New York.
In New York, there's nothing you can't do. New York City used to be the sweet home in Friends, the romantic concrete jungle in Woody Allen's jokes, the fashion city, the dream place, and when I really went to NYC, it became this place I'd never experience enough. I love New York City, even though I'm not a New Yorker, not even an American citizen. I don't know why. I just feel this connection to the city. It's weird but beautiful.
Day one:
The first day in NYC was not pleasant at all. Three hours' bus trip made me dizzy and exhausted, but I was fairly excited to see the not-so-heavy snow in NYC-- I stayed in Boston, where there should be snowy in October based on its latitude, but I hadn't seen any snow until I went to NYC in December.That was disappointed. The first thing I saw after getting off the Chinatown bus was the big gate in Chinatown. I didn't go near it though, giving that I'd better find my friend's house first. Taking out the map and studying it, I realized I was still the old me, no sense of direction at all. When I was stuck into the map at the big crossing in Chinatown, a Chinese guy came to me and asked me what I was looking for. Thank God I'm a Chinese person, and thank God there are Chinese people everywhere. However sometimes I feel this might be part of the reason why it's so hard for Chinese people, especially students, to really mingle with American community. We have so many people all over the world that we don't really need to try to get involved in others' networks, but this is definitely not a good thing. The most direct consequence I've seen is that when Haiti had the big earthquake, everyone even those students in our small town college students at once reacted to it, donating and going there to rebuild schools or something. Whereas when I asked them about the earthquake in Wenchuan in 2008, almost no one had ever heard about it. The truth is we had a even severer earthquake and more devastate damage was caused, but because we could handle it ourselves, no one else cared about it. I don't mean that others have the responsibility to care about us, but the thing is we, as normal citizens and tax payers, should enjoy much better conditions than rescuing the poor children in the earthquake. It's like the Chinese government it hiding the fact from the outside world, and we have to eat the consequences quietly. Most of us don't even realize this. We pay tax, therefore the government should do things. That's their responsibility. That's what they should do before the earthquake. We can feel moved by them, but we can 't let this delude ourselves.
Anyways, I found my way finally, with the help of the Chinese guy. That night turned out to be the first day of the biggest snow storm in NYC that year, and I was lucky to find Xu's house before the real storm came. The timing was really bad. When I looked out through the window later that night, it was snowing brutally, reminding me of the film I saw a few weeks earlier, new Christmas Carol.
I feel like this article is really hard to define. It's not simply a journal, since I said so much about my view on some issues. Just in case, I'm writing this now, supposing no one will take a look at it.
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