Harlem tricycle
The past two days I've taken to making coffee with water from the tap as hot as it gets. Saves the effort of heating water on stove. Advance or decline?
New York and TV go together like white and rice, perhaps because it's the loneliest city in the world. I was watching a stand-up comedian on Comedy Central, and he did a bit that allowed him to use a loud Chinese accent, lucky devil. He mentioned he goes to the same place and orders the same thing for lunch every day: Chicken broccoli.
It occurred to me that I, too, could live cheaply and deliciously and mindlessly and effortlessly on chicken broccoli every day. There is usually a sweetness in the sauce that makes me happy.
The Chinese take-out restaurants here in Harlem are about the size of a mausoleum. Sometimes there is a little bench you can share with two Mexican workers. Yesterday's place had no bench. Just a little red tricycle. I thought that would have made a nice photo by renowned photojournalist Channing Johnson, a shot of the menu on the wall so you knew where you were, the window where all the miscommunication takes place between the Chinese woman and the customers, and the little tricycle where one can sit in the foreground.
The other day I had already ordered my Chicken broccoli when three English-speaking workers came in and ordered. The miscommunication occurred in the ordering process. The woman said something no one understood. "Prostate?" one guy said. "You do prostate exams here too? Wow, you can get everything here."
Every night I've been talking to my roommate, Kawah, a tall slender Chinese who teaches yoga and would make my childhood friend Rick faint. He is an architect in San Francisco and has an Asian fetish, for all you readers who happen to be Asian women living in the Bay Area.
Rick places free ads on craigslist specifically looking for an Asian woman. Rick is too cheap to pay $25 a month for salon.com or match.com personals. The good news for Rick is that Kawah herself has used craigslist to place personals ads. The bad news is that she said she would never respond to someone who said they were looking for an Asian woman. She said she's wary of yellow fever and doesn't want to be fetishized.
Kawah has a moddish haircut and looks like Shelly Duvall in The Shining. When I told her this while we were sitting in the kitchen last night, she called The Shining a beautiful film.
She grew up till age six in China, then in New York City, so she's a true New Yorker, with an accent 75 percent New York/25 percent Chinese. Are people scared to watch horror movies in cities, or is that only in the burbs? She said she enjoys terrifying herself but can only watch scary movies in the daytime. I then looked over her shoulder with a horrified look on my face, twitching slightly. She was terrified.
"Okay, talk about something else! I'm freaked out. Talk about something else. Oh my god, I have to close this cabinet." She got up and closed a cabinet. She is very feng shui oriented and the one rule of the household is that one has to have the toilet seat shut before flushing. I'm not sure if that's feng shui or germ phobia, since her toothbrush is nearby.
New York and TV go together like white and rice, perhaps because it's the loneliest city in the world. I was watching a stand-up comedian on Comedy Central, and he did a bit that allowed him to use a loud Chinese accent, lucky devil. He mentioned he goes to the same place and orders the same thing for lunch every day: Chicken broccoli.
It occurred to me that I, too, could live cheaply and deliciously and mindlessly and effortlessly on chicken broccoli every day. There is usually a sweetness in the sauce that makes me happy.
The Chinese take-out restaurants here in Harlem are about the size of a mausoleum. Sometimes there is a little bench you can share with two Mexican workers. Yesterday's place had no bench. Just a little red tricycle. I thought that would have made a nice photo by renowned photojournalist Channing Johnson, a shot of the menu on the wall so you knew where you were, the window where all the miscommunication takes place between the Chinese woman and the customers, and the little tricycle where one can sit in the foreground.
The other day I had already ordered my Chicken broccoli when three English-speaking workers came in and ordered. The miscommunication occurred in the ordering process. The woman said something no one understood. "Prostate?" one guy said. "You do prostate exams here too? Wow, you can get everything here."
Every night I've been talking to my roommate, Kawah, a tall slender Chinese who teaches yoga and would make my childhood friend Rick faint. He is an architect in San Francisco and has an Asian fetish, for all you readers who happen to be Asian women living in the Bay Area.
Rick places free ads on craigslist specifically looking for an Asian woman. Rick is too cheap to pay $25 a month for salon.com or match.com personals. The good news for Rick is that Kawah herself has used craigslist to place personals ads. The bad news is that she said she would never respond to someone who said they were looking for an Asian woman. She said she's wary of yellow fever and doesn't want to be fetishized.
Kawah has a moddish haircut and looks like Shelly Duvall in The Shining. When I told her this while we were sitting in the kitchen last night, she called The Shining a beautiful film.
She grew up till age six in China, then in New York City, so she's a true New Yorker, with an accent 75 percent New York/25 percent Chinese. Are people scared to watch horror movies in cities, or is that only in the burbs? She said she enjoys terrifying herself but can only watch scary movies in the daytime. I then looked over her shoulder with a horrified look on my face, twitching slightly. She was terrified.
"Okay, talk about something else! I'm freaked out. Talk about something else. Oh my god, I have to close this cabinet." She got up and closed a cabinet. She is very feng shui oriented and the one rule of the household is that one has to have the toilet seat shut before flushing. I'm not sure if that's feng shui or germ phobia, since her toothbrush is nearby.
posted by Thon at 9:43 AM
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