Flowers and Owls

A few days ago the boy asked if I wanted to go to Chinatown and I said, of course. He said he wanted to get me some decorated chopsticks for Christmas, since I've mentioned before that I'd like a set. So today we took a train to New York. I love a train ride. Cities still mess with my head, give me the ole existential crisis, thoughts of death, nonbeing, but after some subway rides to Flushing we got to Chinatown and I felt better, even though it was bustling with people. As we waited for a crossing signal I said, I wonder how I would feel being in China, and he said, this is almost like it, similar to being in a smaller city there. It did feel different from the couple other Chinatowns in other cities I've been to, less like I was just in a neighborhood of an American city. I sometimes feel comfortable being a more completely foreign presence in a place, where the difference is more overt, rather than somehow implicit.




We went to a restaurant, tea, we had drunken duck tongues (I've wanted to try them for some time), the Chinese take on chapatis, flavored with pineapple, and spicy frog and fish. I watched a waitress and a girl eating in the restaurant getting distracted by a Chinese historical drama playing on the television (it distracted me, too, and I wanted those girls to be my friends).




Then we walked around, went to a market and looked at fish in their tanks and squid and clams and eels and geoduck and all sorts of seafood for sale on beds of ice, we went to the food court of a mall with far too many tempting things to eat, there was a person in a knockoff Rilakkuma costume handing out samples, and I immediately fell in love, with my fascination for mysterious strangers in the guise of animals, strangers in masks, and then I saw this person step aside for a break, remove the mask, back turned to me, wearing a hoodie, face out of my sight, I prayed they'd turn around, a turn, hoodie lowered, it was a girl! A little tomboyish, she didn't look very happy (understandable, in that costume), she caught me watching her tie her hair back, I loved her.




I had an oolong milk tea and we split a slice of matcha crepe cake. I watched two girls sitting nearby watching another drama, raptly looking up at the television, admired their investment in the program. We walked, looking for stores that might have chopsticks, but didn't find any. I looked in a stationery shop, practiced restraint and bought nothing, though I am weak for cute notebooks and pens. I felt wistful in an apothecary, wishing I could read the characters on the labels, and wishing I knew more about Chinese medicine, I was tempted to buy lots of dried flowers, sea lavender and violets and peonies and others I couldn't identify, but held off.




We went back to the alluring food court, had some delicious soup dumplings, and I had a couple bites of his interesting pastry-wrapped sandwich in a wrapper that said Chinese Hamburger. We went back to the market we started from, found some sufficiently cute $.99 red chopsticks, he got me a teapot and a sack of Rose of Versailles face masks, he got a bag of persimmons, and some duck heads to take home, I kissed him several hundred times over the course of the day.