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The bus drops him in Chinatown in the midst of a fine drizzle. A different world: more people than he’s ever seen, more bustle, more noise. Despite the clamor and commotion, he feels oddly at home, and it takes him a moment to understand why: all around him, suddenly, are people with faces like hers. And a bit like his. He has never been in a place like this, where no one gives him a second glance. If his father was here, he’d be the one standing out, not Bird, and Bird laughs. For the first time in his life, he is unremarkable, and this feels like power.
Before he left he’d studied the map, the librarian nudging it wordlessly toward him. A grid, his father would say, calm and patient. Just count your way up and over. He does the math: Bowery will turn into Third; eighty-seven blocks up, then two blocks west. Just over five miles. All he has to do is walk in a straight line.
He begins.
He begins to notice things.
That on all the signs here in Chinatown, something has been painted out or taped over or, in some cases, pried away. He can still see the perforations where something was once nailed on, still make out shapes embossed beneath silvery-gray duct tape. He notices that the street signs have been painted over, too: a fat swath of black runs under the feet of neat white letters spelling mulberry and canal, like a shadow at high noon, like a dark ring beneath the white of an eye. Only when he spots one where the paint has begun to wear away, revealing a thicket of characters beneath, does he understand. He remembers his father’s finger, inscribing characters like these in the dust: once, all these signs bore two languages. Someone—everyone—has tried to make the Chinese disappear.
He begins to notice other things.
How the people he passes speak either in English, or not at all, casting quick glances at one another but saying nothing. Only when they duck into a shop can he sometimes catch the low murmur of another language—Cantonese, he guesses. His father would know; his father might even understand. Everyone here seems cautious and edgy, scanning the sidewalks and the street, checking over their shoulders. Poised to run. He notices how many, many American flags there are—on nearly every storefront, on the lapels of nearly every person he sees. In the corner of each store hang the same kinds of posters from home: god bless every loyal american. All the way through Chinatown, not a single store is without one. Some sport other signs, too, garish in red, white, and blue: american owned and run. 100% american. Only when he’s left Chinatown, and the faces around him become Black and white instead of Asian, do the flags become more sporadic, the people here apparently more confident that their loyalty will be assumed.
He walks.
He passes storefronts shielded by graffitied metal grates. New and Used. Bought and Sold. For Lease. A concrete median dividing patched concrete streets. Mystifying names: Max Sun. Chair Table Booth. On the curbside, broken pallets splay like desert-bleached bones. No grass, no trees, nothing green, only street lamps the same gray as the sidewalk, the roads, the dirt that streaks its way up the sides of the buildings from the ground. Everything grit-colored, as if trying to escape notice. The people who pass carry heavy plastic bags, roll shopping carts, avoid each other’s eyes. They do not linger. Sometimes the crosswalks under their feet are simply spray-painted on, the lines wobbling and uncertain; in other places there are no crosswalks at all. More than a decade after the Crisis ended, so many things still haven’t been repaired.
Block by block, the landscape begins to shift around him. Stunted patches of grass fight their way through gaps in the sidewalk. How long has he been walking? An hour? He’s lost track already. Has the school already noticed his absence, have they notified his father? Up, up, up. The drizzle slows, then stops. Supermarkets with giant glossy billboards of pizza, intricately ruffled kale, slices of mango that make his mouth water. His stomach growls, but he doesn’t stop: he has no money left anyway. Bodegas with tumbling mountains of fruit and buckets of sheathed roses and indifferent, yawning cats stretched across the displays; barbershops where men’s laughter floats through the propped-open doors on a wave of aftershave. In their windows, familiar posters: proud to be american. we watch over each other. Now there are trees, small wispy ones barely above a man’s head, but trees, nonetheless. Somewhere a church bell strikes. Three o’clock, or four? The street buzzes with life, and he can’t tell chimes from echoes. He should be walking home from school, but instead he is here, his pulse growing faster with each block. Nearly there.
He walks faster and around him the city changes faster, too, like a sped-up video zipping into the future, or possibly the past. The way things used to be, that golden pre-Crisis world he’s only heard about. More taxis, nicer ones, newer. Cleaner, as if they’ve just been washed. The streetlights are shiny black here, taller, sleeker, as if here there is more space to hold their heads high. He passes buildings with crowns of decorative stonework over each window: someone took the trouble, up here, to pick out details in beige against the red, just so that they would be beautiful. Now there are stores with wide glass windows, unafraid of being smashed. Restaurants with awnings. People walking small dogs; trees ringed by neat metal fences no taller than his knee: for show, not for protection.