The Great Apartment Hunt, Pt. II
August 8, 2012 § 3 Comments
During the whole process of looking for an apartment, I felt incredibly single-minded. I didn’t have the time or patience to make small talk over IM with any friends who were curious about my move (sorry guys!) because I was too busy scouring New York Craigslist for listings within my price range and geographical location. I had a Google doc set up where I summarized all the ads I applied to, linked to them for reference, and wrote a personal introductory spiel that I copy/pasted into all my emails. The process became almost muscle memory, and I fired off as many emails as I could each day. If only I could apply that kind of focus to every other part of my life…
DAY 2
On Monday, father had to go to work, so he dropped mother and me off at the Newark Path station bright and early, where we rode the train for over an hour to get into Manhattan. I brought my laptop with me so I could do some extra Craigslisting throughout the day, and though it only weighs about five pounds, my laptop bag (including camera, notebook and other things) felt like it weighed about 30 pounds by the end of the day.
I didn’t have any appointments until the afternoon, so mother and I had quite a few hours to kill. We walked north to Times Square and took some pictures before stopping in a McDonald’s for some free Wifi. All of the Starbucks and Wifi in NYC have free Wifi! That was a really great discovery. We only ended up seeing two apartments that day, one that was a cute place that cost $1300 plus utilities, and another that cost $1000 plus utilities. Neither was very close to campus, and the second one was unfurnished, so we weren’t too keen on either one.
The Great Apartment Hunt, Pt. I
August 6, 2012 § 5 Comments
One of the most stressful things about going to school at NYU was not knowing where I was going to live. Because I was spending the summer at home in Naperville, there was no way for me to tie down a residence without physically being on the East Coast. I was looking for a room to sublease or share that cost a maximum of $1300/month per person. It was difficult for me to wrap my head around the fact that I might have to pay three times as much as any apartment I had ever lived in, but I soon learned that’s a pretty normal budget for Manhattan. Good grief.
The other infuriating thing I learned about NYC apartment-searching is that nobody plans ahead by more than maybe a week, or a month at most. If someone has an opening in their apartment, they want you to come by tomorrow to see it and sign the lease the day after that if not that very afternoon. So for all of June and July when my parents kept asking if I had found a place to live yet, I had nothing to say. Therefore, they decided to ship me out a month before school started so we could get a head start on the process.
We rented a small SUV, stuffed it with my belongings — trying to figure out which part of my massive collection of clothing to bring was a huge burden in itself — and drove out on Saturday morning, leaving my brother to fend for himself at home (he didn’t want to come, and there wasn’t any room in the car for him anyway LOL). The 800-mile journey took us about 13 hours, of which my father drove the whole time, claiming he wasn’t tired.
DAY 1 
The next day, we drove from our hotel in Newark to Manhattan, which was a pretty costly 10-mile journey. Crossing a bridge in New Jersey was $2.45, and the Holland Tunnel into NYC was a hefty $12. I mean, I understand that maintaining extensive roadwork requires a lot of money, but $12 for such a narrow and unimpressive passage seemed exorbitant.
Most of Sunday was spent in Chinatown, where, for some inexplicable reason, my father was determined to have me live. We literally walked around collecting phone numbers off street light poles poles and went back to the car to start cold-calling like some kind of rock-bottom telemarketing agency. “It’s better to pick up phone numbers in Chinatown,” my father reasoned, “because there will be less competition. The only people who would be able to find these places are people who can speak Chinese.” And it was true: The great majority of the people we met were from Fujian and barely spoke either English or Mandarin. Even if their apartments weren’t disgusting, I wasn’t keen on living with some random old person with whom I could barely communicate.
I actually had a Craigslist appointment set up in Chinatown at noon, but the rent was excessive ($1275 plus $200 in utilities, a price I was unwilling to burden my parents with) and the apartment seemed a bit too nice, so I canceled it because I probably would’ve been depressed if I saw an amazing place first.
Instead, we visited the first stranger who picked up the phone, and all I can say is that his apartment was genuinely frightening. It was a three-bedroom apartment squeezed into less than 500 sq. ft., with no living room (and barely a kitchen), a tiny, questionably…stained…bathroom and a cramped, gloomy bedroom. It definitely set the standard nice and low for the rest of the day.
