No More Nice Nightingale

The Nightingale is about a nondescript little grey bird who wows the Chinese court with its song but is replaced by a bejeweled mechanical wonder that can only sing waltzes. It's actually pretty fitting that the controversy at La Jolla Playhouse should be over the casting of a musical based on this fairytale.

In case you've somehow missed hearing about it, out of twelve actors, only two are Asian. The Emperor of China is being played by a white guy; there are no Asian men. It's supposed to be 'multicultural' and set in a mythical not-necessarily Asian land. It's also supposed to be a workshop production. But let's face it, for a play set somewhere vaguely Oriental, all the people in power are white guys. Instead of taking on the real deal - Asian actors for a musical set in China - La Jolla Playhouse has opted for the artificial bird. And it sings the old familiar tune. I mean, can we say The Good Earth?

I'm a little late on the bandwagon for this because it's really depressing to me. As if being in the arts isn't hard enough, if you're Asian-American apparently you can't even get cast in a musical set in China.

What's worse is that this play is in San Diego - home to over 400,000 Asians. I think it's the 10th largest population of Asians in the country. UC San Diego, which is in La Jolla, has a student body that is 44% Asian and only 24% Caucasian. Has La Jolla Playhouse never had a discussion as to how it might appeal to this demographic? Do they just assume that Asians aren't interested in theater? Or maybe they think Asians would be too meek to complain?

And the play is directed by Moises Kaufman, a director I really like. I remember him way back in like 1988. He directed one of his first plays in New York at Theater for the New City, back when I lived in cage in the basement. You would think a Jewish, Romanian-Ukrainian maricón from Venezuela would be a little more sensitive and inclusive.

Plus this comes right on the heels of the Knicks giving up Jeremy Lin. I mean, jeez, this kid plays on a level that electrifies the entire world, makes the cover of Sports Illustrated twice, instigates a rush on tickets at Madison Square, gets the most unlikely people to watch sports (including me, yes I confess), and even with that much game, he doesn't rate more than one offer.

So yeah, I've been pretty discouraged, with these events corroborating what I've been feeling about the deck being stacked. I mean it's hard enough being poor and a woman, but being Asian-American too, I'm a triple nightingale. An overlooked bird, an outsider to the palace. It doesn't matter how well we sing. Or play ball.

So with all that, I drank a glass of wine tonight and watched the entire hour-long panel discussion at La Jolla Playhouse that took place yesterday. I swear, in my curmudgeonly old age, I'm turning into a wino. And a cat lady. But the panel was actually a lot more hopeful than I expected.

After a brief upset when it seemed the creative team might not even attend, Moises Kaufman and writer Steven Sater were indeed present, as were casting director Tara Rubin, and Christopher Ashley, the Artistic Director of La Jolla Playhouse. On the other side of the room were the angry Asian-Americans: Cindy Cheung and Christine Toy Johnson, both of them representing AAPAC, and Andy Lowe, founder and producer of Chinese Pirate Productions.

The moderator started things off by asking the Asians what they thought about the play. Christine struggled with emotions as she said, "To see this production....which clearly to me looks like it was set China...with so few Asian-American faces... reminds me how invisible we still are and how we are so often not invited to sit at the table. And to not be invited to sit at the table in a play that takes place in an Asian country, is like a knife to the heart."

Cindy added, "I'm still getting over the shock of seeing it and having so many people being okay with this. It was disturbing."

This made me think of a strange experience I had two years ago when I went to Governor's Island on a balmy night with one of my closest friends. There was something Dutch going on that day and we stayed late and danced to a band from Holland. Then the singer announced that it was the last song of the night and launched into something that went (I kid you not), "There was an old man from Hong Kong and he once said something very wise... ching chong ching chong chong ching chong." Not only was everyone expected to dance to this, but they were encouraged to sing along to ching chong ching chong, which the entire crowd of over a hundred people did. Gleefully. Even my friend, who is one of the smartest guys I know, obliviously enjoyed himself while I tried not to be horrified. I am still flabbergasted by this experience.

But I digress. There was a previous panel that was instigated by AAPAC, which I didn't manage to attend, partly because I had a bit of an issue with how it seemed they were knocking at the gate of the elites, can we come in pretty please? But I guess that was my curmudgeon talking, because after watching the entire panel, it did seem that something crystallized.

First, the Artistic Director, Christopher Ashley, conducted the discussion with grace, unlike Guthrie Theater's Artistic Director Joe Dowling, whose televised response to a question about the lack of women and minorities in the theater's 50th season was, "This is a self-serving argument that doesn't hold water." In contrast, Ashley apologized, "We did not intend to offend fellow artists or the Asian-American community. We did so and we are sorry."

