Golden Poo

"Are you sad because you're on your own? No! I get by... with a little help from my friends." -- Lennon/McCartney

I pride myself on knowing a lot of stuff about a lot of different things. I'm well-read and well-educated, I'm familiar with many subject areas, I can hold a decent conversation with many types of people, and I have a head filled to bursting with many random facts. Thus, it's very rare for me to find myself in a place or a situation where I'm totally out of my element.

Well, it happened last weekend.

After two days that fit every possible definition of "homecoming," I found myself wandering around Chinatown. It's something I've done countless times before -- I've traversed Canal Street, ventured into Pearl Paint, eaten dim sum, and browsed the wares of the street vendors pretty regularly for years. However, I'd never been to Chinatown accompanied by actual Chinese people... and, accompanied by Q and DW, Chinatown was a whole new world.

They led us to places I never even knew existed -- streets that barely looked like New York City and shops that contained no English signage whatsoever. We went to a grocery store selling live frogs in a garbage can. I became acquainted with dried shellfish, and I'm still not sure if it requires rehydration or if it's eaten as is. I waited on line to buy dried udon noodles and briefly panicked about whether I could use US dollars for my purchase. We had Vietnamese for lunch and I didn't know how DW's coffee pot worked. Q took me to a bakery to get some buns I once tried, but all I remembered about them was that they had sweet yellow filling and that description basically fit everything in the display case. We went to an underground shopping mall filled with plush depictions of bear excrement. ("Golden poo" is allegedly a symbol for good luck, but no one knew why.) I pointed at what I thought was an endive and was told that it was actually a torpedo vegetable. I then pointed at a vegetable that looked like a carrot, asked what it was, and was told that it was a carrot.

We continued to wander, deeper and farther into shops and streets that I never knew existed, and I truly began to feel as if I had been transported out of New York and onto a different planet. Despite my cultured upbringing, the obscene amount of time I've spent with my Chinese friends over the years, and all of the reading I've done during the course of my life, I was totally clueless about everything. I felt incredibly ignorant.

Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, we stumbled upon a pocket of Little Italy. Q decided that she wanted sfogliatella, we stopped into an Italian bakery... and and all of a sudden, my world once again made sense. The sights, the smells, the biscotti in the window and panettone boxes hanging from the ceiling all felt comfortable and familiar to me.

We approached the counter. One of my companions pointed at a display case, turned to DW, and said, "Ooh, have you ever had a cannoli?" I'm not sure how he answered; I was too stunned to listen. Have you ever had a cannoli?! What kind of a question is that?! In my world, asking someone if they've ever had a cannoli is like asking them if they've ever breathed oxygen or if they've blinked at least once today.

I then realized that I was the only person in the crowd with any Italian blood, and that my companions probably weren't weaned off the bottle onto cannoli like I was. And then my entire day made sense. I wasn't ignorant -- I just have a different cultural identity than the one I happened to be facing. And I'm lucky enough to have an open mind and friends willing to help me fill it. All in all, it was a pretty amazing afternoon.