My father didn’t come up to see the first few apartments with us (he was usually outside making sure nobody towed our illegally parked car), so he didn’t experience the full magnitude of Chinatown’s nightmarish living situations. Of course, he and mother lived in the ghetto of Chicago’s Chinatown for a few years when they first immigrated, so it’s not like he was unfamiliar with the situation. I think he was so resolute about me living there because he preferred the cheap rent and easy access to food (or he just wanted me to gain character through suffering), but you truly get what you pay for in Chinatown. After seeing a couple of places, it was pretty clear to me that my mother and I had both decided against renting anywhere in the area. We basically kept up the charade of interest just to entertain my poor father, who was working so hard to find me a decent place. It was an impossible task.
Mother was mostly concerned with safety and proximity to NYU, two things we weren’t too sure Chinatown offered. My priorities were to have a clean room and bathroom where I wouldn’t be afraid to touch the walls or floor. The condition of all but two of the apartments we saw were simply unlivable for me. There are people who consider their house a long-term home and make the effort to contain it, and then there are the people who strew things everywhere and let the dirt become permanent. I think the biggest problem was that the buildings were just too old and had housed too many people who simply didn’t care.
In the middle of the afternoon, mother and I swung by my first Craigslist appointment at a “luxury” building right in the heart of the NYU campus. The building was indeed impressive: a sweeping lobby with a doorman and concierge greeted us as we entered, but the upstairs looked rather worn. The man we met was named Maurice — yes, I did consider living with a man if perhaps he seemed innocuous enough. Maurice’s apartment was actually a converted one-bedroom, meaning that he had installed sliding doors to separate the huge living room where he slept.
Mother really liked his place despite the steep price ($1200 plus $200 in utilities; seriously HOW does cable cost SO much?!!?), but there was something off about Maurice himself. He was an old man with a long white ponytail and a European (Russian?) accent, though when mother asked where he was from, he was very evasive and even answered “outer space” before saying “Brooklyn.” He was a bit creepy and condescending toward my poor mother, and she didn’t like that he asked to be paid in cash ($1400 in cash are you kidding me) and worked from home doing some vague business with “artificial intelligence.”
By the time evening (and a typical East Coast storm) arrived, we were all exhausted. I felt the day had been very unsuccessful and even a waste of time if you don’t count how much of an ~educational experience it was to see how some people are forced (or willing?) to live. Father kept earnestly asking me which apartment I would take if I had to choose between the day’s viewings, and I really just didn’t want to answer.
To be continued…
Singapore, Pt. IV
July 27, 2012 § 1 Comment
This post is three and a half months late, but I’m determined to crank it out, so here goes! (Click for parts I, II and III)
On my third (and final) day in Singapore, I was slated to meet up with Benny, a mutual friend of me and CK that I had also met while studying abroad in Hong Kong in 2010. I was actually a bit nervous about it because I had only met Benny briefly at a house party and hadn’t really spent time with him after that, so I hoped that the day wouldn’t bee too awkward or a waste of his Sunday. (I’m sure he felt the same way, haha). Thankfully, we ended up getting along quite well, and I’m very thankful for his hospitality!
We planned to spend most of the day at Sentosa, an island resort on the south coast of Singapore. I got dropped off at the MRT station in the morning, where I mustered up some intrepidity and took the subway by myself to the Sentosa station to convene with Benny. For lunch, we dined at Toast Box on some traditional Singaporean grub:
Kaya toast
Ode To My Mother
June 21, 2012 § 5 Comments
I have an uneasy relationship with my mother.
Perhaps this is true of many people, but among my close friends, I always seemed like the odd one out. I envy the people whose mothers are their confidante or close friend or basically anything that doesn’t involve disapproval 90% of the time and indifference the other 10. I’ve tried confiding my romantic interests in her ever since the first crush, but she usually manages to use that information against me (“He’ll never like someone like you,” “You’re not allowed to date,” “He’s not good enough by my standards and I don’t care what you think,” etc.), so I put an end to that just this week.
Recently, I figured that 99% of the criticism toward me in my life has been from my mother. I think that’s the main reason why I take criticism very poorly, especially from female teachers/professors. Even the most neutral constructive criticism from an older woman can feel like a personal attack, because that’s basically what I’m used to. It sounds harsh, but most of my friends who have grown up with me know how scared I am of my mother. (It’s weird because at approximately 5’1, my mother is the shortest person in our family, yet I’ve learned that usually short women are the feisty ones.)
I don’t know when it started. Perhaps it was after my brother was born. (I was 7.) Perhaps it was after I entered middle school and it became clear that I wasn’t going to reach my mother’s expectations, a shortcoming she has frequently reminded me of. There have been so many emotionally destructive instances over the years that when my mother actually acknowledges my wish to be a writer and urges me to write some kind of memoir, I just chuckle wryly to myself and think, yes, but I wouldn’t allow it to be published until after you pass, because you’ll probably be horrified by my memories of you.
