Thanksgiving

And so, the Thanksgiving weekend passes in a whirlwind of beers, dim rooms, shisha smoke, Garth Merenghi, Asian food, subway rides, long walks and reunions. It was an unbelievable weekend, as many people came from all over the Northeast to New York, and old social circles and new social circles met and combined in captivating social kaleidoscopes.

Over the weekend, I found that I have two great gaping holes in my knowledge of New York, specifically concerning the nightlife options available, and also the various places to get the best food in New York. The former is because 1) I don't have enough money to investigate the nightlife on a regular basis - indeed, on any sort of basis at all, and 2) I hadn't really been all that interested, to be honest. And the former is because my trusty NYC Free and Dirt Cheap guidebook doesn't include (understandably) top-end stuff. For these two lacunae, though, connections with other friends (especially the NYU people, who, having their school situated right in downtown Manhattan, are ludicrously well connected) proved to be extremely useful. At any rate, we went to so many places that I'd never even dreamed of going into that I find myself suddenly swamped with places to explore.

One of the places that we went to was Cafe Wha?, which is apparently the place where Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan were talent-spotted. Despite its worldwide renown, though, it's still a tiny space crammed into the basement of a short boutique on a small street off Washington Square. On the night that we went there, right before Thanksgiving, the place was crammed with tables and chairs, and every available space was taken up by people. Into the dingy space we went, and discovered a live band playing priceless numbers from the golden age of rock. I was rather taken by how I recognised almost every song, from Sweet Child of Mine to Hey-ya. And between singing along (rather ineffectually - though the place is small it has a superpowered sound system) and squeezing into the narrow aisles to dance (or, more accurately, jump up and down, since lateral movement was pretty much out of the question), I found that it was actually really fun. I never thought of myself as much of a nightlife person, and certainly the bill for that night tells me that I can't do something like that every other week, but I was really surprised by how fun it was. Joel was right - you need to get a little buzzed, and more crucially, I think, you need to go with people you know.

Another place was this Japanese bar at St. Mark's Place (in the Lower East Side) called Kenka. We found it on the evening of Thanksgiving Day, and when I stepped into it, I could hardly believe my eyes. It was like something out of a Kuroshawa flick, with a peeling samurai poster on the back wall, a cluttered counter doubling as a bar and sushi joint, several dozen tables and scores of young Japanese and Chinese people doing away with cheap Sapporo beer by the jug and sticks of yakitori. Even the harried serving staff, with their dirty aprons and tired smiles that they could turn on and off on demand, seemed to have been chosen to fit in with the decor and enhance the atmosphere. This is, of course, a place to linger, with a pint costing only $1.50, and various snacks costing onl $5 per serving. Amidst the hubbub of people relishing the arrival of the holidays, you feel yourself transported, and you are inclined to ruminate over how you got here into this little fragment of Japan when moments ago you had just walked out of the No. 6 subway line.

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To commemorate the special event of our first Thanksgiving, though, the first-years invested in a steamboat dinner. I, WL and J (our friend from Flushing who is also a skilled cook) went down to Chinatown to buy the food, the pot and the stove, and came back to our dorm to set up the meal. I have to say that we did a passable job. The meats were a tad bland because we didn't marinate any of it (it didn't occur to me at least that the meat should have been marinated, since I assumed that raw meat worked like meatballs or crabsticks - goes to show how much I know about cooking), but you can't go far wrong with fishballs, cabbage, rice and noodles. The best part, as usual, was the soup: clear, wholesome and, most importantly, piping hot. I daresay that we'll be having quite a lot of steamboats over the winter, especially when the dining halls close for the holidays. And there is a sort of pathos in a group of Asian students huddled over a bubbling hotpot on a winter night.

The dining halls were closed over the weekend, so everyone basically had to go out and make do with whatever we could afford on the open market. Over the weekend, I hooked up with various groups to sample the Asian fare of NYC, including the still-good Nyonya restaurant in Chinatown, another Indonesian-Malaysian restaurant whose name escapes me, and the Saigon Grill near Union Square - all of which serve what they purport to serve. The last one was especially atas, being in a prime location, but it does a remarkably authentic pho (one of the most affordable items on the menu), given its location in New York. Between that and the fare around Columbia (Mill Korean Restaurant and Tom's Restaurant of Seinfeld fame), we rounded out our meals over the weekend - and you can imagine how much cash was spent on food!

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Special events over the weekend were provided courtesy on NYC, in honour of Thanksgiving. So after Cafe Wha?, which kept us out till about 4am, I went down to Central Park West to hook up with some other visitors for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, which started, to my dismay, at 9am. By the time I got there with JK at about 8.30am, the place was already filled to capacity; there was essentially zero movement along the sidewalks fronting the parade route. And, as I'm coming to realise about New Yorkers in large crowds, everyone was in high spirits, being far more gracious than I'd expected them to be, given the early hour and the inhuman crush (at one point in time my weight was completely supported by the people around me). Kids were lifted up onto shoulders, kids were squirming between legs to get to the front of the crowd, kids were jumping up and down trying to see.

The parade itself consisted basically of enormous floats interspersed with marching bands from the various states of the Union. It was fun to see a giant floating Pikachu, Snoopy, Buzz Lightyear, Ronald McDonald, Spongebob et all bobbing along Central Park West, tugged gently through the crisp morning air by the tethers attached to a troop of puppeteers on the ground. Also, it was exciting to try to spot the celebrities, including child stars like Miley Cyrus and her protege (a pretty little girl whom I don't recognise at all), and the American Idol runner-up Daniel Whatshisname. But after a while, you realise that it's really just marketing by Macy's to get the kids to pester their parents in the run-up to Christmas. However, there was a special moment at the end, when Santa's float comes down the avenue. Santa always ends the parade, being the last float, and this year, the big red sleigh carrying the rotund and white-haired man was followed by huge red and green stars emblazoned simply with one word: "Believe".

