New York, in between

The author is captivated by the grit beneath the glitter in a city that countless immigrants call home

There’s no place quite like New York for an experience junkie like me. It is one of the few cities that always whet my appetite for new flavours, sights, sounds and ideas. There are some things I must do on every visit — walk in Central Park, try out some of the latest “it” restaurants, spend a couple of evenings in its slightly gritty jazz clubs and idle away a pleasant day at the Metropolitan Museum. But what I look forward to each time I visit is for the Maximum City to reveal a few of its many secrets — secrets that I hold on to and savour until I visit again.

This time is no different. Two days in the city, jet lag is still such a problem that I nod off into a demitasse of espresso, listening to the 82-year-old jazz great Gato Barbieri at the Blue Note Jazz Club. The next morning, soon after I’ve inserted a T-Mobile sim into my phone, it rings. A friend is offering a spare ticket to a TEDx conference at the Met. So off I go to the Breuer building, freshly acquired by the Met, where it is being held. The conference has me the minute I learn of its theme: “The In-Between”. For, in our obsession with the here and now, it is the interregnum, filled with amazing stories of people neither here nor there and ideas that have not yet attained fruition, that is sometimes overlooked.

The mix of ideas, poetry and performance at the conference is striking. From Sharon Olds, the poet who has renounced poetic conventions to write odes to her hymen, to Tanya Tagaq, the Inuk throat singer — each speaker/performer forces us to rethink how we look at our worlds. I’m most fascinated by the presentation by Ian Alteveer. A Met director, he talks about images in art that are too hard to see. He introduces the audience to the works of Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez Torres whose most evocative works are about his lover Ross’ battle with, and eventual death from, AIDS. Alteveer shows us a photograph of his installation — a pile of jewel-like, delicious candy weighing exactly what his lover weighed when he’d been healthy. Viewers were invited to partake of this candy, and as they helped themselves to the sweetness of Ross, the candy pile diminished. Every day, the candy pile was replenished, resurrecting a healthy, beautiful Ross. As I leave the Breuer building that day, the torpor of jet lag has been replaced by the happy buzz of all these new ideas.

The idea of the “in-between” continues to haunt me over the next few days. Consequently, when I’m wandering in the verdant New York Botanical Garden, where a Frida Kahlo exhibition is currently on, I find myself musing that the famed Mexican artist embodied the “in-between” in so many ways. She was a woman ahead of her time who never truly belonged to her beloved Mexico, or to America where her work was celebrated but perhaps never really understood. The Botanical Garden has recreated her garden in her natal home, Casa Azul (Blue House), which she and her artist husband, Diego Riviera, made their own. I sit amongst the luscious bougainvillea, hibiscus and frangipani, which she loved to paint and wear in her hair, and recall her famously saying that she painted self-portraits because she was the person she knew best.

A couple of days later, Sarah Khan, a New York-based Fulbright scholar who I’d met in India when she was travelling the country to document lives of women farmers, tells me about a bakery in Harlem that’s worth a visit. So I take the subway to Hot Bread Kitchen, which runs an innovative workforce development programme that supports low-income, minority and immigrant women to launch culinary careers and food businesses. The aroma of freshly baking challah, ciabatta and other breads from across the world greets me as I witness the moving graduation ceremony of some of its trainees. “It’s beautiful to see ladies from West Africa, Spain,  West Asia and more, training to be employed in New York’s best bakeries,” says Allegra Ben-Amotz, the bakery’s marketing and events manager.

Later, we all gather for a party in the bakery’s Incubator Kitchen, where entrepreneurs who have trained here spoil us with pretty cupcakes, delicious ethnic food from West Africa, and some banana rum pudding to die for. As I look around the bright industrial kitchen that all of the bakery’s entrepreneurs can rent to prepare the food for their businesses, I realise how wrong the common perception of immigrants and refugees as economic dead weights is. In fact, as the ladies excitedly hug each other and enjoy the fruit of their labour, I realise that the bakery demonstrates how immigrants can make positive contributions to their host economies and cultures. As I walk out, I reflect that, in many ways, these immigrant women are stuck in the in-between too — from countries they’ve left behind, in a home not quite theirs yet. One of them, a Nigerian with a toddler, shows me the way to the subway station. As if to give me more food for thought, she says, “HBK [Hot Bread Kitchen] is making it better for me. I feel more at home since I’ve joined….”

The day I have to leave New York, I return to the familiar comfort of Central Park, lingering on a bench overlooking the lake. Each bench is inscribed with memorials to unknown loved ones. I dream, as I’m often wont to do, that one day after I’m gone, maybe a new bench will be placed here. And it will look at this lake in eternal salute to people like me who love New York City — neither locals nor tourists, but those somewhere in between.