What bothers me is when they leave and I see their tip.

Hordes of European and South American tourists come through the restaurant and leave paltry tips or none at all, unless we add it to their bills. Just last week a family of eight from Colombia spent a hundred and twenty dollars on dinner and left a ten dollar tip. They waved at me when they left, thinking we were best friends because I spoke to them in Spanish, have a friend living in their hometown and plan on traveling to their country soon. I felt bad for resenting them, but it was a slow night and I needed all the tips I could get.

It’s not their fault they’re unfamiliar with our tipping system. They don’t know that, as a waitress, my hourly wage is less than the Mexican dishwasher’s. But fortunately it’s not the restaurant that pays most our check—it’s the customers and their tips.

The West Village restaurant I’ve been working at for four months serves Balkan and Mediterranean cuisine. We also have a wine bar, and though we do have wine from Italy, France, and Spain, many of the regulars come here to try our wine from the Balkans—stuff they can’t really find at other restaurants. But the French are different. They come here to drink Bordeaux.

On slow nights we pass out wine coupons. A customer with a coupon gets a free glass of our house wine. Usually when people get free wine, they feel inclined to order food, drink more wine, or at least leave a cash tip. It’s because of the coupons that a young French couple ended up at the bar.

Though they finish their glasses of our house red—a Pinot Noir from Italy, they make it known that it had not met their expectations. It is not my favorite either, but I’ve never complained about a free glass of wine. At least our coupon ploy worked because they decided to buy two more glasses of wine, and because they are French they felt entitled to sample over half our wine list.

Most customers, when they dislike a wine, will politely ask to sample something else, but this French couple made a histrionic show of their disapproval. Their lips, which arched and curved gracefully when speaking to each other in French, puckered grotesquely and they vigorously shook their heads at every wine they tried until they finally settled on two glasses of Bordeaux.

“Eet reminds us of home,” they said, and ordered some meats and cheeses to accompany their wine. Their cheeks got rosy as they imbibed and spoke softly. If they were bitching about our wine selection I would not have been able to tell by their tone since the French language seems to be devoid of hard consonants. They could have been comparing the Tempranillo to horse piss and it would have all sounded like docile cooing to me. There are some moments when I almost thought the French couple was cute, but I always managed to recover my senses.

After sipping the same glasses of Bordeaux for two hours they finally requested the bill twenty minutes after we were supposed to close. The man left a tip of one dollar and twenty cents after spending over twenty dollars. He smiled at me as they grabbed their coats to go, as if the experience had been equally endearing for both parties.

A buck twenty? Oh no, buddy. You can keep your smile.

With that smile he is in the same club as the Colombians and numerous other international visitors. The whole herd of them will have grinned and waved their way through countless New York City restaurants by now, blissfully ignorant of the fact that they are a waitress’s worst nightmare. The Colombians were a lost cause, but it was not too late to reach this Frenchman. It was not about the money. It’s not like a bill of twenty-something dollars will ever fetch a large tip. It’s just hard for me to let bygones be bygones.

For my mission to be successful I had to quickly engage the French couple in this small talk before they left, and I had to do it with a smile—though all I really wanted to do is fling a glass of Bordeaux in their faces.

“So, how long have you been here?” I asked, trying to look casual with my elbows on the bar.

“Oh, I hev been here fur a monz,” explains the girl. “I hev an intairnsheep,” she added. “He eez my friend. He eez visiting for a week,” she said of her male companion, who offered another ridiculous smile.

“Okay!” I said, hoping the foreigners would not detect my false enthusiasm. “And how long will you be staying in New York?”

“Fur two more weeks,” replied the guy. I didn’t know about the girl, but estimated that since he was a tourist he would probably eat out every meal, which meant that there were at least forty-two different waitresses he would be shortchanging.

“Hmmm, okay….that’s great!” I gushed, causing the French man to look at me expectantly, perhaps thinking I would tell him some important insider information. Like where all the actors hang out. The girl, on the other hand, had already put her jacket on. That was my cue to hurry up and stop beating around the bush.

For dramatic effect I quickly dropped my smile and peered straight into the Frenchman’s pupils. “Well, since you’ll be here for a while you might as well know that in New York City you are supposed to leave at least a fifteen percent tip.”

I guess my affectations worked because the girl suddenly started to get anxious.

“Ow much did you leave?” She asked her compatriot, her face beet red instead of cute red. In the time that she’d been here she already figured out about gratuity, but it didn’t matter what she knew if she wasn’t paying the bill.

The guy looked at me for an answer. He hadn’t even looked at the bill when he put down his cash.

“You left one dollar and twenty cents,” I said.

Words were exchanged in rapid French. The man blushed. I wish I could have sugar coated this learning experience for him, and perhaps it was bad form to educate him in front of his female companion, but as most Americans know, getting schooled on another country’s dining etiquette while abroad is hardly ever a graceful experience.

Most people react by getting defensive or repeating the obvious. “Well, it’s not like that in my country,” they say before expounding on the virtues of their way of doing things. I waited for the Frenchman’s rebuttal, but never got one.

