nyc iii: country miceday one was a bit of a frenzy because i only got in at 5pm. yen collected me at penn station and we went back to addy's to deposit my bags and get our tickets. addy had misread the schedule and bought herself tickets to go to la boheme with kate on tuesday thinking we were going to la traviata on saturday, only to find that saturday night tickets were also for la boheme, so yen kindly went with me. we had standing room tickets which i was apprehensive about but addy breezily suggested that this way you'll never fall asleep and had better view than the people sitting in the orchestra section. (true on both counts, but standing spoils both the concentration and the knees) it was a lavish magnificent production though, and the atmosphere and visual experience makes it wondrously breathless affair, which is nothing like hearing it at home (yeah, on my laptop with its laupok speakers) i wouldn't exchange virginia for columbia but oh, i can't imagine not going every week if i *were* in columbia. i wish i could have left friday, if not for those darn midterms, then we could have gone to the matinee too, which was turandot and rather contingent to riddling! yen and i walked around the lincoln center (there's a lovely flash intro, to elgar's nimrod i think, though someone correct me) and admired the fairy lights in the bare trees and how stately the theatres were, and watched the clinking glasses of wine and stilettoed ambling and swishes of gowns in the opera house and there was a brief ache to get away from the sleepy docility of charlottesville, which i then felt guilty for.
is the desire towards a city a sort of struggle that every person must come to terms with? shakespeare didn't stay in stratford-upon-avon; he had to come to london to become big. catullus came to rome, he wasn't a gentleman farmer poet who wrote naive poetry. away from the city there is much you're shielded from and when you come to it you're an innocent abroad. we yearn for the city but our provincial lives kept us whole in certain ways. i genuinely do not think i could be energised by the city. it would wear me out. i only want its glamour and convenience and opportunities and its promise without the accompanying rudeness and squalor and coolness. and i don't know if leaving behind the small town for the big city is a kind of growing up or a kind of emotional stunting. i think growing up in singapore eliminated that sort of choice - you were offered all of the city's conveniences but the safety of the hdb heartlands. singapore isn't a real city, but a staging of one. it looks like one, it gave you all the advantages of the city, its skyscrapers and subways, its bustling and crowds and the throb of life, but it was also oddly inorganic - it was never going to be dangerous or squalid or unexpected. and you could always retreat to the residential town centres - for goodness sake, i live in hougang, an old teochew housing estate. singapore is a compromise. new york city and charlottesville weren't. i desired everything the city offered, but i can't live with the dirty pavements and the people who jostled and did not say you're welcome hon to me the way old ladies and dining hall servers and check-out counter staff at harris teeter did in charlottesville, even as i recognise that the southern gentility and hospitality that we speak of so often was a myth of sorts. i was telling addy, the next morning, over cappucino and that apple turnover at the hungarian, that being in new york i felt out of place. this wasn't necessarily an unfamiliarity in a new place. no, in a way, being in a city, any city, was in fact a kind of returning to home for singaporeans. you didn't genuinely need to belong, you feigned it. your paces quicken purposefully, you found your own way on the gridded world, any city with a subway system had that effect on you - it conferred mobility without requiring you to know how or where, or at least you moved on grooves and emerged at fixed points without necessarily imagining the overhead world. you didn't need people so you didn't make contact. and you didn't feel abandonned by the system, as i sometimes do in cville, because you felt trapped by the slowness and the mildness. here is the lure of the black dress and the wineglass and a place in a grander seduction, in charlottesville you weren't free to reject the choices - because there wasn't anything to reject, and that makes me angry.
