Author: Ernest
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Polyglot Eating #2: Chinatown, Subtitled
The second surprise – or complication – to put it that way for my friend came the moment he opened his mouth. His Mandarin was rusty, but met with a firm shake of the head. But she’s Chinese! New York’s Chinatown is, of course, a largely Cantonese-speaking one. The broader history of Chinatowns in the…
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Polyglot Eating #1: Everyday Cartographies
1: Everyday Cartographies My time in NYC is short; just a year, so I take shortcuts to acquaint myself with the university and neighbourhood. Stories do not arrive for me as they did in the past, unravelling themselves over wine with my professors at Oxford or clumsily translating information panels about authors and musicians in…
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Polyglot Eating #0; or a short series of journals on Chinatowns
Walking the city should be a fun experience above all. I like eating things – that is not to say that all culture should be reducible to bite-sized parts, but I find myself most confident making cross-cultural comparisons chewing on its culinary constituents. Benjamin’s arcades or Pamuk’s experiences ambulating across Istanbul are my first introductions…
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Late Aug – Early Sept 2024: First Impressions of New York
The Move In (23 Aug 2024, 26C 79F and sunny) Seven minutes is all it takes to walk from my apartment to Harlem, waylaid slightly by my confusion over whether the red lights here are actually respected. Or have I always been in Harlem? The morning’s taxi takes me from JFK airport to Morningside Heights,…
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Weekly Update: 20 Jan to 26 Jan ’25
This blog is unthawing amidst the deep freeze of a New York Winter – the chilliest in years, I’ve been told. Too late to be attributable to a New Year’s resolution, or even the momentary spurt of post-relationship epiphany, I’m writing on Jan 20 with the grimmer prospect of dating the new year to a…
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A Note from a Reader (Weekly Update: 17 Apr to 23 Apr)
A great hello to all those who glow (and, most of all, those who glow but only dimly)! The observant reader of this blog would have very quickly identified the shift in diction in this post, and they would be absolutely right to see so. I am not, in fact, Ernest; but a secret other.…
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Weekly Update – 27 Feb 23 – 5 Mar 23
Hello, world! The only pattern in the rhythm of my writing is that there is no pattern. It has been 2 years, 3 months, and 7 days since the last weekly update – enough time to embark on a minor crusade, discharge conscription obligations in all countries (save Eritrea & North Korea), or produce 107…