“I’m sorry, I deed not know,” he said, which surprised me.

The man seemed so genuinely remorseful I felt obliged to dish out some good old American optimism. “Well, it’s okay, because now you know!”

He put two more dollars on the bar, which I did not expect him to do. Now it was my turn to feel remorseful. I decided to appeal to the French’s sense of patriotism in an attempt to uplift his spirits and quell an impending sense of guilt.

“Yeah, things are different in France. In France your waitresses get a wage …and….and…gratuity is included in the bill…” My discourse devolved into babble about living wages, vacation time and health care, until eventually the Frenchman’s smile crept back onto his face before the couple left.

“Good bye! Come back again!” I said out of habit, knowing they wouldn’t.

Robin Kilmer graduated from Bard College in 2007 and worked for three years at a public school in the Bronx. She hopes to one day successfully converge two diametrically opposing forces: writing and making a living. Until that day she is working as a nanny (and a waitress).

I think Jesse’s fascination might be something genetic, something hard-wired into his psyche. His grandfather on his mother’s side spent years in the South Pacific fighting World War II. And for a while, Ian, Jesse’s older brother from another mother, also dabbled in the exotic when he was dating, before he got married. Ian’s girlfriend Anita wasn’t Asian, but Columbian, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, or one of those other -ians from one of those South American or Central American places. Not that there’s anything wrong with that either.

I always liked Anita, an intense and passionate little brown girl with white teeth, dark flashing eyes and a good sense of humor, who didn’t seem to mind that I put all the knives away and kept checking the hubcaps on my car whenever they came to visit. But Anita, by last account, moved back to Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, or one of those other places, got married and has had several kids, none of them his, Ian assured me.

Then came Siu Lan who was definitely Asian. She was Chinese, in fact, and I am pretty sure she still is. We called her “Siu Who?” though her last name was actually Wing or Wang or Wong. We did that to differentiate Siu from Sue, my niece who isn’t Asian and spells her name differently but pronounces it the same way. I first met Siu at a party, a family gathering of the Italians at my daughter Janine’s house on Staten Island. Weeks in advance of the event, a nervous Ian had prepared everyone for the meeting of East and West in an attempt to head off any potential problems. But on the appointed day, his grandmother, my mother, made it evident by the expression on her face that she wasn’t very pleased when Ian led a foreigner into the thick of twenty-five screaming Italians all talking at the same time.

I watched the girl, head high, black hair radiating the light of Janine’s Italian crystal chandelier, as she walked fearlessly or foolishly into the middle of things. The conversations dropped to a low murmur and stopped, and in the intervening silence you could hear a steamed wonton drop.

It was my mother-in-law who barreled in and attempted to break the ice with some Asian small talk. “So tell me,” she said with an innocent smile of simplicity on her face, “how come they took Kung Fu off the air? It was one of my favorite shows.”
Siu Who blinked. She shook her head. “I’m not sure,” she said without a trace of sarcasm after barely a pause. “But let me get back to my people and I’ll tell you what I find out.”

It was love at first sight, and from that second I knew Siu Who was special!

But their relationship didn’t work out because there were other problems beyond the East/West thing. And eventually Siu Lan went the way of Anita, though I don’t think she moved to South or Central America, and I assume she still lives in Brooklyn somewhere.

Soon after, Ian reconnected with Amy, his college girlfriend, the polar opposite of his previous choices, both geographically and physically. Amy was born in up-state New York, in Syracuse or Schenectady or one of those other “S” cities. She is smart, beautiful, flaxen blonde and so white she might be mistaken for alabaster. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I love Amy, and that is a good thing because she is now my daughter-in-law and the mother of Hailey, who for the first three months of her life was the first blue-eyed grandchild born into this brown-eyed Italian/Sicilian family, until her eyes changed to beautiful black Sicilian olives.

The Asian bug bit Jesse somewhere around seventh grade when he met Jessica, a petite Korean with great lips, who was in the horn section of the middle school orchestra. Jesse played the same instrument. Well, they didn’t actually play the same one, but they both played trumpets. Their pairing had such possibilities. Jesse and Jessie. Two trumpets. No waiting. However, they were both so shy that neither one said a word to the other until high school graduation day, just before they went off to different colleges. And by that time it was too late.

Then along came Amy. Not Ian’s “Caucasian Amy,” but one of the Asian persuasion, a Japanese violinist Jesse met in college. When he brought her around, the family, including my mother, had grown accustomed to Asians at the gates, although they still had trouble separating them according a specific -ese. Just as the family had reduced everything from ravioli to linguini and lasagna, into generic “macaroni,” there was a tendency to lump all of Asia together - Chinese, Japanese – Portuguese? It didn’t seem to matter. And there were some who had problems telling the family’s Asians apart and thought that Asian Amy and Siu Who were the actually the same person, dating first Ian and then Jesse. Not that they looked alike, or that there was anything wrong with it if they did. But some of the confusion was mainly because Siu and Asian Amy had never been seen together. No one ever had problems telling the two Amys apart. My mother-in-law never asked Asian Amy her Kung Fu question. “Because,” she said, “I already asked her once at Janine’s and I don’t want to be a pest. Besides, I don’t want her to think that I am being rude.”

