"Doing" London

Just came back from “doing” London. The whole concept of “doing” a city seems a funny one, in retrospect. You go to the city, pop open a travel guide, find the series of sights that are acknowledged to be the city’s “must-see destinations,” and proceed to tick them off one by one. It’s bound to be a rather fruitless exercise. If anyone told me I could “do” New York by seeing Times Sq, Rockefeller, Broadway, Lincoln Center, and then round it off with a Statute of Liberty, I’d tell them that it’s the equivalent of eating a Ho-Ho and thinking it’s a French pastry. You simply don’t get the real experience of being a New Yorker. Yet, here I was, in London, working my way from Big Ben to Westminster Abbey to the Tower of London, “doing” London. And of course, even in eating, I was self-consciously chugging down on the British ales (very good, warm and filling, but never bitter) and eating the fish and chips (terrible, the culinary equivalent of McDonald’s Filet of Fish, which of course it is).

Priya and Nathan, as my hosts, did take me around to East London, to the area around White Chapel around which there now exists a vibrant Bangladeshi community: supermarkets and Bollywood DVD stores, all there. (Of slight concern was the flyer on one of the store’s doors calling for the Islamic countries of the world to join together and defeat Israel. This whole Gaza affair has all tempers on flair.) There I did experience “real” London, in the sense that indigenous (can you call an immigrant community “indigenous”?) Londoners were chowing down on the same excellent grilled chickens and curries that I was. It’s “real,” non?

Of course not. I was still just a Chinese-American having a Bangeladeshi meal in a London restaurant with an Indian-American and a white Pennsylvanian. If you put it in words, the entire affair seems just that ridiculous; so many different identities intersecting together and gorging itself on excellent food. But certainly not “London,” not as my tour-guide in the Tower of London, a Yeoman Guard named Paul who was in the British army for two decades and as British as British gets, would think to London, as he recalls to us the lives and deaths of ancient Brits like Henry VIII and Anne Boyeln. Is “London” that history, and that heritage, preserved now in its buildings and its gorgeous crown jewels? (530-some carats on the Star of Africa; what a nice prize for colonialism.)

The idea of how does one actually experience a city, reach out and touch a city, to do morally intelligent tourism, is one that bothers me. Mostly it’s a function of the fact that a city itself has different faces: the historical, the modern, the native, the immigrant. And then, layered atop that, is the impossibility of penetrating any of those layers as a weekend visitor. Those layers present a public face to you: they let you glimpse them and eat their food. But no “Londoner” can sit you down and reveal himself. He can’t explain it either.

Most people living in a city would be hard pressed to define their city in words. I feel that in two and a half years of New York, I have some sense of it, of its rhythms, of its patterns. Some of it is functional: which subway goes where, imprinted as a map of the city. Some of it is intellectual: how do people here interact, who does what and who has what aspirations, which neighborhood means what. But the last part, that’s the part I can’t describe, some sense of comfort with the city and its people, some connection, some anthropomorphization of the city into an actual person that is possible to get to know beyond the stage of an acquaintance.

That last one is what one gropes with when visiting a city like London. Like meeting a stranger, it’s a subtle probing, beyond his social facts, into whether the two of you can become deep friends, whether the intangibles are there.

And in this one city, in that little glimpse, in that five-minute cocktail conversation, I liked what I saw.