The Sorrows of Others by Ada Zhang EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Author: Ada Zhang
- Language: English
- Genre: Asian American Literature & Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
The Subject
The summer before my junior year, I moved out of the dorms in Baxter Hall
on the corner of Broadway and East Tenth and took a room in a small house
on Cherry Avenue, Flushing, Queens. I told my friends it was to save
money, and they didn’t ask why I didn’t move to Brooklyn or Long Island
City. Anywhere would have been closer. I suppose it was a point of pride
among my college friends to live frugally even if it was selective. Even if it
was abstract, since it was our parents’ money we were spending every time
we went out, our parents who paid our rents. But we were all very young
back then, and I regarded hardship the same way I regarded my own
shadow. I was aware of it but rarely thought of it. Either way, it did not
frighten me.
The house was a low, squat rectangle with a patchy yard and a maroon
awning over the front door. The windows were barred. A chain-link fence
wrapped around the house, separating it from the sidewalk and from the
homes on either side, which looked more or less the same as ours, the twobedroom I shared with Granny Tan: red brick with asphalt shingles scaling
the roof, all faded and curling around the edges. At parties that summer, my
living situation lent me an air of authenticity. I’d recently bleached my hair
and dyed it blue to make up for the fact that I did not grow up in a
progressive household. My parents are Chinese immigrants. We were
middle class. Their politics were what you might expect. They believed in
taxing the rich but not in affirmative action. At the time, this brought me a
deep sense of shame.
“I live in Flushing,” I would tell a room full of hipsters, most of them art
students like me. They all stepped closer. “My roommate is this old Chinese
lady.”
“How old?” someone would ask.
“In her seventies I think.”
“Why does she need a roommate?”
“To save money I guess,” I would say, and shrug. “Same reason as
anybody else.”
The hipsters would nod and drink their beers, smug in the idea that there
was a real one among us. There was a palpable fear in every young liberal
back then that one could never be poor enough or of-color enough to
outweigh whatever privileges one had. Even those on scholarship felt
insecure. We talked our heads off about gentrification but said nothing
when friends moved to Bushwick or Ridgewood, the then up-and-coming
neighborhoods. It was amid such confusion and self-loathing that I began
searching for a new place to live.
I loved Flushing because I chose to be there, but at the time I believed I
loved it for different reasons. The food, Chinese restaurants all up and down
Main Street, noodles and dumplings next to Thai restaurants, Korean,
Vietnamese; and the people, who looked like they could be my relatives, the
aunts and uncles and cousins I saw once every three or four years.
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