Townies is a series about life in New York, and occasionally other cities.
Growing up, my brother and I spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ house. They lived next door so when Mom and Dad worked weekends, it was up to them to keep us out of trouble. Most afternoons, we’d sprawl out on their living room floor in front of the television — the Chinese-language radio station going in the kitchen — while my grandfather paced the back garden or my grandmother sat on the porch with a bowl of alfalfa sprouts in her lap.
We lived in Bayside — a middle-class suburban neighborhood in Eastern Queens, outside the noise of the city. To my parents, Bayside was an ideal place to raise a family. Safe and quiet and only minutes away from the burgeoning Chinese center of Flushing.
If you’re Chinese and living in Queens, Flushing is focal in your cultural landscape. Step foot on Main Street and there is the sea of bodies crushing against each other; the noodle houses, bubble tea houses, dumpling houses, the karaoke bars. In the restaurant windows are whole pigs and ducks, roasted to a crisp and suspended from hooks. There are fruit stands and vegetable stands, and apothecaries with baskets of powdered roots and herbs and mushrooms. Flushing is Ridley Scott. It’s Mos Eisley spaceport.
But best of all were the bakeries: Tai Pan. Fay Da. Red Leaf. In the evening, my grandparents’ friends would come calling for their weekly mah-jongg session, bearing bakery boxes bulging with pastries. Pork buns baked dark gold. Egg tarts, still hot from the oven. There were cakes of all kinds, cored with red bean and custard, crusted in sugar, slit down the middle and grouted in cream.
We gorged ourselves and after we ate, my uncle would fetch the mah-jongg table from the basement, and the grown-ups would sit with their cigarettes and dried plums, and roasted watermelon seeds and mandarin rinds — and my brother and I, in a well-fed stupor, would loll about the room, bored but happy, listening to the storm of tiles underneath their hands.
I have a hard time with my Chinese-American identity. My parents are Chinese. This I can say with certainty. They can speak the language; they can write it; they can follow the subtle shifting social cues that are demanded of them. It is as if they possess an essential lens of “Chineseness” through which they view the world.
For me it’s harder.
I am what some in the Asian community would refer to as an A.B.C.: an American-Born Chinese. A Twinkie. A banana. Yellow on the outside but white on the inside. The kind of person who prefers spaghetti over lo mein, who is more at home with the steady action of a fork than the clumsy pincering of a pair of chopsticks.
My friends, by and large, are non-Asian. In high school, I quit the math club to join the debate team. In college, I majored in literature instead of computer science or accounting or engineering. And when I was 26, I left Bayside to move in with my white girlfriend (now my wife).
She’s a Brooklyn girl from Moscow by way of Coney Island. When we were looking for apartments, I used to trek out from Queens at 6 in the morning to get to Brooklyn by 9. We’d have breakfast together, and then we’d head out with her parents to look at the rentals in neighborhoods like Bensonhurst, Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay.
We were a strange-looking group — this Russian family and the 6-foot-tall Chinaman in the rear. Sometimes we’d get to the showing early and we’d scout the neighborhood, taking note of the Laundromats, the grocery stores, the flow of the streets, which were never empty. There was the noise of the train overhead, music spilling from the storefronts. Babushkas glided their pushcarts down the sidewalk while men in leather jackets leaned out of doorways with their cigarettes. Traffic moved like plate tectonics.
And as I watched, I saw that everyone was watching me.
You can’t live in New York without thick skin for this kind of thing. It’s a large city, crammed with micro-communities, and it’s impossible to not feel like an outsider at least some of the time. So you cope. You develop strategies. Be inconspicuous. Be polite. Speak softly.
This would be fine if I was only visiting, but I was here looking for a place to call my home.
I remember a one-bedroom along the D-train. The apartment was gorgeous — parquet floors, high ceilings, in our price range. But as we were leaving, the landlord narrowed his eyes.
“Do you cook a lot of Chinese food?”
A listing agent in Coney Island showed us an apartment overlooking the Boardwalk. It had its charm. Large windows that opened on the green-gray ocean and blasted sunlight against the hardwood floors. We left the apartment feeling hopeful, and it was only when we crammed into the elevator that I realized the agent was staring at me.
“Chinese?”
“So what if he is?” my girlfriend snapped.
“Oh no, no, don’t get me wrong,” she said laughing. “The Chinese are great!”
This sort of thing is harmless enough, but every time it happens you can’t help but glimpse the thing they see when they look at you. An alien. A foreigner.
There were times while my girlfriend’s parents were cross-examining the landlord, I’d go steal away into an empty room. I’d look out the window, down into the street, listening to the warm noise rise off the concrete, and I’d struggle to imagine carving out a life here, in what seemed like the other side of the world.
In the end we signed the lease on a place in Bensonhurst. It was the perfect camouflage. An old Jewish and Italian neighborhood now flanked by bustling Chinese and Eastern-European communities. Walk down any street and the alphabet changes from English to Hanzi to Cyrillic; on any afternoon you can find dim sum and borscht and pasta e fagioli.
It’s nice here but it isn’t perfect.
The first week I moved in, one of my neighbors, an old woman, came up to me to ask my advice on what Chinese restaurants to avoid and I did what I always do. Nod. Speak softly. Play the alien.
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And I remind myself that three blocks over are the Chinese markets where I can blend in among the trays of fish, the unreadable scrawls, the Chinese grandmothers in their bubble coats. But it isn’t right here either. Here, I’m terrified someone will ask me something — something as innocent as “where are the cabbages?” or “do you have the time?” — and I won’t be able to answer. Because here I am the A.B.C. Here I am an impostor.
Some weekends, if I’m up before my wife is, I’ll walk down Bay Parkway to one of the Chinese bakeries along the main drag. I’ll go in and in clumsy Cantonese I’ll ask for tea, and I’ll go up to the display cases and ask for something to eat, trying my hardest not to point. I’ll use the wrong word or carry the wrong inflection. And if it’s early enough I’ll find a seat — close to the window if I can — and I’ll have my breakfast. I’ll be very quiet, eating my pork buns and my egg tarts, and I’ll listen to them. All of them. These perfect strangers with my grandparents’ voices. Their cadences. Their rhythms. My own mouth full of dough.
Townies welcomes submissions at townies@nytimes.com.
Bill Cheng is the author of the forthcoming novel “Southern Cross the Dog.”
Townies, a series about life in New York — and occasionally other cities — written by the novelists, journalists and essayists who live there, appears on Thursdays. This week features an essay by Sandy SooHoo, a freelance photographer and writer who is working on a collection of essays.
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