But change doesn't just come from the ones in power - it has to come from the ground too. And there did seem to be a rumble of something shifting during the (mostly unfortunate) audience comments, which began inauspiciously with an old lady who wondered if there were enough talented Asians out there and also what did it matter. Sigh.

After she spoke, the audience seemed to be sharply divided between angry Asian people who shouted and had to be shut up, and non-Asians who rambled in circular platitudes that only illuminated their confusion at why everyone was so upset. Why can't we all get along? I really liked what one angry (Asian, male) audience member said before he was shouted down for going on too long, "When the Asian play comes along, it's suddenly 'mythical' and 'multicultural'... It's incredibly irritating to hear terms like 'multicultural' and 'color-blind' used to reduce the number of minority roles."

But Cindy had already laid it all out on the table and it was a royal flush, "There was a point in history when it was acceptable to have a white person play Othello... and at some point, the community stepped up and said this is no longer acceptable.... The Asian-American community is saying it now. That we find it unacceptable as well."

She was even bad-ass enough to throw down an extra ace in her sleeve, "We know [the play is] not a finished product and it's why we are here, to influence. We don't want to see this anymore. If it were a finished product, we would be outside with pickets. And we will be if it keeps going." 

So maybe a sea change really is occurring. As both Cindy and Christine said, it's no longer the way it used to be back in the prehistoric age like twenty years ago, when the Asian-American theater community really was like a small high school. Now it's like a dozen high schools who have play-offs and debates and dances together. After which they get on the Staten Island Ferry and make out. While I go home to my cat and a glass of wine.

But okay, Asian-American theater community, now in addition to prying open the gentry's gates a little, how about some support for Asian-American producers so we can survive and come up with more work for everyone? I might even make out with you on the Staten Island Ferry then.

Rating the Dating Game

I don’t date. I find the whole concept ludicrous and rather unsavory. Yet two weeks ago, I suddenly decided to put up a profile on OK Cupid. 

What precipitated this strange impulse was my shocked realization that it’s been nearly twenty years since I was last alone. And everything I used to do twenty years ago no longer exists. The new East Village doesn’t have any more second-hand bookstores and vintage shops to hang out in. That scene is long gone and I’m gone too – transplanted to Brooklyn, where I don’t know any shopkeepers by name, where I never run into people I know on the street. 

So it’s been lonely. And I sort of fell for a guy who isn’t available or that interested in me. Maybe so I could stop being so angry with the guy whom I had been with for ten years and also finally get over another ridiculous infatuation. For nearly a year, I’ve been trying to stamp out every pesky smoldering flame in my badly charred heart. I suppose OK Cupid was my next line of attack. 

Not that I'm sure that I am cut out for another long-term relationships or god forbid, marriage. For so many women, success in life is contingent upon landing a guy like a giant floppy six-foot fish. “Don’t worry, you’ll be married one day,” my friend’s mother said to her once, as if she was to be pitied for being single. And that’s the attitude of many women who are otherwise so independent. Researchers were surprised that in a national study of 1,000 female college students, 91% agreed to the statement, “Being married is a very important goal for me.” [1]

Of course it's not just women. Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin theorizes in his book The Marriage-Go-Round that Americans idealize marriage because of their deep-seated religious heritage, but they also have a contradictory belief in individual freedom and the right to self-fulfillment, which results in Americans getting married and divorced at twice the rate of other countries. [2]

I can’t think of anything more horrifying than a big church wedding with six women wearing the same dress. It always makes me think of the phrase “a fate worse than death.” I suppose I’m more European in this regard. The World Values Survey, a study of sixty countries in 2000, reported that 26% of the British and 36% of the French think that marriage is an outdated institution, compared with just 10% of Americans. [3]

But love? I can’t seem to help it. Love strikes me like lightning. I remember once being in an acting class and a guy whom I had known for three years and hardly ever noticed turned in my direction and BAM. We both made some lame excuse to leave early and once out on the street, we got as far the corner before making out by the mailbox.

He was my second big love (my first love also happened instantaneously) but he was weirded out by my lack of rules or expectations. “It feels like I could just walk all over you,” he once said to me in disgust. I had a nervous breakdown getting over him. Mysterious red blotches erupted on my face and I couldn’t get out of bed for weeks, not that I would have wanted to even if I could have, since I looked pretty mortifying. Maybe love doesn’t strike me like lightning; it's more like a recurring case of bubonic plague. 