So for as long as Asian Amy was on the scene, the matter of Kung Fu’s disappearance remained a mystery.

We didn’t talk much, Asian Amy and I, when she and Jesse visited. She was shy and quiet, the very definition of inscrutable, the silent, brooding type, a person of many moods, most of them dark, like a rain cloud that she seemed to carry with her. Their breakup was a protracted and painful affair for both of them. Asian Amy was Jesse’s first real love, but in the end, after many fits and starts, they went their separate ways.

After the pain of Asian Amy subsided, it didn’t take Jesse long to hook up, first with Kat, a tattooed Filipina, and then with Kit, a cute little Chinese girl. They make a cute couple. Kit is barely five feet tall and Jesse measures in at a towering six feet four. They have a lot in common. They are both shy and quiet and have a strong affinity for sushi. But if they ever get married I know there is no hope of the union ever producing a blue-eyed baby.

Jesse has other plans after graduation. He has been studying Japanese for about a year. In June he hopes to go to Japan for a year or more to teach English there. He has submitted his JET application, one of the few things he has completed on time without coaxing from his mother or me. He is already there in Japan in his head.

“I hope you get your wish,” I told him. “It is a wonderful opportunity. But what,” I asked him while we were watching Lost In Translation for the third time, “will you do if you are not accepted?”

He looked as though he had never considered that possibility.

“And what will you and Kit do if you are accepted?”

He shrugged as he sat there with his legs crossed looking very inscrutable.

So I am making plans too, to take a trip to Japan when Jesse is there. I am fortifying myself in Asian culture by ordering lots of Chinese take out, and I am desperately trying to develop a taste for raw fish and octopus flavored ice cream.

Joseph E. Scalia grew up a shabbos goy in Boro Park, Brooklyn, turning on lights and lighting cooking stoves. He has published two novels FREAKs and Pearl, two short story collections, No Strings Attached and Brooklyn Family Scenes. He is looking for a publisher for his latest collection of humor, Scalia vs.The Universe.
 

There. I’d gotten it out.

The language of Descartes, Voltaire, and Balzac had clearly vacated my cortex. Despite those years of French classes and one brief visit to Paris, “Je m’appelle” was the best I could come up with. And even that was a struggle. Pushed aside by the overwhelming necessity for Spanish in our clinic, further dilapidated by decades of disuse, I could not conjure up a single word in French beyond stating my name. I was appalled at my brain’s porosity.

Mr. Mezondes smiled politely. No doubt he was accustomed, and perhaps resigned, to the challenges of communication here in America. I gestured for him to sit down, and tried to signal a polite, “just a moment,” as I started down the list of options. First was calling the office of our volunteer interpreters.

“Sorry,” the person answered, “our French interpreter is no longer with us.” I hoped he had merely quit his job and not reached an untimely end.

I asked around in the waiting room, but nobody spoke French. I surveyed the clinic staff—only Spanish and Chinese to be found. Back at my office, I resorted to the final option and called AT&T. When a French-accented voice graced my ear, I exhaled a sigh of relief.

Mr. Mezondes and I took turns on the phone, and I learned that he was a 24 year-old man from Braazaville in Congo. He spent an extra cycle of translation ensuring that I understood that this was the Congo that used to be French Congo, not the Congo that used to be Zaire. He was generally healthy, but his main concern was a burning in his stomach, especially after he ate.

Even though we smiled gamely at each other as we handed the phone back and forth, it was hard to say that we were really having a conversation together. It was more like we were each having a conversation with the polite but business-like interpreter. And that’s what our conversation was: polite and business-like. I asked the questions, he supplied the answers. I kept my utterances brief, not wishing to overload the operator and I sensed Mr. Mezondes doing the same. I was also cognizant of the cost of the services, so I tried to be as efficient as possible. I even ventured to tell my patient his diagnosis and treatment during this initial conversation, something I normally would never do before the physical exam. But I didn’t want to have to call the operator back again, so I explained that he most likely had acid reflux, and—barring any information to the contrary that I might glean from the physical exam—that I would give him a medicine for acid and see him again in my clinic in one month.

We said goodbye to our AT&T friend and I gestured him up onto the exam table. As I palpated his abdomen and listened to his heart, Mr. Mezondes asked in halting English, “You speak little français?”

"No.” I shook my head, regretting the years of study that had never succeeded in cementing my French. “Solamente español.”

“Español?” he said with a broad grin. “Yo hablo español.”

Spanish? He spoke Spanish?!?

For the rest of our visit, we chatted happily, if a bit awkwardly, in our mutual non-native languages. I learned that he’d studied Spanish at his university in Congo, and I told him that I’d studied on trips to Latin America.

He told me how he had emigrated from Africa two years ago, but first lived in Canada, and how different Canada was from America. I told him that I had once lived in Montreal, and how I’d struggled with the Québécois French. We laughed over our common difficulties with the slang street-Spanish in New York. And then we were able to review his medical issues and treatment, and I could be confidant that he understood.