She brought up this memoir thing again last week, and after once again exhorting me to pitch something to Reader’s Digest or our local newspaper (“Do you think journalists only get paid to write about themselves?!” I asked), she said, “You know, if I had the time or ability to write well, I would do it, and I bet I could get published easily. I have a lot of life experiences to write about.”
And that made me pause. Yeah, I bet my mother, who grew up in communist China and immigrated to the U.S. 21 years ago, does have some interesting stories to tell. The sad thing is that I don’t know any of them, because we basically never talk. The majority of our exchanges, while I was a teen, were one-sided lectures. My mother’s not the kind of person to ask how I’m feeling. And in college, I only spoke to my parents once every few weeks, and though it’s slightly embarrassing to admit, those conversations only lasted 10 minutes or so. (It flabbergasts me that B talks to his parents on the phone for at least 30 minutes almost every day. I can’t even imagine doing that in person.)
I always thought to myself, well, we’ll get closer when I get older. When I have a job. When I’m successful. When I’m good enough. Then, maybe, we can talk. But what if it’s too late? The mother of a guy at church was in a horrible car collision last week that put her in a coma and required emergency brain surgery. She’s recovering well now, but life is just that fragile and unexpected. As a journalist, my goal is to tell other people’s stories — what if I never hear those of my mother? Her own mother died of lung cancer when I was 2.
It’s a pity that I never got to know my grandmother. I have one photo of her, which I keep on my bookshelf. She looks like a kind woman, and as the youngest of four girls, my mother was most likely as spoiled as anybody in the lurches of Mao’s Great Leap Forward could be. My mother always spoke fondly of her mother. I imagine that they were close, and I wonder if and when I’ll be able to experience that kind of relationship.
Grandma and me
A friend once asked me if I have daddy issues because my father has traveled for work for as long as I can remember, around the world for maybe months at a time. I was surprised, because that was the first and only time anybody had brought it up. After thinking about it, my answer would be a resounding no. I’ve never been boy-crazier than the next girl, and I’ve had healthy, functional romantic relationships so far. I’ve always known that my father loves me. What I have is just the opposite: mommy issues.
For most of my life, I just wanted my mom to like me. It might seem like an exaggeration, but I rarely got any hint that she did. There are a few positive memories, such as her coming to my badminton games or taking me prom dress shopping, buried in the mountain of why aren’t you good enough why aren’t you good enough recollections. (At this point, you might be inclined to think that I enjoy victimizing myself a bit too much, and I might agree with you, but traumatic memories are hard to rewrite.)
It’s a bit tragic to admit, but one of my greatest fears is that I’ll turn out like my mother. (Pretty sure only deadbeat parents would enjoy hearing that.) Yet there are small things I’ve picked up that might not necessarily have originated from my mother, but make us alike nonetheless. For example, she has always liked painting her nails. I mean, she doesn’t do it to a crazy manicure addict’s degree, but she does like keeping a few bottles of pinks and reds around to decorate her toes. I remember being fascinated with her nail polish as a child, and once when playing with one, I accidentally dripped some onto the carpet. When she found out, she furiously forced me to kneel on the ground in the living room for an hour. (Never let it be said that my parents were particularly good at appropriate discipline.) So…yeah. There was that, but hey! Nail polish buddies!
My still-expanding collection
We both have a thing for cats — she has a penchant for tigers because she was born in the year of the tiger, while I tend to like all cats in general, though she’s pretty much afraid of all animals (even hamsters) and I’m allergic to cats, so we could never actually have one. And she basically loves the color red just as much as I am obsessed with hot pink, so we share some kind of…inclination/loyalty toward bold colors? (I’m trying really hard here.)
When I peel back her scathing layers, my mother has a lot of qualities I would find cute or lovable if I weren’t so damn afraid of her all the time. I think it’s cute that she loves Jennifer Aniston movies. I think it’s cute that she inexplicably cheers for Lebron James (“I like him and I think he deserves a ring.” Uhh okay). I think it’s funny that she thinks 3D movies are “great.” (You mean money-grubbing and pointless??) I think it’s funny that now that she has a Facebook, she asks my brother and me for advice on things like tagging the photos she proudly posted. And I’ve always thought it was funny that she loves animal print and will sometimes wear clashing ones to church.
But I’m barely scratching the surface of who my mother is. And as this is (God willing) my last summer at home before I go off to NYC and find out more about who I am, I hope to find the courage to hear my mother’s stories while I still can. Today, on my parents’ 25th wedding anniversary, I want to thank my mother for everything she’s given and done for me.
Stolen from mom’s FB
auradis 