Chinatown a.m.

This past weekend I was walking through one of this country's Chinatowns -- it doesn't matter which one -- and as I went down one unfamiliar street after another -- sometimes turning right, sometimes left -- I felt less like myself and more like someone watching a body float down a river that cuts through a canyon. There was nothing to do but watch:

Monday morning, just shy of nine a.m. Storefronts are mostly closed, but the bakeries are doing brisk business. I stop in front of one, look inside the window -- Chinese people are pointing to things inside glass deli cases, and attendant women in identical aprons are picking things out with tongs, wrapping them in paper and ringing up the bill -- it's like watching praying mantises at work. I step up to the counter, wait until I catch the eye of one attendant and point to one pastry, then another, then another -- now I'm hungry -- no, I don't want that "to stay" -- "to go, please". I pay out the two sixty-five and walk out of the store holding this paper bag like I'm a marsupial with a newborn in its pouch.

I turn down a side street, go about twenty feet until I'm out of eyeshot, and take the first wrapped pastry out of the bag: a piece of chicken, beaten flat, topped with a pickle, wedged into a bun of cake flour. Another look around, and I see I'm in front of a church. God, I'm eating this chicken sandwich, it's just after nine a.m., and I'm reading church announcements posted on a fence in a strange city. The English version is mounted next to the Chinese. "Pray for the sick" -- crumbs are going all over the sidewalk -- "Pray for the deceased" -- more crumbs fall, and now I'm done with the sandwich. I feel good. The thought crosses my mind that I should walk right into this church, sit on a pew, and pretend I'm a parishoner. The thought crosses my mind that seventy-five cents' worth of chicken in a cake flour bun has made me giddy.

But I'm too impatient to do the prank, so I keep walking. Grocers are the only other stores open -- some with long displays of fruits and vegetables angled up toward the sky, others with fish lain flat on crushed ice. I'd like to buy a fish and sling it as far as I could up a street. How far would it go? Old Chinese women walk in front of me, hunched over and looking small, and I try to pass as respectfully as possible. Mom and dad didn't raise a prig, but I'm in a hurry. No destination, just the vague motivation that I should cover as much ground as possible. Odors pass by, one after another -- this must be what it's like to be a dog with its head out the car.

A storefront opens just as I pass it -- the door rolls up on its spindle -- and I walk through a cloud of incense. I'm next to people speaking a tongue vaguely familiar to my ears which are powerless to stop the recognizable phonemes from reaching my brain. For a moment I'm totally out of place -- I'm back at my dad's house in the Taiwan countryside, in the pharmacy that they run out of the front, sitting on a wooden stool as motorcycles pass. Like a thunderclap, I'm suddenly fully cognizant of the fact that the place my parents call home and the place I call home are not the same, will never be the same. Suddenly I don't want to be here -- I want to be home -- heimweh hits -- but where is that?

I'm dizzy like someone's sucked the air out of my head, but I keep walking two, three blocks. And now I'm outside a park with a baseball field, holding myself up on the top row of concrete bleachers. A man is sitting opposite me on the bottom bleacher. He's got his head in his hands and his shopping cart full of black plastic bags next to him. The sun comes out from behind the clouds.