It had never dawned on me that Mr. Mezondes would speak Spanish. I had assumed that, like most West Africans, Mr. Mezondes would only speak French in addition to his native language in Congo. It never dawned on Mr. Mezondes that I might speak Spanish. I guess he assumed that most white Americans didn’t speak anything but English.

“Hasta luego,” he said, shaking my hand.

“Ojalá que pasa un buen día,” I replied, with a small surge of pride that I’d nailed the subjunctive. I knew that Mr. Mezondes could appreciate the linguistic leap that grammatical construct entailed.

Mr. Mezondes left my office to make his appointment with the front-desk staff. Most of the Bellevue clerks were Hispanic, bilingual in Spanish and English. Mr. Mezondes—a native Congolese who spoke scant English—would have no trouble at all arranging his health care.

Danielle Ofri is a writer and practicing internist at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. She is the editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. Her newest book is Medicine in Translation: Journeys with my Patients. This essay is an excerpt from Medicine in Translation, (©Beacon Press, 2010, Reprinted with permission.)

“Can I pull out the tulips?” I said to Richard. “ My knees are in bad shape and I’m afraid of making them worse by kneeling on them.” He replied, “Sure, do what’s best for you, no need to hurt yourself.” It began to pour as I walked over to the shocking pink and red tulips that were in the main garden. Richard said, “you don’t have to work in the rain, go home.” I said, “Richard, rain won’t hurt me.” I proceeded with my job of pulling up the tulips and I loved working in the rain and there was a perk in taking home as many tulips as I could carry. While I was knee deep in dirt, I briefly looked up at the tall buildings surrounding the park and was amazed at the contrast.

Just then the wind began to blow, and many of the pink cherry blossoms floated off the trees into the air and fell to the ground. I stood there feeling I was in the middle of pink snow. The blossoms covered everything including me, and I felt like a fairy princess. The garden maintenance workers were hurrying like crazy to clean up the blossoms, but they finally gave up because there were so many of them and they just kept coming. They were just trying to do their job, and I was loving the pink snow.

I proceeded with trying to get the bulbs out along with the tulips, but those bulbs wanted to stay in the ground. They were giving me a real hard time and not coming out so easily. Just then a man by the name of Rodrigo walked by and said, “may I have some of the tulips?” I said, “sure take as many as you like.” He told me that it was for his garden in Brooklyn and he said “I wasn’t even planning to walk through the park, but I decided it was shorter and here I am and look what I’ve found.” I asked him “do you work in the City?” He said, “no, but I used to. I worked at the World Trade Center. I was on the 27th floor when the attack happened.” There was silence. We looked into each other’s eyes. Just then the gardener walked over and began talking to Rodrigo and me. I shared with them that I was a healer and that I worked with a modality called Plant Spirit Healing and that I was totally in my element. Richard said, “you need to read The Magic Life of Plants. I’ll bring the book for you the next time we meet.” Richard showed me a piece of soil that was leftover from 9/ll, covered with dust and the dirt crumbling into more dust. Richard said, “I lost a lot of people in the WTC. There used to be a woman that would visit me frequently in the park. I would give her flowers from the garden. After the attack I stopped seeing her, and then her friend came by one day, and I asked her friend ‘where is your other friend?’ She said, ‘she was lost in the WTC.’" Chills ran up my spine and I looked into Richard’s eyes and there was more silence. He went off to do more gardening and I continued on with the tulips.

Just then a young couple came by on their bicycles. They spoke in a language I didn’t understand and they told me it was Czechoslovakian. They wanted some flowers for their garden in Long Island, so I asked them to join me in the garden and whatever bulbs they were able to root out, they could take home with them. They said “we came into NYC to go on the bike tour that is happening today, but we were stopped in the beginning of the tour because we weren’t wearing our helmets, so we decided not to waste the day and do some sightseeing on our bikes.” I said to them “this is the magic of the City. They smiled in full agreement and we continued on our work together. They stayed in the garden with me for an hour and then went on their way. Many more tourists came over to me. Some couldn’t speak English, but I knew what they wanted, and when I gave them some tulips their faces would light up. The entire park was lit up with these happy faces that had received the gift of flowers.

I worked in the garden for 3 hours and then it was time to leave. I exchanged good-byes, feeling exhausted, happy and full of joy. I came up to my apartment, dumped all of my dirty clothes in a pile, jumped into a hot shower, fell into bed and slept for 4 hours. When I awoke it was 4:30pm and I couldn’t believe how long I had slept, but my body felt rested and I got dressed and walked outside deciding what to eat for dinner.

Sherri Rosen has had her own publicity business in NYC for ll years. She’s a mom, writer, performer, interfaith minister, and singer. She’s missed City Hall Park since she moved to Harlem a year ago.

The second answer is: On our birthdays my sisters and I were given pieces of silverware from a prestigious German manufactory that names its models after big cities. My sisters’ models were called Stockholm and Helsinki. Mine was New York.

