Selina Xu

The past few weeks felt like four months condensed into ONE. Life in New York is a spinning top, flung down from above by my whimsical hand — April was sheer torque, unstoppable whirl. There were days when I left my laundry in the common dryer overnight, too tired to get it; rides on the NQRW, bathed in fluorescent, calculating if I could reach home before midnight. But the underlying thread is not exhaustion but exuberance. Feeling life brimming over is enlivening!!!

I’ll remember April by the flashes of Singapore humidity, sun caressing my cheeks in Washington Square Park, cherry blossoms blooming in front of The Bean. I’ll remember it by Taylor’s TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT, screaming to Down Bad at SoulCycle, Florida pulsing in the bedroom and sinking into sinews, humming “What if he’s written ‘mine’ on my upper thigh / Only in my mind?” in the shower. By karaoke outings to Flushing filled with dramatic Chinese ballads, off-key duets, and TP Tea. By nights drinking from red solo cups in the dark at house parties, listening to jazz at Mezzrow, shivering while huddling over skewers at the Queens Night Market.

April was also when I chanced upon random events and activities across the city. A lecture about Anna May Wong and her legacy at the Museum of Chinese in America; an after-hours writing club on ‘What a Body Needs’ at the MoMA gallery on Body Constructs; gluing paper cutouts at the Whitney workshop for Pippa Garner’s new exhibit on “impossible inventions” (imagining fantastical second lives for manufactured objects); listening to Neel Mukherjee (my creative writing professor in freshman year) talk about making the reader feel unsafe, instead of constructing narratives as smooth as a banana.

April was conversations with interesting people, on the margins of conferences and parties, born out of email exchanges and coincidences. A Chinese American man in his eighties telling me about his aspirations for the US-China relationship over coffee and declaring quietly, “We’ll never be white and we must first accept that.” A friend talking about A Reluctant Fundamentalist and feelings of being a class traitor at the Columbia Law School formal. The founder of one of my favorite newsletters on China sharing about how he started doing it full-time.

Now it’s May and I’m freshly back from DC. I’ll be flying off to China tomorrow for three weeks (so excited to be back in Asia!!!) – stay tuned for more travel tales ❤️

PS some random artifacts: