New York, New York

I asked my daughter recently if she would go work in New York after graduation from Cornell, like a lot of her young friends have done. She replied, “I don’t think so. I don’t like how my friends turn out after living in New York.” Her response gave me something to think about.

It is every small-town New Yorker’s dream to end up in the big City someday. Not just for the young boy or girl, the dream occurred even to me. Seven years ago, at the age of 46, bored of Ithaca, I packed up my belongings, and moved 220 miles south to be near New York. For the following five years, I lived in the suburbs, and took the train into the City for work everyday.

Today, I’ve retired from the City – Since November 2006, I took a job in Connecticut, doing the reverse commute away from the City.

What has caused my change of heart about New York? The City? The people? Me? All of the above? Or just me? All I remember at the time was this “I began to tire of the City” feeling.

In hindsight, there were reasons deep inside beyond me that bothered me, but I could not tell their names at the time which I only know now.

Toxic Manhattan may be nice on certain nights, but awful on other nights.

The City is but a romance. When you are younger, you live for the promise and potential that the City presents you (including high heels, cocktails, and charge cards for the new girls). When you get older, you have caught up. The magic dims, and you begin to see the ugliness around you: the lonely people; the class divide; the greed and arrogance of the Wall Street sucking the soul off the City. Good people will then move on, repulsed by the nastiness in the air.

By the time I left the City, a mere one year ago, New York was on speed: a terribly unaffordable place, a playground for the idle rich, a city financed by the dirty money from one dominant, yet infamous industry (an industry that takes in the country’s brightest and molds them into a bunch of corrupt capitalist lemmings). Underneath the gilded façade, average folks toiled, moving farther and farther away from Manhattan to save on rent, robbing the City off its vital essence of ethnic colors (now suffering the final indignity of credit crunch on their dwellings at the hands of the unscrupulous Wall Street traders of the exotic mortgage-backed securities.)

What I value in a friendship has always been intelligence, honesty and originality. I see little evidence of any in the friends I’ve made inside the City. I seemed to run into a succession of selfish, flawed, mostly single professional women. No matter how hard I tried to be nice, I knew my relationships with them would not last. Till this day, I often wonder if the City has made them, or they have made the City. (Oh, there are so many of them…Terrified to be left alone, and yet unpleasant to be around long.)

New York is Starbuck, and I am Duncan Donut. You go to Starbuck to see, to be seen, and to hang out; that’s where you spend $4 on a coffee of a cup size that you cannot even pronounce. I prefer Duncan Donut, because I can get my good-to-great cup of medium-size coffee on the run for $2.50.

I understand my daughter’s ambivalence about New York. I’ve been there myself.

But one certain thing about young people is their uncertainty.



November 27, 2007
Susie Li