My destination was clear. At 26, I flew to New York. What followed was a seven-year journey that included a terrible marriage, Byzantine immigration procedures and a divorce. Eventually I found love again. Now settled, I could afford to worry about other things. My frustration over not being able to participate in the political process grew. It was time to become an American citizen.

The long line at the Department of Homeland Security in front of 1 Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan was a condensed version of a city that never fails to astound me. A wrinkled Hispanic mother gently guided her adult son with Down Syndrome. An Asian woman put on lipstick using a compact mirror. A Caucasian businesswoman rolled her eyes while texting compulsively. The line crept toward the checkpoint like a snake cut into pieces, its parts haphazardly reattached.

According to my appointment letter, my citizenship test and interview were scheduled for 12:05 pm. The specificity of the time made me believe this would be a relatively fast procedure. After the first two hours of waiting it became clear this was not the case.

I looked at the 200-odd people around me. We were all so tired. The years leading up to this appointment had been filled with mounds of paperwork repeating the same questions. How many times can you attest that you have never been part of a terrorist organization? At what point do you crack when asked whether you had ever been a member of the Nazi party? How on earth would they find out if you were a habitual drunkard or prostitute? And who had a clear conscience when asked whether she had ever committed an offense?

Except for the flags and the yellowed photos of Peter Jennings and Ivana Trump proudly presenting their citizenship certificates to an apparently cheap camera, the waiting room resembled an ER. Burgundy plastic chairs connected at the joints bounced you along with your pained neighbors.

Announcers called out names through two speakers. They sometimes overlapped and we would hear only muddled syllables. I considered my name’s possible pronunciations. Sab-eyen Heen-leen? Say-been Heyen-lin? Sa-bin Hin-lin?

After five hours of bursts of cursing from my fidgety neighbor, my name was finally called. To my surprise the caller didn’t even forget the e at the end of Sabine.

Smirking from behind a big pile of files, the immigration officer started the routine. Was I a prostitute? A drunkard? A member of the Nazi party? Or of the Greenpoint YMCA? (I had dutifully noted my membership when asked what associations I was part of.) Had I committed any crimes since I mailed these forms? I shook my head.

Had I really been out of the country only once in the last couple of years? I said that when I got remarried we went to Puerto Rico. But that didn’t count.

The officer handed me a form and told me to read a sentence from it. “Alright,” he interrupted me before I could finish. “Now write: ‘I honeymooned in Puerto Rico.’ ” He caught himself. “ ‘Honeymooned’ isn’t a real verb, but write it anyway.” I did and we both chuckled.

Angela, the woman who owns my local laundromat on Greenpoint’s Manhattan Avenue, once told me how she applied for citizenship in 1977, after having spent several years in the U.S. illegally. Back then illegal immigrants could become citizens if they had given birth on American soil. Her officer told her to write, “I love New York.” She still cracks up remembering her response. She wrote, “I ♥ NY.” In fact, Angela ♥s NY so much that she moved her entire family from Nicaragua.

Testing my patience over a five-hour stretch was far more painful than testing my knowledge of American history. Why do we celebrate the 4th of July? What do the stripes on the flag represent? What is the name of the ship that brought the pilgrims to America? Piece of cake. The officer left out the more difficult questions: How many amendments to the Constitution are there? Name those that address voting rights. Who said, “Give me liberty or give me death?”

Four weeks later I was invited to the naturalization ceremony at a courthouse in downtown Brooklyn. To my German eyes, incurably attuned to efficiency and order, the event seemed chaotic and ludicrous.

An exasperated officer was trying to arrange the tide of people flooding the foyer into an orderly line. Many of the 300 soon-to-be citizens had brought their entire extended families. The wobbly line inched to the checkpoint. Trying to stay calm, I reminded myself that this is also why I wanted to be part of this country; whenever you think you know what to expect, you fall right back down the rabbit hole.

In the courtroom the New York narrative continued. The woman in charge was munching on Cheetos and the background echoed with the question, “Where are you from?” In the front row sat the tired, the pregnant, the limping, the old. One at a time, we were called to hand in yet another sheet of questions. Prostitute? Drunkard? Communist? Polygamist?

The hours passed like a dense fog. Eventually, the Cheetos lady explained that when she knocked three times it meant the judge was about to arrive and we were to rise.

We heard three knocks and all rose in unison. False alarm. A child was amusing herself by knocking on wooden pews.

Finally the appropriately named Judge Go arrived. We faced the American flag and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. I had goose bumps.

I grew up believing that gestures and symbols of national pride were a recipe for disaster and that I could only be proud of my own choices and achievements. I chose to move to New York. I traded a rather rigid and homogeneous society for one that is utterly diverse and remarkably flexible. I traded bike rides through parks for an uncomfortable commute in a sticky and crowded subway car. I traded blinders for a 360-degree panoramic view. But most importantly, I survived years of ups and downs in New York. That’s what I’m proud of.

