I spent last weekend in New York City--my first visit there in over two years--and it was pretty great. Hopefully next week I'll get a post up complete with pictures of all the awesome food I ate. For now, though, all you get is a description of a too-brief portion of my trip.
On Monday morning I ventured to Chinatown, ostensibly to look for a cheap/fake Rolex for my brother. They no longer keep the knockoff watches, sunglasses, and handbags out in the open; rather, as you walk by, old ladies will whisper "Watches? You want watches?" If you say yes, they lead you around the corner or into the back of a shop and have you pick what you want from a page of pictures. Then someone pulls the bootleg item out of a backpack, and you're on your way. Unfortunately, I couldn't get them to drop the price far enough, and I bought nothing. Sorry, Derek.
In previous visits to Chinatown, I don't think I had ever done more than walk up and down the few blocks between Centre and Broadway on Canal St., where all the tourists congregate. But after striking out on the Rolexes, I decided to do some wandering--and it was pretty great.
Strolling the side streets of Chinatown was at least as enjoyable for me as walking through Central Park ever has been. There's so much visual stimulation--colorful storefronts with signs in English and Chinese (Mandarin? Cantonese? I don't know), shops selling an incredibly random array of items (any readers who grew up in Murray, think of the old Jobber's Odd Lot), huge sidewalk displays of fruits and vegetables (including enormous bins of dragon fruits and other produce that I rarely if ever see at my grocery store), and an almost equal number of outdoor seafood displays (though I never heard people whispering "Crab? You want imitation crab?" as I walked by). I don't care how much ice the fish, shrimp or lobster is sitting in--I wouldn't feel good about buying fresh seafood from these shops.
I eventually made my way to Columbus Park, which was pretty cool. Check out the thoughtful reviews here--they're all pretty accurate. Just a bunch of Chinese people playing Mah Jong, performing native music, and just, well, living. I paused right before entering the park for a passing funeral procession, and that, combined with the scenes I observed in the park, helped me see the residents of Chinatown not just automatons desperate to sell trinkets but as real people. It's a stupid thing to have to "realize," but it's really not that hard to overlook the humanity of these people if you only spend a few minutes on Canal St.
The picture above is of a statue of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Chinese Republic, that stands in Columbus Park. If you enlarge it you'll see the inscription at the bottom is his quote "All under heaven are equal." As I thought about that quote, juxtaposed with all I had seen that morning--the residences above and between all the stores and restaurants, incredibly cramped even by New York standards; the elderly men and women working at shops and carts who will likely never be able to retire; an entire neighborhood whose language and cultural barriers largely isolated it from everyone around them--it was quite sobering.
It certainly doesn't seem that all under heaven are equal, at least not in this life. And this lack of fairness is not new--this week's Sunday School reading continues the story of the preaching of Alma and Amulek. Their converts were cast out of their city, and the converts' families were burned to death. Later on, the Lamanites destroy the city of Ammonihah, killing literally every resident.
Why does God allow some to be killed because of their beliefs, while others are spared? Why do some people have the advantage of being born a white American male, to a comparatively affluent family, like me, while others are born into poverty in a community where they are likely to experience hardship and discrimination? I don't have good answers for these questions. But I do have faith "that the judgments which [God] shall exercise...may be just" (Alma 14:11). All under heaven don't seem to be equal right now, but eventually they will be. For real. And not Chinatown Rolex real--real real.
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