The only time I had ever been on a date was when I was fifteen. Every time I pass by the 8^th Street subway station, I see my teenage self leaning against the pizza shop in a way that I hoped would look nonchalant, wearing a slit satin skirt and slouchy grey sweater that I had borrowed from my best friend. But even that wasn’t really a date since we both knew perfectly well that we would find our way to some corner where we could make out. His message was clear – he had been flipping rubber bands at me in math class for weeks. 

I know I’m a pretty strange phenomenon, like a time traveler, or someone who came from an alien planet. I basically make up all my own rules, since I didn’t grow up with any. Or rather, shuttled in between New York City and Taiwan, I grew up with two sets of rules that sort of cancelled each other out. I learned social conduct not from my absentee immigrant workaholic parents or even from television and magazines, but from the classic novels that I devoured. Dating was consequently not part of my understanding of the world. Heathcliff and Cathy definitely did not go on dates. Daisy and Gatsby didn’t either. Not even the odiously plebian Elizabeth Bennet and stuffy Mr. Darcy went on dates. 

Dating is mostly a post-war American phenomenon. Teenagers in bobby socks sipping Coca Cola together at a soda fountain. Groping one another in a movie theater. Exchanging school rings. There is something very juvenile and Norman Rockwell about dating. 

For those who can't picture life otherwise, dating as we know it came about from the rise of both youth culture and the entertainment industry after the first World War. For the previous hundred or so years, courtship had taken place at home, with men coming over to have some tea and listen to women play piano. [4] That's what Tennessee Williams was writing about with the Gentleman Caller in The Glass Menagerie. But in the 1910s, courtship started to become a public event, relocated to movie theaters, dance halls, and restaurants. Dating became marked by competition and consumption, fueled by new magazines that advised sorority girls who didn’t have a date to turn off the lights in their rooms and pretend that they did.

The new online dating scene also taps into latent voyeurism. I confess that I rather like being able to secretly check out what people are interested in, how they write about themselves, what they think is hip and sexy and hot. But with the shoe on the other foot, I'm not so comfortable. I guess having been exposed to the public for half of my life, I'm pretty cagey about what I am ready to reveal to perfect strangers. I tried to write something about my age and the kid, but I finally just ended up saying, maybe I'll tell you if we meet in person. 

But privacy issue of online profiles aside, what really bothers me about dating itself is that it's intrinsically calculating.  Underneath dating culture, sociologist Martin Whyte sees a “marketplace learning scenario,” in which “people date a large number and variety of others to acquire experience that will enable them, it is hoped, to make prudent choices.”  Paul Hollander notes in his book Extravagant Expectations: New Ways to Find Love in America, “American-style dating … incorporates two not entirely consonant goals: the pursuit of romance and intense emotional involvement on the one hand, and on the other a deliberate, self-conscious rational, trial-and-error procedure of sampling potentially available partners.”[5]

It’s very strange to me, this notion of being so prosaic about forming a partnership. One sociologist said in a July 1953 New York Times Magazine article that ideally, everyone should date 25 to 50 people before deciding who to marry. That kind of assembly-line dating sounds like another fate worse than death.

But I’ve given it a go and so far, I’ve been on four dates. The first was a jazz musician. We ate at a Thai restaurant, after which we went back to the jazz club where he was tuning a piano. The second was to a bicyclist and photographer recovering from his own ten-year relationship. We had dinner and walked around a little. I brought the third guy, a writer who teaches creative writing at NYU, to a party where he knew a few people. I met the fourth guy for tapas and we talked about his animal rescue work. 

They're all quite nice and maybe in other situations, if we had met at a party or on the subway, we would be friends. But with the OK Cupid set-up, this seems somewhat unlikely.  And I don't know if I like the position it puts me in. Maybe other people who are used to this sort of set-up know what to say or do, but it just feels like I'm inviting random guys to hit on me over drinks or dinner. This already happens to me plenty enough without me needing to go looking for it. Do other women like this? I find it rather uncomfortable and I never know how to react to it.  I would much rather be struck by lightning. Or wait around for the next bout of the plague. 

But maybe my attitude is rather childish. Maybe I would be more likely to aggressively pursue a relationship if I wasn’t so ambivalent about it all. But what is this need to have a mate? Why isn't it a group of friends enough? I mean besides the sex issue, which does get pretty difficult at times.  Maybe I am from some other planet after all.

The whole thing is making me feel that it's not fair of me to have a profile up on OK Cupid since everyone on it has a set of expectations that I don't know if I share. So I’ve been thinking I will shut down my profile after this brief sociological experiment. But, just to keep an open mind, I'll finish go on dates with the guys I've already been corresponding with: an actor, two artists, a random guy from Kentucky whose picture I like, and an Italian doctor who wrote me twice, the second time in Italian begging me to write him back, so I did. While we don't have much in common, he did mention that in the Italian language, there is no equivalent to the word “dating” – it’s not a concept they have there. 

