Category: Chinatown

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…

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…

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…