Judge Go interrupted my thoughts. She encouraged us to vote and said that in other countries people walk barefoot for miles to execute that right. She told us that she arrived as a child on a boat from China into the chilly morning mist enveloping the Golden Gate Bridge. For a long time she doubted that she would ever be as successful as the natives. Now she was a judge.

“It is only in America that this can happen,” she said. “Tomorrow you will have a child that can become President of the United States.”

I was giddy on my way home. What was this new hungry citizen to do? My new husband, a Mexican immigrant, had left me a surprise in the fridge: a cupcake from a Polish bakery in Greenpoint adorned with an American flag from a 99-cent store run by Arabs. This is why I came to New York and this is why I wanted to be an American. I took my first bite.

Sabine Heinlein is a contributing writer to the Brooklyn Rail and a podcast producer for Artinfo.com. Her feature articles have been published in national German newspapers, including Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. She was awarded a Sidney Gross Memorial Award for Investigative Reporting (2007), an Artcroft residency (2008), a Yaddo residency and fellowship (2009) and a NYFA fellowship for nonfiction literature (2009).

One night as I prepared to depart for the city I sat in a Panera and ate soup while I reviewed my travel plans. I would ride into Penn, take the A C E to the F train and then get off at the East Broadway stop and find the 169 Bar, the evening’s venue. I smiled, proud of myself for remembering all those tricky letters and whatnot, and surveyed my plate. I’d been given a liberal hunk of bread with my soup, but hadn’t touched it. I had to leave to catch my train and I was concerned that I’d get hungry again shortly. I decided to wrap the thing in a napkin and jam it in my pocket, figuring that if I didn’t eat it on the train I could toss it when I got to Penn. I met up with a friend, we boarded our train, and we were off.

As I sat on the train the soup settled firmly in my stomach and I decided that I wouldn’t be needing the bread in my pocket after all. While the train clacked ever closer to the city, I came to a decision. One of the more unsettling things a bridge and tunnel guy like me tends to meet in his journeys is the homeless. They ask you for your money and then you feel terribly guilty for saying no or ignoring them. Furthermore, there’s that nagging doubt that these people don’t actually want money for food, they want booze or drugs. Well, I proclaimed, now I can give them the food straight away and cut out Washington and Lincoln as the middlemen. A perfect plan. I explained the plan to my companion and, as she got over the shock of me pulling a loaf of bread out of my pocket, she agreed that yeah, maybe it would be an okay idea.

Of course we didn’t see a single homeless person when we got off the train. Even the thin lady who sits on the ramp down to the downtown subways was missing, though some of her effects were there. No one approached us on the A train. No one was hungry when we transferred at West 4th. Everyone around the East Broadway stop had everything they needed. And so I showed up to a gig with a solid length of bread nestled safely (and increasingly warmer) in the pocket of my hoodie.

After the show and a few beers I left with the same friend I’d come in with. We B&T folk stick together, you know. Our return trip had the same air of we-need-nothing Zen that the ride in suffered from. Finally, as we walked along the street towards Penn, we found a man who hadn’t been stricken with the recent outbreak of nirvana. He was a large man in a wheelchair, propelling himself backwards up the sidewalk and shouting out, almost happily. He needed, or wanted, money. Since his back had been to me as he rolled towards me, I couldn’t understand him. By the time it was clear he was asking for anything at all, he’d already passed us and was quickly moving away.

“Go ahead,” my friend said. “See if he wants your bread.” I anxiously glanced at the figure rolling away into the night. What was I supposed to do? Sprint after the wheeled vagrant and thrust my bread out at him? Would he appreciate it? Would he take it as some sort of doughy insult? The choice was made for me as he spun off into the dark. I turned and kept walking the way we came; chucking the bread into a trash can outside the station. I was annoyed, but it was hard to say if I was mad at myself or frustrated with the failed attempt at charity.

I could have fed someone. But apparently they had to ask me for help directly.

Jeff Kyle, Jr. is a Jersey-born bridge-and-tunneler. His website is separatedchaff.com.

“Check it out,” my friend Neal said, interrupting my budding frustration. I looked over and noticed he was pointing a cluster of giant red “ornaments” cordoned off behind wooden police lines. “We should get a picture in front of that!”

“Do we need another picture?” I was too cold to hide my irritation.

“Dude,” Neal, whispered. Then, after making sure Dana wasn’t looking, he nodded in her direction.

“Let’s take a picture!” I said.

Dana was the one girl we convinced to come out with us that night. Or rather Neal convinced—mainly by promising her a chance to see the tree lighting. But our little group of college freshmen had gotten caught downtown trying (and failing) to buy beer, meaning we missed the actual lighting ceremony by about half an hour. When she realized our miscalculation, Dana almost bailed on the spot. Without her, we’d just be five eighteen-year-old guys roaming Manhattan—which even we knew would look pathetic. So Neal had taken it upon himself to keep Dana entertained. Which meant a lot of posing for photos.

“You have got to be kidding! Enough pictures!” Unfortunately, Dana was just as sick of Neal’s photography as I was.

