Cold coming

The cold has come and it's apparent to me now what it truly means to live in a pedestrian city. There's no rushing to the car and bathing in the heater's emissions once there; you want something, you bundle up and go get it on foot. I guess some people have the same revelation here with the heat in summer, but I don't mind heat, actually, so this is only now sinking in.

It's been good this week, though, because I've had a reason to venture out each afternoon, and it was brilliantly sunny most of the week, so if I bundled properly I enjoyed it. The venturing was part of a new project -- a food-writing gig chronicling restaurants in downtown and lower Manhattan. My first beat was an area I soon realized was basically Chinatown (East Chinatown, they call it), so the challenge was to pop into every place and figure out what made one Chinese bakery different from the next.

I really enjoyed it at first, and was reveling in all the bargains I learned of (sandwiches for 70 cents! beef and rice for $2!) but as I got deeper into the neighborhood, people became less and less open to talking to me. No matter how friendly and non-threatening I tried to be, at many places employees would clam up suspiciously and become loathe to give me any information about the restaurant. "I'm a reporter," I might say, "there's no charge," but many people would just clam up, tell me the boss wasn't there or that they didn't speak English and their eyes would implore me expectantly to please vanish. It was dramatically different going to the four or five Vietnamese restaurants in the area - these places had reviews from the papers and Yelp and Citysearch posted and seemed happy at the prospect of further press. I soon realized something cultural was going on at the Chinese places, and I had to wonder if it has to do with the lack of a free press in China, and consequently not really having a place from which to relate to what I was doing. At one closet-sized dumpling shop, the woman gave me as much information as she could with limited English, but seemed reluctant. Her coworker then asked whether I was planning to open my own Chinese restaurant! I had to laugh. No, I said, I'm happy just to eat at them.

Sometimes people laughed at me (I never did get the joke), and at one spot a young Chinese-American kid who was ordering takeout was nice enough to translate my requests into Mandarin, and whatever he told the restaurant owner and cooks made them laugh and laugh. I sort of chortled along (the situation was comical), but I never will figure out exactly what was so funny. Somebody who did speak Mandarin would have been better for the gig - I may as well have been trying to report on a foreign country with zero language ability and no translator - but I'll do my best to accurately summarize each place. The menus, though - and my boss wants comprehensive ones - that may be impossible. Many places didn't even have menus posted in English...

At any rate, it's cold and maybe tomorrow - or soon! - I need to go scarf and hat and sweater shopping. Like everyone, I've really pared back on buying things, but this is necessary. Hopefully retail will see a slight spike as people stock up for the winter. It needs it.