A Journey West to New York

In A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, the main character Zhuang, aka Z, documents her journey out of communist China and into Western culture through a diary set up like a dictionary. Each entry begins with a new word, and then proceeds to illustrate important experiences that she has in her new surroundings.

In many ways, the experience detailed by Z in the story felt familiar to me. Her journey from China and into Europe presents a huge cultural transition, but at the same time it is very similar from the journey that all of us have taken in deciding to attend NYU, and more importantly, to live smack in the middle of Manhattan.

For me, coming to New York City presented me with a radically different set of cultural ideals than from where I came from. New York obviously is much busier and full of more people than suburban Boston, and everything moves at a much faster pace. Furthermore, the buildings, the streets, the traffic – pretty much everything around me operates on a much larger scale here in New York City. In addition, in Boston people you on the street are much friendlier and outgoing, and it is not uncommon to strike up conversation with random strangers about the weather, the Sox, or construction. All of these factors lend me to occasionally feeling small and unimportant, an emotion echoed by Z in the story.

The main difference, however, is language. Although people in college say some goofy things, our diction is essentially the same here in New York as it is in Boston. For Z, however, language serves as a huge barrier for her in her travels, especially towards the beginning. It diminishes her ability to communicate and connect with other people, and it further enhances her feelings of being lost and overwhelmed in a new place. I can only imagine the difficulty of my experience, were uncertainty with language and communication another thing that I had to deal with.