Love Letters to Chinatown and the Financial District

Our arrangement seems to be working well. I had doubts at first. After all, I’ve never had a mistress. But I couldn’t very well just up and leave my neighborhood for you. It’s not that easy. I have stairs, lots of them. The kind that switchback and seem to last forever or at least until you begin to wonder who would move into such a place. And you were, and still are, set in your ways. I couldn’t convince you that moving your busy shops and ubiquitous pink plastic bags my way would be a good idea. So we worked out an arrangement. You usually call to me when I am at work in the financial district, sitting in a green cubicle without so much as a view an office with a view. When you do call, I slip outside and quickly past the Grant Street arch that announces the beginning of you. Your main thouroughfares are often clogged with people angling for the inexpensive lychees or bok choy. I like your side streets the best though, the narrow ones with fire escapes that look as if they’ve both never been used and have been overused, because this is what I like most about you—your ability to be two things simultaneously. Maybe because that’s how I feel, slipping down your dark alleys in my workaday clothes, buying freeze dried squid and plums and listening to the rattle and hum of Chinese that spills out of the narrow doorways. So I think we should continue to see each other. We’re probably bad for each other and bad for many other people as well, but some days my desire for you, my faith in your aloof love, is the one thing that keeps me from thinking that I have disappeared.

Darling Chinatown, How can I eloquently profess my love to thee? I love you as all broken but beautiful things are to be loved: passion and pity overwhelm me in your bustling streets. You leave me with no choice but to embrace your colors and smells...your sights and sounds. Walking up your hills - the mountains and valleys that make up the curves of your luscious body - I feel I've stepped into a different world. I am Alice, and I am indeed in Wonderland. All of the small people with shining hair and glittering eyes further confirm my suspicion: I must have stepped through the looking glass and eaten the cake which made me grow! I am a monster, a blonde freak of nature in the streets! Despite this fact, the people pay me no mind. They shout at each other with broken consenants: or so it seems to the untrained ear. Each thought has a pattern, an ancient rhythm that flows like the beat of the drum...like the beat of the heart. Disasters are avoided constantly here. It must be something in the air. The air here is thicker; it is warmer than the rest of the city. I can see the air...the transluscent bubbless that smell of sweet and sour, and of silk, all garnished with gasoline. Chinatown, my love, my life: you let me be myself without questioning me. You require no interrogation; instead, you invite me to lie my head upon your breast and stay awhile. Your incandescent glow must come from within: it brightens the paper lanterns, the flourescent and primary colored signs that adorn shop windows, and trickets perched precariously upon pompadors. Maybe if I stay here long enough, my love, I will absorb some of the magic you contain. Love always, Your Secret Admirer