A New York Moment...

When I first graduated college and moved to NY, my first apartment there was in Brooklyn. (A time when I was single, young, and washed myself daily.) I had a pretty decent walk to the subway, and from there, had to transfer trains once till I finally arrived at my work destination in midtown. There were times that the trains were so crowded, it was unbearable. Nothing worse than having strangers pressed up all around you, shoulder-to-shoulder, with more people trying to squeeze into the cars at each stop. We were shunted back and forth, and often these sardine-packed times were the ones when there were these unexplained long pauses in transit. The train would be just sitting there in some dark tunnel…filled with hundreds of commuters…all trying to pretend that their personal spaces weren’t being completely violated. You gotta hand it to New Yorkers…a fierce crew with the best survival instincts. Anyway, being that close, you would get the random whiffs of fart, or B.O., but to me, the worst would be getting stuck next to someone that had doused themselves in perfume or cologne. It’s akin to getting gassed, and with each breath, your nostrils and mouth are being filled with this putrid odor that someone actually PAID for. Ack. God, do I not miss living in NY.

Once on the way home, the subway stopped in the tunnel just before the station in Chinatown…we were there for about 20 minutes…annoyance levels rising…the train wasn’t crowded, but still…What’s the holdup? Then the train doors connecting to the car in back of ours opened and all of these riders were streaming through our car…seemingly to get away from something…Okay, this was getting stranger. Still no announcement from the loudspeaker saying what was going on. THEN, we see policemen through the windows sprinting through the tunnel to get to a car somewhere behind us…Come to find out that there had been some sort of altercation…a stabbing or something like that had occurred on the train.

When we finally pulled into the Chinatown stop, which was just mere feet from where we were stopped, the station was filled to the platform edge with Chinese people. After all, we were in Chinatown, right? Yet, the doors didn’t open…At this point, all of us riders are looking out the window at the people waiting to board…and then we hear shouting voices in the distance…and see more policemen running towards the tunnel entrance. Then, all at once, and I kid you not, the crowd of people on the platform look to the right towards the tunnel, and all together, they start running in the opposite direction! A mass exodus of Asians fleeing…there was no screaming or panic involved, only movement…I think I may have even seen some of them smiling…We have no idea what they saw…but I tell you…and being Asian myself, what happened next, I found hilarious,…one of the passengers on our car says aloud…”It looks like a scene from a Godzilla movie…” Everyone laughed, and it was a great stress reliever. After that, the doors opened, and passengers boarded the car...and we were on our way. Chalk it up to another example of a classic New York moment. God, do I miss living in NY.