FOUR
I padded into my kitchen and opened the stainless-steel fridge.
The immaculate shelves stared back at me, empty save for a carton of orange juice, a takeout container of chicken tikka masala, an ancient Chobani yogurt, and—bingo!
—a bottle of Pinot Grigio. The kitchen spoils of a woman who had eaten dinner at home exactly three times in the last month.
Although I’d bought the place two years ago, my apartment still wasn’t lived in—no pictures on the stark white walls, no rugs on the bare hardwood floors.
“But it doesn’t look like anyone lives here!
” my mother had exclaimed on her last visit to New York.
My father just murmured approvingly about the state-of-the-art security system.
I poured myself a glass of Pinot Grigio and returned to the living room to contemplate the events of my day in peace and quiet.
I sank down onto the couch—the one splurge I’d allowed myself, a little gift to celebrate my closing on this place.
Plush, low-backed, celery-colored, and horribly, impractically, expensive, it was the sort of couch meant to be looked at, more than sat on.
Having grown up in a house where every piece of furniture was purchased on sale and remained neatly covered until the precise moment company walked in the door, I was not accustomed to making impulse buys.
Still, I’d allowed myself this one luxury.
I took a swallow of wine, settled back against the cushions, and closed my eyes, finally letting myself think about the thing that had been bothering me all afternoon—had nagged at me, even as I sailed through a productive lunch meeting with Ted Lassiter, followed by a successful strategy conference with Marty Adler back at the office.
By all objective measures, it should have been a great day.
But it was an extremely unwelcome realization, to a grown woman of thirty-three who was about to make partner at one of the most powerful law firms in the world, that a single stupid, careless word tossed underhand on the street could still slice right through me as if I were nothing and no one at all.
I felt like I was six years old all over again, and the other kids at Ravenwood Elementary were pushing up the corners of their eyes at me on the blacktop at recess, chanting,
Chinese,
Japanese,
Dirty knees,
Look at these!
This was not still supposed to be happening, was it?
Get a grip, Ingrid, I admonished myself.
What is wrong with you? Why do you even care what some random jerk on the street says?
Everything’s going just the way you always wanted.
I took another big swallow of wine, put the glass down on the end table, and curled up on my impractically expensive couch, trying to sleep.
I could remember with perfect clarity the first time I saw the gorgeous spirals and peaks of my beloved Manhattan skyline.
It was summer, and I was nine years old. That June weekend, my parents and I drove from our suburban house in Maryland to visit New York City for the first time. I had chattered for weeks about nothing else.
We were going to visit an old colleague of my father’s, a well-respected Princeton economist named Roger Giles.
Dr. Giles had been a visiting American scholar at my father’s university many years ago in Taipei, Taiwan, and he and my father had managed to remain in touch all this time.
Every Christmas, my mother would carefully copy a single English sentence that I had written down for her—Season’s greetings to you and yours, and best wishes for the coming new year!
—into a set of boxed Hallmark cards purchased for half-price the previous December 26 and stored for eleven months in our basement.
Each year, my parents dutifully sent these cards to the handful of non-Chinese acquaintances they had acquired in the two decades since immigrating to America: a few co-workers; my piano teacher, Mrs. Johnston; two or three neighbors who had invited us to the occasional barbecue or block party (not all our neighbors did); and Dr. Giles.
After retiring from Princeton, Dr. Giles and his wife lived full-time in New York and for years invited my family to come visit them in Manhattan.
After all, they scrawled in cheerful script across the bottom of their annual holiday letter, New York is only three hours from Washington by train!
We’d love to see how little Ingrid has grown.
It sounds like she’s turning into quite a good student!
My father finally accepted their invitation after I came home from school one day and announced that I was one of the few kids in my class who had never seen the top of the Empire State Building.
I loved going on long car trips with my parents.
I had no siblings to squabble with in the backseat, so it was always peaceful, sitting with the two people I loved and admired most in our own enclosed, private vessel.
I felt safe and comfortable and cocooned from the outside world.
Sailing by the factories and old houses and storefronts, my father told funny made-up stories about every point of interest that we passed.
My mother hummed along to tapes of old Connie Francis and Elvis songs she and my father liked—the very songs, she said, that my father had used to woo her back when they were both college students in Taiwan.
There had always been certain oddball English words my mother could surprise me with by actually using in their proper context, and “woo” was one of them.
I loved having their complete and unhurried company for hours.
From the front passenger seat, my mother twisted all the way around to explain to me how my father had been Dr. Giles’s star economics grad student at Tai Da, the best university in Taiwan, especially because he spoke English far better than most of his peers.
My heart swelled with pride and affection.
His eyes on the road, my father murmured that she was exaggerating, but I could tell from his voice that he was smiling.
As we hurtled along the interstate at seventy miles an hour, I remember feeling as perfect a happiness as I’d ever felt, either before or since.
Our little family was completely content and at ease in that car, on our way to see someplace new.
We got to New York around noon. As my father drove around and around midtown, swearing under his breath as he looked for street parking, my mother pointed out the Chrysler Building and Grand Central Terminal and Carnegie Hall and Rockefeller Center.
I couldn’t take my eyes away from the window.
I had never seen any city like it, and I had never felt so small, but small in such a wonderful way.
Small in a way that didn’t feel bad, or lonely.
Everything felt vital and important here.
Bigger, better, faster, more. As if everyone were essential and functioning in a great big machine with lots of moving parts, and it really mattered that they were all here and going about their business exactly as they were doing.
That was the moment I vowed that I’d move here one day, the moment New York wooed me.
First, because it was what I wanted, we went to the very top of the Empire State Building, where a lady greeted all the kids coming out of the elevator with big red lollipops wrapped to look like candy apples, tied with ribbons that said I ? NY.
My parents hoisted me up to the railing so that I could see all the way down, each of them maintaining a firm grip on my elbows.
There was so much to look at from up there.
I could even see the line where the blue sky ended and the gray matter that made up the city began.
There was another kid right next to me, about my age, whose dad lifted him up and pointed intently at something. “See that building over there, Max? The big one with the greenish pointy top next to the one with the gold round top?”
“Yeah,” the boy replied, bored. I strained to see the one the man was talking about.
“That’s where your dad goes to work every day,” said the man proudly. “What do you think of that?”
“I know. Can we go now?” said the boy.
As his father let him down from the railing and they walked away, I remember being fiercely jealous of both of them, although I couldn’t really have said why.
My ears popped in the elevator down. When we were back on the street, my dad stepped off the curb, raised his arm with a flourish, and gave a merry little wave at the end, showing me how to hail a cab.
But the light was red, so no cars were moving.
Then my dad looked over at me, winked, and asked, “Want a try?” I nodded.
He scooped me up and took a step closer to the street.
I raised my arm and waved at the traffic.
The light changed, the cars surged forward, and like magic, a yellow taxicab pulled up right next to us. I was enchanted.
The cab dropped us off in front of an enormous, fancy toy store near the entrance to Central Park.
We stayed there for hours, but I wasn’t allowed to buy anything.
I was, however, allowed to get an ice cream cone from one of the vendors in the park, even though my mother said it was getting close to dinner.
As I sat there on a green park bench between my parents, with chocolate ice cream dripping onto my knees, watching the horses and carriages going by, I decided that New York City was absolutely the best place in the world.