After a slow Sunday morning reading Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride and sipping coffee at the coffee shop I sternly disciplined myself when I got home and started doing some cleaning. I was putting away a flashlight that had been sitting around since the hurricane knocked out the power in September when I happened to see an old photo album in the desk drawer and I idly flipped it open to a photo taken when I was about 18.
In the photo, I’m sitting at a table wearing a blue NYC sweatshirt holding a pair of chopsticks with plates of food spread out in front of me, including a crab. My hair is cut short and I look like a 14 year old orphan waif.
I remember sitting in that small kitchen, watching as Alice cooked the meal and feeling amazed that I was in this big city, so far from rural Alberta where I grew up.
It was my first trip to New York City and I had taken the Greyhound bus from Gastonia by myself to the Big Apple to visit my Chinese friend who had adopted the name Alice in honor of our Sunday school teacher. I wish I knew her real name. I met Alice when she was living in Boiling Springs and I volunteered to help her with her English. We would read children’s books together but mostly just talk about life in the United States and China and our families and lives. I would help her with her English and she taught me some Chinese characters and words and how important inflection is. She worked six or seven days a week in the tiny town’s Chinese restaurant and lived with the owners in a small brick house down a quiet street. Sometimes I would come over and hang out and she made me bowls of glass noodles or peanut butter sandwiches with grapes on them. Even when I protested, she was always making me some kind of food. When she moved to NYC she invited me for a visit. I hadn’t been in the United States long and was still adjusting to life in North Carolina but I was ravenous to see the world and experience life, even though I was afraid. My parents dropped me off at the bus station (so young, so naive, so inexperienced, how did they let me go?? Probably because they were resigned to the fact that there was no stopping me once my mind was made up and I decided to do something).
The only thing I remember about the bus ride was that it was interminable and I was freezing cold the whole way there.
And then we were in New York and I was thrust into this bright, whirling, busy new world. I was a bewildered prairie girl cast adrift in the big city and it was so foreign to me – the mass of people, the big buildings, the bustle and noise and energy. I was stunned and awed and loved it and hated it.
There was no one there to greet me when I arrived and I remember calling Alice over and over until she finally, sleepily, answered the phone. She promised to come soon. I hung around outside the station for awhile but after a man approached me and offered to take me shopping, I went back inside and found a little cafe where I remained until Alice got there. She immediately introduced me to some friends and took me on a marathon shopping trip through China Town, popping in and out of shops, browsing among clothes and purses while I tried to pretend I wasn’t exhausted. We had lunch in an authentic Chinese restaurant where I had pieces of cow stomach for the first time. We bought crabs at a market and Alice cooked them for me in her tiny apartment that night and it was the first time I’d had crab. Ah the memories! The rest of the trip was a blur of food, more shopping, swimming through crowds of people like a salmon and drinking in the vast, teeming pot of humanity.
On the way home, before we set out for the long journey back south, our bus driver gave an impassioned speech about how much he hated cell phones (this was in the days of flip phones that were built like a brick) and how he didn’t tolerate them on his bus. Well, lo and behold, a woman sauntered onto the bus and immediately started talking on her cell phone. We had gone several blocks but the driver whipped that bus around at a traffic light like a mom with a passel of youngins arguing in the back seat and drove it back to the station where she was loudly escorted down the aisle and out of the bus.
That trip was my first big, solo adventure, but it wouldn’t be the last.