“Okay,” Neal said. “No pictures.” He laughed, but I could see his eyes dart around for an alternative. That’s when he spotted him: There in the middle of the sidewalk danced none other than Barney, the then-ubiquitous purple dinosaur of PBS fame. Or at least, some intern in a Barney costume. He kept bouncing up and down in seizure-like fits.

“Oh my God!” Neal called. “It’s Barney—and he’s pogoing!”

A quick word about Neal—of all my freshman-year friends he was the best at salvaging a disastrous Manhattan outing by making a pest of himself—most notably when he “introduced” himself to Ethan Hawke during a class trip to the Met. So I understood Barney’s famously sunny disposition was about to be tested.

Hi Barney!” Neal said, bounding over with exaggerated glee.

Barney knew enough to turn and start bouncing in the other direction.

“Wait—” Neal scurried after him.

As a budding writer, I’d already perfected the art of trailing my more impulsive friends at a safe distance without missing any of their antics, so I quickly staked out a view of both dinosaur and pursuer. Neal lagged a step behind his prey, just close enough to grab the costume’s wobbling tail. In an effort to entertain Dana, who’d just about caught up to us by now, he reached out and gave the appendage a gentle tug. And maybe a shake or two.

“Hey! Don’t do that!” Out of nowhere, this pudgy guy came running over.

“Dude,” Neal said, turning to me, “Barney’s got a bodyguard!”

If true, PBS needed a better security budget. Barney’s helper looked like a jewelry store clerk, with his thinning hair, old-man glasses, and hideous beige slacks.

“Please don’t do that, sir,” the bodyguard requested over Barney’s shoulder. He made sure to keep his purple friend safely between himself and Neal.

“I’m not doing anything, I just want to see Barney” Neal replied. “Hey Barney! I love you Barney! I love you!” If he knew the rest of the Barney I-love-you-you-love-me song, I’m sure he would’ve broken it out, but that’s all he could manage. “Look everyone! It’s Barney! I love you Barney!”

“Barney doesn’t seem to love you back,” I said.

People ignored us, streaming past on both sides. Neal kept at it, but after a couple seconds even he started getting bored with the whole encounter. My eyes drifted, settling on this kid walking towards us, who looked to be about our age. I noticed him because he wore his Yankees hat sideways, which at the time was still novel enough to seem cool. I watched him come closer, his head bobbing up and down to an imaginary boom box. Then, without stopping, speaking, or even breaking stride, the kid in the ball cap suddenly decked Barney right on the side of he head with a left hook. The purple guy collapsed like a punctured float at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, his entire fluffy body hitting the pavement at the same time.

As soon as the assailant was gone, Barney’s security detail sprang back into action. “Oh my God! What did you do?” the bodyguard asked, looking at Neal.

My friend stood openmouthed, limp tail still hanging from his fingers and a crumpled children’s icon twitching at his feet. The bodyguard eventually forgave us with an exasperated wave and turned his attention to the victim. Everyone else kept pushing by the same as before, more annoyed than concerned with the dinosaur’s plight. Aside from this one six year old who looked like someone had just told him his parents were dead, Neal was the only one who grasped the magnitude of the event. He looked right at me, his face filled with the awe of a man contemplating his newborn son for the first time.

“Dude,” Neal said. “Someone snuck Barney.” He finally dropped the tail. “This is such a great night.”

Guy Patrick Cunningham is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York.

“So why didn’t you take the necklace?” my mom me asked a few days later. The boy was the son of a popular Congressman and from a well-respected family. I didn’t answer. I knew she was fishing to see who my “somebody else” was. She said the boy’s mom had told the other mothers at the neighborhood association meeting that he had asked her for the pendant, and my aunt, who also lived in our subdivision, had heard about it and passed along the news to my mom.

When I think about all the reasons I ended up living in New York City rather than the comfortable, close-knit neighborhood I grew up in, this is one incident that stands out. It is said that the Philippine upper class is made of a hundred families who are related or went to school together. My parents’ neighborhood is a quintessential example. My mother’s sister and her husband live around the corner from my parents. My dad has former schoolmates at almost every street in the subdivision. The Vice President of the bank from where my parents got their mortgage lives next to my aunt and uncle. She is also my godmother.

Growing up, I was always hearing “You should set a good example!” and “You are a reflection of our family!” I am the oldest of four girls and as is standard in Filipino families, my parents kept tabs on me the most. The thinking is if the oldest is well-disciplined the rest of the children will follow. I left the role I was born into when I moved to New York.

In my early 20s, I was accepted to grad school at NYU and found myself in an apartment building on West 56th Street and Broadway, where I didn’t know my neighbors and the faces of people on the street hurrying to the theater changed every night. I felt that I could breathe easier.

I could have dinner and drinks and return any time I wanted. I could run in Central Park in a tattered t-shirt and no one would care. I could skip church on Sundays and not be reminded that I had added another day to my stay in purgatory. My roommate and I exchanged pleasantries once in a while but for the most part I came and went as I pleased. Sure, my parents and my sisters from Manila called and visited. But most of the time they were 10,000 miles away.

Shortly after graduate school, I married my American boyfriend who I met at school. It was a bittersweet moment. Now the distance I had put between me and my family, cousins, and the friends I had known all my life was permanent.