at the same time, when i first got off the subway at 96th st and looked around me, i felt almost nauseated with homesickness for charlottesville that i fought to keep hidden. in charlottesville i wear long skirts and enjoy its swing as i take my slow paces on my way, i am patient with people and i lower my voice with strangers and am filled with a gentle welling of happiness at the mountains and flowers and columns on the lawn. i am wrapped in a mixture of self-possession and mildness and easy solitude. i want to be nice to people. and this has become natural for me but i also know that it is something acquired, a ritual learnt. i'm alarmed to find myself getting short-tempered in nyc. the security guard at the new york state theatre had barked at me when i tried to go back to retrieve my dropped hat. when i explained what i was doing he snapped, well, be quick about it you hear? i was very cross with him and said so to yen, and when i came out with my hat, i gave him the smuggest smile i could. after that i thought what came upon me? why did i do that? and the truth is that it's difficult to keep being nice to people who weren't nice to you. niceness isn't instinctive in charlottesville or singapore or ny city. niceness is a contract of sorts. if he had ushered you through understandingly saying ah hope you find your hat dear, you would have stopped beside him when you came out again to say oh look i found it! and then perhaps he would say, i'm so glad you found it, that's a pretty hat, you don't want to lose it! and perhaps you would have waved goodbye to him as you left the theatre and both of you would be in a good mood. and in charlottesville there is a great deal of that. people are nice to others in the full knowledge that niceness is always matched by niceness and those are the things that life depended on, which made the niceness lightly tinged with social hypocrisy too, and yet it was that missing contract that i could not quite live without, although i couldn't explain it to addy then.
and this distinction and torn feeling between the city and the small town grows increasingly. i wrote to professor nohrnberg in the beginning of third year, when i had come back from my first visit to von.
Other than that I was doing an experiment. I wanted to find out if I would be happier in a city. Over the last month I've begun to have doubts about the B.A./M.A. business. I didn't know if I wanted to stay in Charlottesville longer than I can help it. I don't feel like I've made the wrong choice - I like UVA, it's a good school, I've had the good fortune to have studied with good teachers, and to make good friends. But I do miss a city lifestyle. I want to be able to go to the ballet on a Thursday night. I want to be able to hop on a train and head to the city centre in a matter of minutes, not to feel trapped every Sunday when the Charlottesville city buses stop running. I want to be in a place where they have an *International* Airport. I want to see buildings taller than Cabell Hall. I want an array of cultures and tongues and people. And I was waiting for a great epiphany when I went there - I thought that when I walked out of the airport I would either be hit with a "that's it! this is the place for me!" or to feel "I'm completely wrong here! no city schools for me!" But at the end of three days I've come away with mixed feelings. I felt joy to be walking where buildings leapt skywards. I was happy to wind narrow streets in the North End, dipping into Italian groceries for sinfully rich canolis and listening to the polyphony of tongues being spoken as people passed you on the streets and reading restaurant menus and dreaming of having the money to eat there and pretending to snigger at tourists who were following the trail of Paul Revere. I was happy to watch sailboats on the Charles, to stroll through Boston Commons and fling my arms out at having the space, to be happy at how everything is on a bigger scale. I walked past the Ritz and all the other familiar big brand names on Newbury street and feel satisfied and pleased - not so much that I wanted to shop there or stay there but that you feel connected to a sort of vast national or worldwide network - even if that was, some say, simply a proof of the grossly far-reaching tentacles of capitalism at work. Nonetheless if you walked by the Ritz in Amsterdam, Singapore or DC you would recognise its place in a huge international chain. Yet cities aren't devoid of the small home-run bakery or odd bookstore either. I liked how you could have both kinds in the city, here it's mostly the small - one doesn't have enough choices.But at the same time I thought these things I missed Charlottesville. I don't know if Charlottesville has made me tame - or too tame to survive the city - my threshold for noise and traffic has gone down - for dirtiness too - because even though I can't put a finger on it and say what exactly it was, nonetheless I felt there was something ugly and tainted about it all. In the mornings I walk out of Harvard Yard and inevitably think - the road is too close, there are too many people - I just couldn't abide the idea of the roar of life so near home. Here my room seems set beautifully amongst a host of trees - sitting at my desk and looking through my third floor window I can always lull myself into thinking I'm in a tree house and everything outside is a forest. Later in the year when the leaves fall I can watch the sunrise. I don't have to go to a park to see trees. Everyday I walk home and see the spread of mountains along the same stretch of road and I marvel at the colours of the foliage and I think to myself - oh I'm glad to be here. 3 weeks ago I had a friend from Penn visit who was astounded at how I left my door unlocked and how we had no security desk in our dorms and how you didn't need an ID to get into Alderman. At all those schools I got tired of having to be swiped in and signed out of buildings. On Saturdays I go to the city market and feel comfortable to be there without it losing its novelty for me, though I never miss a week. (We did go to the Haymarket, which was fun, but not the same - it was crowded and the sellers were unpleasantly aggressive)
