Nostalgia is a disease : intimacy of the otherness
I took Peter Hessler’s River Town with me on my two-night-three-day excursion to Philly. To be exact, it was more like an escape to somewhere unknown from the heavy works here, with a safety friend, a girl friend. I was planning to finish Hessler’s book on the plane, but failed to do so, I slept all the one and half hour and skipped snacks and drinks.
I saw the city of faded brown from high above the sky, and I said to myself, so this is the city of “Philadelphia”? Strangely enough, the city seemed very intimate to me, just like that feeling when you met some stranger for the first time of your life, but you seemed knowing all about him/her, or put in another way, you know you will become instant friend of them, if not become lovers. That kind of intimacy.
Then I realized, it is the sense of nostalgia that makes me felt so. Which will be explained in the end.
Then here is Philadelphia. For a PhD student of early American history, it is natural to feel the connection, due to the constitutional convention, due to the founding fathers. But somehow, the first thing that evoked my fondness of the city are the dogs.
Dogs:
Philadelphians love dogs, they walk their dogs day and night, you spotted more dogs here than Boston, New York, and Athens. And those dogs are huge dogs. The streets are filled with the filthy sent of dogs’ pee and street signs asking citizens to clean their pets’ shit. But anyway, I love seeing all the dogs, because I am more of a dog person than a cat person, I used to raise two dogs, a silly one and a smart one.
We spotted a dog school on the second day of the journey, they played with the music of Adele in a kindergarten like room, and they liked seeing strangers outside from the big window. They seemed pretty happy, happier than the dogs I saw on 6th avenue between west and 13th street. Rick and Maira used to have a dog named Pete, I never got meet him in 2008, since he passed away in earlier in December. But I did carry his ashes on a bleack NYC winter morning…
Then on the second afternoon, we ran into a kindergarten near the river, kids were playing with house music while the teacher is away. We stood at the window and watched them play, they soon noticed the two weird black hair asian girl, and gathered towards the window. “They were like the dogs in the morning, don’t they?” we laughed. And they really did.
Streets:
The other thing that made me felt like home about Philly was the streets in the town, narrow and vintage especially those on Walnut St. and Chestnut St.. There were Italian origin supermarkets that reminded me of Fairway market, where Rick took me there for the first time and demanded me took his photo while he making orders, which according to him was an evidence to my dad that as my American grandpa he was feeding me well. But the streets were so much narrower than those of New York, with buildings more vintage and shaking, even the so called broadway that crosses through the City Hall seemed narrower and humbler than the other Broadway.
Fancy people flocked all over Chestnut and Walnut in the early spring heat. Even though the mother nature hasn’t brought spring to the city, people started putting on tanks and maxi skirts to show their optimistic anticipations. I did not shop much there, except for three panties. I was supposed to buy a ring to fill the gap left by Mrs. Robinson’s gift, but I was not sure on the first day in the store, then the second day I went, it was sold.
Really preppy people gathered near the Barney’s store and the Parc restaurant, we saw a guy with blue suit and gold buttons, brown brogue and light brow khaki, he was confident and mildly pretentious. But that was that, just like all the preppy middle aged men in other towns, being naturally preppy effortlessly.
I spotted a black man with red raincoat, walking in a hangover mood in the street, watching him, I just could not help thinking about Bruce Springsteen’s drum beats in “Street of Philadelphia”, he was cute, but I never got a chance to shoot him face to face.
We walked more than 40 minutes to a highly rated French restaurant in a non-touristy neighborhood, the food is supreme, the waiters were cute. The mother and daughter next to our table was gossiping about friends, while on the left an old man nervously flirted with his new girlfriend. We chose a safer route walk back to the hotel through the German town like streets with penhouses all along the two sides of the streets. It was quiet in late night, but safe. We stopped at the bar just across the street of our hotel, ordered wine. I felt so eager to smoke, and got a pack of Lesley-Anne’s favorite Winston, however, it never suits me. I smoked four of them and gave them up.
After all, people watching was the most interesting thing for me when visiting a strange place or even in a familiar environment. I was just boring…I guess.
The Art Museum:
We spent more than four hours at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which totally worth it. There was this special exhibition of Vangogh, in which I saw the sunflower, the one I did not have a chance to see in Amsterdam’s Vangogh Museum. Though the color of the actual painting was not as bright as it seems on google art or other photos, it got me in a personal way. The first Sunflower I saw was a duplicated one by my grandmother, hanging in her sitting room, and she told me the original was by a Netherland painter who happened to be really unhappy but talented, and who killed himself on the same day as my birth month and day, died two days later…
Then I thought about my grandmother all the time when I lingered back and forth in the exhibition hall of Vangogh’s landscapes and flowers. She passed away just one month I arrived in US, which was a regret that still regrets me.
I also thought about the first time I saw the Starry Night at MoMA, I used Maira’s membership card that day to have unlimited access to the exhibition, I stood there seeing the real painting of my favorites. It was just as bright and fluid as I thought it should be, vibrant but serene. I called my dad and another person after seeing it, my dad was nonchalant about my excitement since he has seen it before in Europe, the other person told me there was a song named Vincent.
Seeing the rest of the art museum was fun as well. I saw Duchamp’s Fountain and a bold crimson Mark Rothko, I saw teachers and museum volunteers explaining different genres of works to patrons and students. I saw a father taught his little girl about the late Renaissance European paintings, thinking about if one day I would bring my daughter to MET or something and ask her draw a portrait of Homer or Ceaser in the Roman and Greek Hall while I toss a coin into the fountain.
Nostalgia:
What Philly got to me was exactly the movie in which Tom Hanks was an HIV carrier gay lawyer. I watched it for the first time when I was 8, because my father thought it was an education for me to learn about homosexuality and discrimination, and of course, AIDS. I cried at the end of the movie just because it was so sad listening to Bruce Springsteen singing and saw the flashback of the dead lawyer’s life course photos. Then that was Philly, which the otherness and strangeness of a place I never been to felt so intimate and comforting to me. Wherever I walked through intensively those two days there, I was not afraid, it was just like going home, like wondering in Sanlitun and bumping into friends, like waking in West Village in late November night and the door man always smiled at you when you arrived at 59th west 12th. It was just that sense of security derive from nowhere.
But still, it was nostalgia, and it was the disease. And more and more when I realized that I will be far away from home and China for a long time, I guess this weird intimacy to the otherness will grow more severe, which is helplessly welcoming to me. Nowhere feels like home to me since 13, I left home for junior and high school in boarding schools, and then parents left for Beijing when I was 16, I lived in grandparents’ homes, uncles’ houses, and then I moved to Beijing briefly and then it was Tianjin my nightmare years.
And then, here, Athens, out of nowhere I would never have imagined I would end up been. But gradually, I started to like this place. However, the longer you stayed in one place, the more you feel alienated from it. The more intimacy you felt in other places, even in Paris, even with the weed dizziness in Amsterdam, or the shabby and curvy streets in old Brusells. You cannot help but thinking, what about staying there for a while ?