Hilariously, the day after I set up my profile, OK Cupid sent me an exultant message about a great match. It turned out to be my ex-boyfriend of ten years, who unbeknownst to me had also put up a profile on OK Cupid a few months previously.  “We're a 96% match!" he messaged me, "Will you go out on a date with me?” I laughed until I cried. 

Maybe I should move to Europe.

---

[1] Norval Glenn and Elizabeth Marquardt. “Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right: College Women on Dating and Mating Today.” Institute for American Values, 2001.

[2] Andrew J. Cherlin. The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today (New York: Knopf, 2009).

[3] Ronald Inglehart, Human Beliefs and Values: A Cross Cultureal Sourcebook Based on the 1999-2002 Values Surveys (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 2004), 158.

[4] Beth L. Bailey. From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989).

[5] Paul Hollander. Extravagant Expectations: New Ways to Find Romantic Love in America (United Kingdom: Ivan R. Dee, 2011), 25.

Pop Question - The New Theater?

I went to see Qui Nguyen’s The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G last night with a few friends and it made me think of Young Jean Lee, whose work, it seems to me, is also about a deeply felt inadequacy.

Nguyen does not speak Vietnamese and has never been to Vietnam. In the play, he grasps at straws, attempting to come to terms with his Vietnamese identity and his cousin’s horrific experience as a refugee. Growing up in Arkansas, it seems the only tools he had to understand Asia were kong fu films, 1940s noir and the anger/anguish of being “other” expressed in hip hop and ghetto rap.

Similarly, in Lear, Young Jean Lee uses the Sesame Street scene in which Big Bird explains the death of Mr. Hooper as a reference point to understanding the death of a parental figure. I felt the scene was trite and eyeball rolling, but when I later talked about it to a much younger friend, his eyes misted over and he exclaimed, “Oh! I know that episode!” I realized then that for a million people, Big Bird must have been their first introduction to death.  And what does this say about the state of the world? Or this new generation of writers, who reference Shaw brother flicks and television shows instead of Greek myths or classical literature?

At a recent rehearsal, an actress whom I was working with declared, “I don’t know anything about history. Dates just don’t stick in my mind!” I was rather horrified. To me, the whole point of being an artist (and you are an artist as an actor) is your understanding of where you are in the continuum. I believe what makes an artist great is a deeper insight than others of where they stand in time – the gift is a comprehension of what came before and being able to translate it through current events, to create something that is both new and old, that has the weight of time, of the accumulation of understanding through the ages.

But what if what came before – what if the references that you are working from – are a jumble of over-the-top films, belligerent music and sentimental television programs? What if history and time has been truncated to the last twenty years? Like all extremely smart artists, Nguyen and Lee are interested in huge knotty human questions. But in assaying these difficult subjects, they seem to have stumbled onto another one, which is the dumbing down of our culture.

I am called elitist or a snob by a lot of my friends. Well, it’s partly a joke since they all know that I didn’t graduate high school – I get a perverse pleasure in those job forms you fill out where you have to mark the last year you graduated and I write “10” in big bold numbers.  Take that, Establishment! I can pretty much safely say that I am self-educated and thus my references are not going to be the usual ones. I’ve hardly read any books that were written after the 1960s, for instance. I know myths and legends and fairytales, 19th century literature, the Romantic poets, American writing of the early 20th century. For a while, I used to haunt Tompkins Square Books, basically reading anything that said “classic” on it.  Which took me to some obscure corners – Huysmans, Andreyev, Alain-Fournier, anyone? Anyone?

And yes, those are all dead white guys. And I am not really sure how I feel about the dead white guy canon. On one hand, yeah, they are all dead, white and male. And I am not male or white or dead (yet). On the other hand, wow, they can really write! Prose that takes your breath away, that you want to recite aloud, that causes you to spontaneously weep. Mnemonic characters and scenes that stick in your subconscious and become part of your own life experience and how you forever view the world.

Which is what I suppose Sesame Street was to Young Jean Lee. And my friend the young director. So am I being snobby or elitist to think there is something wrong with this? Just because it’s a kid’s television program?

Which brings up a whole other question of what makes something memorable and affecting. What strikes a chord? And if it strikes that true, deep, collective chord, then does it matter how it’s written? Or whether the scene is of a man in a giant yellow bird suit or an Asian actor being under-dubbed in English?

