The Cermak-Chinatown station brought me right in front of an intersection. Although I have the perfectly trained jus-go-even-when-you-don’-know-where-you’r-goin’ attitude, I just had to stop across the station to see a map that felt like it had sprung up from nothing.<\/p>\n
The Chinatown Library is nearby, and I wanted to go quite badly, so I went. There were quite a few parent-child pairs in there, and it was quite nice. When I was ready, I went looking for the dragon gate. I thought it was the only Chinatown I know with such a wide gate, leading to such a wide street. And the streets were quite empty. So I realised that the Chinatowns I’ve known were all more like Hong Kong.<\/p>\n
I went there with a mission, though. I went from one grocery shop to another, looking for lemongrass and galangal. In a shop where I bothered asking, the words lemongrass and galangal didn’t spark any positive answer. When I asked them where they think I could find lemongrass and galangal, they said they didn’t know.<\/p>\n
More and more I thought that perhaps I wasn’t too much of a Chinese, and much more of a Southeast Asian.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Cermak-Chinatown station brought me right in front of an intersection. Although I have the perfectly trained jus-go-even-when-you-don’-know-where-you’r-goin’ attitude, I just had to stop across the station to see a map that felt like it had sprung up from nothing….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chicago","category-hyde-park-art-center"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2624"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2638,"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2624\/revisions\/2638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tintinwulia.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}