat tanning my face. For a minute, I stood in the middle of the street and thought only of spring.