I guess that’s one of the points in The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G and Lear. I can’t say I actually loved those plays, but they do feel like some kind of crystallization of a new generation whose prime influences are not dead white guys.  Instead, they mine pop culture for answers to the perennial questions of who you are and why you are here, coming up with a lot of colorful bluster and noise, but in the end, they lament it’s painfully inadequate and very empty. The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G? It’s really The Existential Crisis of Agent G.  Nausea for the New Age. But see, that’s a reference to another dead white guy.  

Maximum Wage - Bridge the Divide

Like many people, Occupy Wall Street has been occupying my mind and I’ve been thinking a lot about maximum wage. It’s an idea that went off like a light bulb in my head a few years ago, when I was discussing the issue of income disparity with a friend. “We have a minimum wage, why not a maximum wage?” I suddenly exclaimed.

I was obsessed with the concept for several weeks, wrote an article (which for some reason I can’t find now) and brought the idea up to a dozen people, all of whom basically reacted with horror. Friends whom I considered progressive accused me of being un-American. I was unable to come up with a rejoinder until another friend said that the idea isn’t un-American, it’s un-capitalistic. Which was so true, I wondered how it happened that America became synonymous with Capitalism. What ever happened to freedom and individualism and the catalytic ideals of the founding fathers that ignited revolution in France and Haiti? Nope, now America equals institutionalized greed.

When I began researching the idea of maximum wage, it amazed me to discover that there is a historical precedence for the idea. In fact, there was, in effect, such a thing as maximum wage in America from 1942 until 1964.

In 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed 100% taxation on income above $25,000 (equivalent to about $300,000 now). Congress did not approve of this, but they did pass an act later that year for an 88% tax to be levied at income above $200,000 ($2.78 million in today’s dollars). The next year, the highest tax bracket rose to 94% of all income over $200,000. The rich continued to be taxed over 90% of maximum wage until 1964. So basically, during this time, wealthy people paid $9 out of $10 on anything they made over the top income level, which rose from $200,000 to $400,000. It’s pretty remarkable that the years that teabaggers themselves cite as those of America’s greatest prosperity coincided with what they would perceive as oppressive taxation.

A salary cap of $500,000 to executives was floated around during the early years of Obama's administration, as was a tax hike for the super-wealthy to 40% (see below cartoon from 2009), but this was shouted down and disappeared.

But there’s another way of imagining a maximum wage that doesn’t have to do with taxation, one that I think is infinitely more practicable – and that’s to correlate maximum wage with minimum wage.

If you take a look at the CEO salaries disclosed at www.paywatch.org, a website created by the AFL-CIO, you’ll find that at McDonald’s, the CEO makes $9,732,618, which is 645 times the lowest salaried worker who makes a paltry $15,080. Or okay, if you want to pick a company where the lowest paid worker is making more than minimum wage, at Texas Instruments the CEO makes $12,213,420, which is 315 times his lowest paid worker at $38,730. Right there, it's apparent the source of the vastly skewed ratio between rich and poor.

And it wasn’t always like this. According to sociologist G. William Dumhoff in his highly annotated article Wealth, Income and Power, “The ratio of CEO pay to factory worker pay rose from 42:1 in 1960 to as high as 531:1 in 2000, at the height of the stock market bubble, when CEOs were cashing in big stock options…By way of comparison, the same ratio is about 25:1 in Europe.” CEOs now make approximately 325 times what the average workers make.

Linking maximum with minimum wage is in practice now at Whole Foods, where the highest salary is capped at 19 times the lowest salary. In other words, if John Mackey wants to raise his salary, he would also have to raise the salary of all his baggers and checkers. Last year, the Greater London Assembly, the government arm that supports the Mayor, voted “to commit themselves to reducing the difference in pay between the lowest and highest paid staff to no more than 20 times, with a long term goal of no more than 10 times.”

Doug Smith makes a compelling argument for a 25-to-1 ratio in his article The Maximum Wage, while labor journalist Sam Pizzigati argues for a 10-to-1 ratio, stating in his 2004 book Greed and Good, that “before inequality began exploding in the 1980s … [a] ten times ratio defined income distribution patterns in nearly every major American workplace.”

Tying minimum to maximum wage at each corporation would definitely mitigate the extreme gap between the haves and have-nots in America but CEOs would probably attempt to compensate themselves through other derivatives. Currently, there is a ghoulish scheme afoot where banks have their employees name them insurance beneficiaries and CEOs collect (millions sometimes) from employee deaths. An underlying change really has to occur in America, a change in the American Dream from profit as an end, to profit as a means to an end. We all have a share in society and a responsibility to it as well. It’s ridiculous that anyone should be making 400 times someone else. It’s ridiculous that some people make $58 a day while others make $20,000 a day and adamantly believe they should be able to hang onto every red cent.

