Tones of yellow, shades of dark hair. Everyone clamors around and talks to me all at once; or maybe I’m just not used to anyone speaking my language anymore.
I find myself relieved rather than distraught at the sound and sight of pollution. Factories somewhere nearby pump gray and thick smoke into the atmosphere. It’s bad for humans and it’s bad for the environment, but it’s home—at least the closest I can get to home now without spending over a thousand dollars in airfare. For a 45-minute drive and under $10 in tolls, it is the best home away from home that a fifty-year-old Chinese man can ask for.
Even without ever having lived here, I know this place like the General Tso’s chicken recipe: a tablespoon of Grand Street, a dash of Forsyth, a sprinkle of Allen. Ever since coming to America twenty years ago, this approximately one square mile patch of restaurants, supermarkets, doctors, and immigrant families in Manhattan’s Lower East Side has been my lifejacket. When the pressure to assimilate into a mixed-background, suburban community gets to be too much, I breathe in the smog of this second China.
I lead the way for my daughters to the bend of Forsyth Street just beside the subway tracks as they enter underground again. The flea market set up here is my favorite and the most authentic, despite the fact that the vendors are not only Chinese, but also Hispanic or Indian. Our Lunar New Year feast this year will consist of a hot pot with fresh spinach, enoki mushrooms, fishballs, beef slices, taro, an assortment of seafood, and crackers and fresh fruit for dessert. All of this—condiments and desserts included—we can buy here at the flea market and at the New York Mart supermarket hidden under the subway bridge right down the street from the flea market. Like in my Fujian village, it all is within a walking distance, and it is most refreshing to be on my feet to get from one place to another rather than behind the wheel.
My home village in Fujian was never as crowded as this; only in the town square market area from sunrise to sunset was my village ever bustling. Regardless, in my mind, the elderly lady picking out her persimmons for the Lunar New Year whom I would call tài-tài is still the neighborhood grandmother of my Fujian village, and the schoolchildren on vacation from school for the New Year still run around the old playground on the corner of Eldridge and Hester Street like my friends and I used to do years ago in Fujian.
Especially during this time of the year, we all feel the sense of community that ushers in when we know it’s time for families to gather and feast on the luxurious foods that we can’t afford for daily consumption. The mothers dress their children in layers first, then in everything red; even my two daughters in their twenties take part in this tradition. In my twenty years of American knowledge, the best comparison to this time of the year is the Christmas season, with all the warmth and jolliness.
There is always that tài-tài with the metal cart full of thin red plastic bags that will run over your feet and snap you out of your reverie but hurry along as if she did nothing to you. Like the pollution, it should be bad but it is merely a comfort of home. Yes, the vendors and the strangers who choose their dozen of live blue crabs next to you may sound cold and brute, but each one knows the struggle just as much as I do.
Of course, some things here have no place in my Fujian village. I am a little startled to see an Internet café with tons of teenagers on laptops, and I don’t recall ever having as many options for anything as the iPhone accessories stores offer. Police officers patrol the streets that are made for full-size cars, not just bicycle taxis and scooters. My parents would have sobbed to see this many varieties of leafy greens, clean of dirt and neatly stacked for convenience. We bought fish as fresh as this in Fujian, but these steaks and shrimp and lobster? Even if we had these in the village we wouldn’t have had the money for them. And in the streets of my home village, we definitely would not have run into tourists of all ethnicities, not to mention inhabitants who were of any background other than Chinese. If I hadn’t lived in a multi-ethnic suburban community before this, I would be shocked, but now it’s my ancestors who would be shocked to know that these strangers of other ethnic backgrounds bring me just as much comfort as a steaming bowl of rice does.
It’s only a short walk thus far, yet my muscles ache simultaneously of reminiscence and satisfaction.
A rancid waft of fish that makes my two daughters clench their nostrils shut confirms that we have reached our destination. My two daughters: they don’t see the appeal of coming here. The fish is too fresh; the vegetables are too exotic with insufficient pesticides; the streets are splattered with unidentifiable liquids; the people are too rural for their liking. I sadly realize that the anchor that holds a family to a certain place needs a longer and longer rope for each generation. Perhaps, even, they will find their anchor elsewhere. Let them sail. However, no matter how far my boat sails, my anchor will always, without a doubt, be where the fresh fish are.