And after that, New York offers another legendary event: Black Friday (so named not because of its tragic element, though someone did die from it on Long Island apparently, but because on this day the balance books of major retailers all go into the black). Essentially, it's the first day of the pre-Christmas sales, and all over the US stores were slashing their prices. In New York, as if discounts were not enough (and they really were not enough - there seemed to be hardly any difference in price), stores also opened extra-early. Macy's (the department store that's as large as a city block and five storeys high) opened their doors at 5am; Woodbury Commons, a huge factory outlet centre for branded goods, started doing business at midnight. Some friends actually went all the way upstate for the Woodbury Commons event, and came back laden with the fruits of a good night's work. For myself, though, I stuck with Joel, Conan, Ihui and Mark in NY and trawled SoHo instead. It was (for me at least) a journey marked by futility, because despite the discounts I still could not afford to buy anything. The price cuts are hardly on the same scale as the Great Singapore Sale.

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So, the weekend was really stuffed with things to do. Beyond all the myriad happenings, though, was the inherent value of meeting up with friends, different groups of friends, old friends and new ones. Basically, lots of people converged on New York for the Thanksgiving break: the old gang from CHS, new friends from UVa, YS (who surprised me by coming back to NY after all), and naturally, friends from NYU as well. Made quite a lot of new Singaporean acquaintances, friends of friends who turned up at the mass Singaporean dinners that happened every other day. Shuttling between groups took up most of the remaining time; I had never before taken the subways so often.

When big groups of Singaporeans congregate, the usual tendency arises that drives a sort of competition to prove who's leading a more happening life. Like I said before, it's not a question of whether people are leading good lives: those who actually don't like it here are rare. It's just that the tendency to aggrandise the joy, to vie for the title of being the happiest overseas student, seems to me to be such vanity. And anyway, such preening doesn't contribute anything to the happiness of one's life, unless one actually gets the acknowledgement that one is competing for. This, I think, could be part of the reason why Soph always found Singaporeans distasteful, especially when she encountered them abroad, and in big groups. There is a tangible, unpleasant edge, as if it is a matter of honour not to allow any doubt about one's success and enjoyment of one's life overseas.

But anyway, in small groups, everyone's amicable enough. Met lots of interesting and nice people over the weekend from far afield (inevitably, because there were so many Singaporeans in NY over the weekend that we were running into them randomly on the streets), and certainly there are people who I would like to keep in contact with. This weekend was a prime opportunity to diversify my social circle, at least in the Singaporean sphere. And this was made easier by the fact that we all already tend to come from similar social circles, so it's not that hard to transform a shared past experience into a shared present link. And it gets even better when the group isn't entirely Singaporean, as was the case with the UVa people. We had only met once, that evening in Charlottesville at C's apartment, but it seemed like the easiest thing in the world to resume our conversations. I guess partly it's because when you're abroad and in a strange place, every familiar face becomes so much more significant. But there also seems to be an effect that the more diverse the group, the less likely that it will be pretentious, or at least vain.

And then, of course, there's YS, who came back to NYC. I'm not sure why, but I was sure glad to see her again, especially since she's going to fly back to Asia soon, and I'd not been able to say a proper goodbye in Charlottesville. So, when I got her message that she was going to come to NYC over Thanksgiving with her mother, it was startlingly timely. How has it come to this, that we would be arranging meetings that would span entire states, in a city on the other side of the globe from home? We've travelled together before, but these transatlantic rendezvous are a whole new level. I guess it's partly a signal that we've grown up, and we can now plan suc big hops by ourselves. Anyway, caught up with her at the Thanksgiving Day Parade, and then again on Saturday night for dinner before she and her mother went to the Lincoln Centre to watch the NYC Ballet perform The Nutcracker, and then one last time on Sunday morning to help them move from their hostel on 94th to the bus station on 34th. And this time round, it was a good goodbye; or, at least, it was a better goodbye. And now, certainly, it will be another six months before I can even consider seeing my old travelmate again.

And of course, there's the gang from CHS. Somehow, as things have worked out, four of us have managed to end up in the Northeastern United States, and while Joel and I have met up rather regularly over the last semester, this was the first time that the four of us (Ihui and Conan) have gotten together since leaving. It seems like not so long ago, that everyone was at the glass gates of Changi Airport, singing (of all things) Sinatra's number about New York. But it's already been almost an entire semester, and the seasons have changed, and we've gone through experiences that are not entirely the same. I went into this weekend with the fear that we'd have drifted too far over the last six months to recapture the easy camaraderie that we used to have. And certainly, I get the impression that I've drifted farther from them, even if they've not drifted farther from each other. I get pulled along by them, trying to keep up, and finding that it takes all my effort simply not to lose track of them. I guess part of the problem is that I can't let go as easily as I could back in the NS days, when time and money didn't matter so much. I find that now, I'm much more self-conscious than I was even six months ago. But still, it's worth the effort to tag along with these people, and throughout the weekend, I was repeatedly struck by the sheer improbability of these relationships, how they have lasted not only the better part of a decade but how they have survived the transplantation to a new continent - and how I still find myself a part of all this, despite everything. It is a privilege to which I find myself struggling to prove myself worthy.

There you have it, then: a magical, magical weekend. I can't see how things can get any better than this. Well, actually I can see one way: to reproduce something like this with non-Singaporeans, and especially with Americans. And an opportunity to do just that may be coming up tomorrow, as I hook up with some CUErs to go to the star-studded (in both senses of the word) tree-lighting ceremony down at Rockefeller Centre. In the meantime, though, I'm still basking in the afterglow of Thanksgiving. May things only get better from here for everyone.