See also:
J.K. Malone. "Maximum Wage Law Passes Congress" New York Times, July 4, 2009.
Especially those alarmist comments.

"History of Marginal Tax Rates: Will Higher Taxes End the Rat Race?" Greenewable.
Comes with link to site showing tax tables from 1913 to 2011. 

Paul Rosenberg. "Reagan's Mean-Spirited Legacy of Economic Disaster." Open Left, February 1, 2011.

Carola Frydman and Raven E. Saks. "Executive Compensation: A New View from a Long-Term Perspective, 1936-2005." July 6, 2007. Intense study of executive pay, using data from the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC). Page 9: Consistent with previous studies, we find that executive pay increased moderately during the mid-1970s and rose at a faster rate in the subsequent two decades, reaching an average growth rate of more than 10 percent per year from 1995 to 1999. This acceleration represents a marked departure from the trend in compensation in the past.” They further noted, “The remarkable stability in the level of executive compensation from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s is surprising in light of the robust economic activity and considerable growth of firms during most of this period.”

And an argument from the other side:
"Diving Into the Rich Pool." The Economist, September 24, 2011. 
Argues that taxing the rich will not help the economy, but does not mention taxation history pre-1980. 

Dispossessed - Part 2 on being evicted

“The landlord is moving your things into a truck!” my upstairs neighbor cried.

This was how I learned that I was being evicted from my apartment of twenty years. It was 4:00 when he called and I was in the middle of a major grant deadline at work. There was no way I could leave.

My neighbor had gone down to look for my cat but couldn't find her. He wondered if there was anything else he ought to retrieve. I couldn't think of anything, so I thanked him for his concern and went back to making umpteen copies of the grant application, trying to pretend that the world as I knew it wasn’t capsizing.

At 7:00, I finally finished and went home to find my cat. The stammering handyman who had serviced my apartment since the days when it belonged to a Puerto Rican landlord was standing guard as three men trudged up and down the stairs, carrying giant boxes to a waiting truck.

“Y-you c-c-c-can’t go in,” he said, flustered to see me.

“I just want my cat,” I said.

“We didn’t see n-no c-c-c-c-cat.”

“ I know just where she is,” I replied and marched into the apartment, without waiting for his response. He followed me in, stammering protests, as I called the cat out from her usual hiding place.

Books were scattered everywhere. The furniture was already gone. The place was a wreck – everything had either been boxed up or partially removed. I had lived half my life within those walls. The first time I walked through that door, I was a teenager. I had raised my son there, hosted countless dinners and birthday parties, fell in and out of love a half dozen times. The entire neighborhood had changed, but the apartment was still the way it must have looked in 1960. I took one last look at the familiar yellow walls and left, clutching my terrified cat, wondering if I would ever see the place again.

Jean Schneider is supposedly the most lenient judge in housing court but she denied the motion to restore me to my apartment, although I had managed to borrow enough to pay all my arrears.

“ I think it’s time for you to move on,” she determined.

Then realizing that this might make her seem pro-landlord, she allowed a week for me to appeal. After talking to my lawyer and a representative from the local tenant advocacy group, GOLES, I realized that there was no way I could afford a prolonged court case. But since this was the only leverage I had, I played it for what it was worth. I’m not convinced that the landlord really believed that I would really appeal the court decision. I think he just couldn’t believe his amazing luck that he had managed to dislodge a long-time rent-stabilized tenant.

“I’m not a bad guy,” he kept saying.

To prove that he wasn’t a bad guy, he showed me a teensy apartment that he generously said he would allow me to rent for $1,700, nearly double what I had paid for my two-bedroom. I seriously considered it, but I finally just couldn’t stomach the idea of spending more than half of my income for a place as wide as a jail cell, even if it had a brushed steel stove and exposed brick.

So I took $5,500 in conscience money instead. Chump change for what he could make on my apartment.

“I’m not a bad guy,” he insisted as he signed the check.

For the first time since 1992, I went hunting for a home. I had never once considered living elsewhere, but the East Village is now out of my price range. Which is rather ironic, since the reason why the East Village is the East Village is because of its immigrants, activists and artists. Without us, what is the neighborhood? A string of restaurants and bars and designer boutiques is not what makes the East Village edgy, hip and desirable. It’s the unique mix of artists and immigrants that creates value for the neighborhood. But we are now the unwanted tenants.

So I set my sights on Brooklyn, that bastion of exiled Lower East Siders. A joke has been going around: What’s Brooklyn? What Manhattan was twenty years ago. What’s Queens? What Brooklyn was twenty years ago. Well, then, what’s Manhattan? What Queens was twenty years ago.

One of those jokes that’s funny because it’s so damn sad.

In the meantime, I received a yellow letter with a shamrock from New York S Storage & Liffey Van Lines. Apparently, they weren’t satisfied with the $3,000 payment they had received from the landlord and wanted $650 from me for “handling charges.” The letter also gave me one month to retrieve my possessions before they were auctioned off.

I scoured Craigslist and looked at a dozen windowless rooms and characterless cookie-cutter instant renovation jobs in Brooklyn. A few places were nice but there were multiple roommates who wouldn’t be happy with someone who brought a cat and an entire family with her. I finally found a two-room suite in Bushwick, which was inexpensive and an ample size, but was oddly adorned with pink tiles. My boyfriend liked it and the two guys who also lived there didn't react with horror when I revealed that I had a kid who might occasionally visit, so I signed an agreement and gave them a sizable portion of the landlord's settlement.

Just a few days before the impending auction, I arrived at the storage company, anxious to find my HDV camera and a hard drive with the only copy of a documentary that I had been working on for the past three years.

New York S Storage & Liffey Van Lines, Inc. is owned by an Irish family. Danny, a stocky older guy with graying red hair, took $650 from me to transfer my things from a “bonded area” to a regular storage unit and then said in his melodious brogue that I needed to give them another $500 for two month’s rent. I only had another $350 on me.

“Not a problem,” he said soothingly, “You can pay what you owe next time. “

He then pushed a piece of paper in front of me, declaring, “Just a formality.”

I filled my name in the blank space and cursorily read the paragraph as I started to sign at the bottom, but then I stopped mid-stroke. The document said:

“I _________of ________hereby release New York S Storage & Liffey Van Lines, Inc. and all their agents and employees from any and all responsibility regarding my property. I have personally inspected my belongings and find them to be in good condition and intact.”

“I can’t sign this – I haven’t seen my belongings yet,” I protested.

“Oh, that’s all right,” Danny said, as he whisked away the offending document, “Merely a formality.”

He looked troubled though, as he called over a younger Irish man, Mark, who took me upstairs past a long hallway of gated and locked storage rooms, each with an oak tag bearing a name in black marker. I noticed that most were Latino and I began to muse about these other people who had also probably been evicted. Unlike me, they most likely weren’t able to get a settlement from their landlords. I wondered how they must feel to lose all their possessions and what might be found in those units – baby clothes and family photographs, stereo systems, plastic-covered couches, angel figurines?

At the end of the hall, Mark stopped at a storage room with an oak tag with a creative variation of my last name, “Linchun.” He pulled up the gate and the first thing that greeted me was a poster from the first play I wrote.

I dug through four boxes and found my computer, but if my video camera and the hard drive were still in my possession, they were buried beneath a billion books. As I attempted to lift a humongous box to the ground, a young Latino came and told me that the building was closing and I had to leave.

The next weekend, I came with my boyfriend and a car. This time, Danny was adamant about the document, “You’ll have to sign if you want to go up again.”

“Okay,” I replied and began to amend the document, crossing out that I had inspected my belongings.

“You can’t do that!” Danny exclaimed, yanking it away from me.

I sputtered a protest and my boyfriend chimed in, saying that some of the things in the storage unit belonged to him, since he lived with me. This gave Danny another reason to prohibit me from going upstairs, since now, he said, it was unclear whose possessions were in the storage unit. I attempted to brush past Danny, but he wouldn’t get out of the way. Mark came running and accused me of attacking an old man. Then he started to get ugly with Matthew, who retreated outside to avoid a brawl. I obstinately refused to go.

“I don’t know what you think you can accomplish,” Danny said.

In answer, I stared at him until he looked uncomfortably away. I spend the next hour patrolling the reception area. After staring at Danny, I stared at the receptionist. Then I looked at the world map on the wall, counted the toy trucks that lined a shelf and read all the signs. I imagined camping out and picketing the place. Danny picked up an Irish Times. I watched him thumb distractedly through it.

“If you don’t leave,” he said, “I’ll call the police.”

“Go ahead,” I shrugged. I made a quick mental calculation and figured that if I did get arrested, I would most likely just be in detention for one day and I could still be at work on Monday.

He hesitated and went back to his paper, but after another few minutes, he reconsidered, thinking that I was just bluffing.

“The police are on the way,” he said menacingly, “You’ll be arrested for trespassing.”

“We’ll see,” I replied. I could see this made him a little nervous but he was still too bullheaded to back down.

I continued to wander back and forth as we waited tensely for the police. After a moment, I began to tell him about the documentary.

“You know, the Taiwanese are like the Northern Irish,” I said, “The film I’m making is about their struggle for independence.”

Danny assiduously ignored me as I told him about the 1947 massacre in Taiwan and the White Terror and the democratization of the island and how the pro-Chinese party had been voted back in and how the country is now in danger of losing all the rights that had been so bitterly won. I began to wax on about how I identified with the Irish independence movement and independence movements all over the world.

“I don’t want your business here,” Danny finally said, “You take your things tomorrow and we’ll reimburse you for the month you paid and you get out.”

“Okay,” I agreed as the police arrived, just in time to witness the deal: No document, no boyfriend, an insured mover, reimbursement and I never come back again.

Of course, it didn't happen that way. The following weekend was St. Patrick's Day and Liffey wasn't open. So when I showed up with an insured moving company as promised, Mark immediately reneged on the agreement, stating that since it was already the end of the month, they didn’t need to reimburse me after all. But I still owed the outstanding balance of $150. With the landlord’s settlement, the money didn’t matter to me so off I went to the ATM. I suppose that must have puzzled them – I hope they choke on dollar bills in hell while being guilted over their Irish heritage. I was relieved when the moving men were finally allowed to load my things into the truck.

I doubt if there’s ever been a study of those evicted, but if there were, I would bet that very few people recover their possessions. If I hadn’t been able to get that settlement from the landlord, I would have had to jettison everything as well. There is something very wrong about a company levying $1,000 from an evicted tenant after already receiving payment from the landlord. And then on top of this, they won’t allow you to even see your belongings until you sign a document releasing them of all responsibility in the eviction. The upshot is those who are evicted are doubly dispossessed, both of their homes and their right to their possessions.

I don’t own anything expensive. I had an adverse reaction to the material values of my working-class immigrant parents, who live and breathe the American Dream, complete with a Cadillac and plasma TV. I love beautiful things but I'm not interested in owning anything – not a house, not a car, not a yacht in the Bahamas.

But being dispossessed does make you think about your relationship to possessions. Six months later, I still haven’t gone through everything and I am constantly remembering yet another missing item. The objects that I am saddest about losing may not be materially valuable, but they are utterly irreplaceable: A set of six hand-made bamboo steamer baskets that my great-aunt made in the 1950s. A 1930s hand-painted photograph of a little girl who had been adopted into my father’s family, cradling a bust of Beethoven like a doll. A quilt made by my boyfriend’s mother from the shirts he wore when he was a little boy. Two fortunes created by a spiritualist for my grandmother in brushed calligraphy on red paper, redolent of a time, place and tradition that no longer exist. I mourn the loss of these items as if they were old friends, recently deceased.

I mourn too my loss of community. I was born in the East Village and I lived in the same apartment for twenty years. I know the history of every block, every shop. I could chart the long-buried canals under the street. Contrary to what others may say, at heart, New York City is not a city of transience. Generations of families live, work, love and die in the same neighborhood, particularly a neighborhood like the East Village, which has a special cultural resonance. I find the transience rather disturbing – how can a community sustain itself when people are forced to move year after year? Floating from place to place, they can never put down stakes, join in neighborhood struggles or even discover what those struggles are.

But newer residents to New York think this is normal. Unaffordable housing and the resulting transience is now considered standard to New York City life. Transience has been commodified as the preferred lifestyle of celebrities and wealthy elites. Marketing jargon on new condominiums shrewdly peddle the idea to gullible college kids and their well-meaning parents: Time well spent. Sophistication of a boutique hotel.

This is probably exactly what developers want: transitory residents who don’t feel an ownership to where they live. I can’t, for example, imagine tenants of the Avalon or Blue Condominium handcuffing themselves to cement blocks to keep Esperanza Garden from being bulldozed. But it’s those very gardens that make the neighborhood desirable in the first place. Without the community standing its ground, defending its gardens and theaters and parks and community centers, the East Village would be a far less remarkable place.

This palpable shift to transience as a preferred lifestyle is insidious and short-sighted. Landlords, real estate developers and public officials who are intent upon decontrolling rent stabilized apartments fail to see that their rush to capitalize on market value in the East Village is eviscerating what is really of value – the unique blend of artists and immigrants, without which the East Village would have none of its substance or allure. This is not a predestined tragic cycle – artists do not inevitably gentrify a neighborhood, only to get the boot after paving the way for real estate developers. If long-term residents were more widely recognized for adding value to the community, there would be greater appreciation and protection of rent stabilized apartments. In order for a neighborhood to remain healthy and alive, its community needs as much protection as its historic buildings.