A job in New Jersey and the strong desire to remain in New York City led us to move to Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan and a short drive away from Mahwah, New Jersey by car. Inwood consists mostly of six and seven storey, pre-war buildings. Formerly an Irish, working-class neighborhood, Inwood is now populated mostly by Dominicans and former residents of the Upper West Side and Park Slope, who were driven uptown by the high rents and co-op costs.

Inwood is also known for Inwood Hill Park which has almost 200 acres of hills, baseball fields, and walking trails. In the middle of the park is Shorakapok Rock which marks the spot where the Dutch “bought” Manhattan from the Native Americans.

When we first moved to Inwood, my husband and I didn’t make much use of these amenities; since we had no friends in Northern Manhattan. We spent most of our leisure time eating at restaurants on the Upper West Side and watching movies and performances at Lincoln Center. Then I got pregnant.

A neighbor in my building noticed my growing belly and gave me her son’s bathing tub. She also invited me to join her mothers group. After our son was born, whenever my husband and I took him to the park to feed the ducks or pushed him on the swings in the playground we met parents with kids the same age, and they soon became our friends. Now that our kids are older, we walk to the park most summer evenings and share a picnic dinner with other families. While the parents drink wine and exchange stories, our kids catch bugs and climb trees.

Like most New Yorkers, my fellow Inwoodians are “immigrants” as well. They come from all over the US, and in our immediate circle, from 16 different countries. And because our own families and friends are so far away, we have become each other’s surrogate siblings and “best friends.”

This was vividly brought home to me a few weeks ago. I was in our kitchen making Kaldereta (beef stew) for dinner when my husband and our son, now 4, came home from the park. While our boy was washing up in the bathroom, my husband told me that one of the mothers of was complaining in the park that she hears the couple upstairs from her having sex—everyday.

“But we know them!” I replied in shock. I couldn’t believe I knew something that intimate about our son’s buddy’s parents. (Not to mention that a couple with children had sex everyday! Where do they get the energy?)

That night, after our son went to bed, my husband and I talked about the other intimacies we’ve learned about our neighbors over the years: what they wear to sleep, their Zoloft dosage, the homework assigned by their couples’ therapist. As we spoke, I had a chilling yet also strangely comforting sense of déjà vu. I felt that fate had given me another gem signifying the treasure of extended family ties. This time, I am not giving it back.

Tricia Capistrano is a writer living in Manhattan. This article originally appeared on Hybridmom.com.

“It’s bullshit, of course,” José says, holding up the bottle in the afternoon sunlight.

Hidden beneath his low-pulled black hat, his eyes look tired. José worked a double yesterday, from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., and another shift today, Saturday, on four hours of sleep. He is one of the most active members of Movement for Justice in El Barrio (MJB), a controversial group of Mexican immigrant activists that applies Zapatista-inspired methods of grassroots organizing in Spanish Harlem, also known as “El Barrio.” He lives in Queens and commutes 45 minutes six days a week to the Deli in lower Manhattan where he has worked for seven years. All in all, he works almost 70 hours a week. He is 27 years old, “illegal,” and angry.

Like other MJB members, José refuses to keep quiet, to be silenced by fear of deportation or imprisonment. He is one of a growing number of Mexican immigrants that reject the role of voiceless victim. Despite never going to college, having left Mexico for the U.S. at age 19, José understands perfectly well the forces driving Mexicans to the United States, the way the system handicaps immigrants once they arrive, and the dangers of raising his voice and fighting back.

“In Puebla, my family, we used to grow maize, beans, vegetables,” he says in Spanish. “But the big corporations changed everything.” They bought up the land, freeze-dried goods and pasteurized milk, and outsold small farmers like his father. “We had a couple of cows, but we had to sell the milk fresh everyday, understand? How can we compete with milk that lasts for two, three, four weeks in a carton?”

“It’s the same thing that goes on here,” he says, gesturing to the billboards and signs around Union Square, “or in El Barrio. Corporations sell cheaply to eliminate the competition. Then they raise their prices.”

Unlike Ecuadorians and other Hispanic immigrants, Mexicans come to the U.S. with plans to make a quick buck and return, he says. “‘Two years here and then I’ll go back,’ they say to themselves. But it’s always one more year, one more year.” Rarely do they go to school or learn the language, he says, because they always plan to return to Mexico.

“They spend their lives dreaming,” José says, his mouth caught somewhere between a sneer and sad smile. But between their illegally-low wages—when José started at the Deli he got paid only $3.50 an hour—and remitting money back home, they leave their children with nothing except debt and misfortune.

José uses the word “sistema” over and over, as he does when speaking for MJB. Like others in the organization, he sees NAFTA as a pillar of an economic system that strips Mexicans of their farmland and pulls them to the U.S., only to be labeled “illegal” and discriminated against. He speaks in different registers to different audiences, deriding “gentrification” to activists and journalists during a speech at City Hall, criticizing “gente con dinero” and “evictions” to community members in neighborhood meetings.

For some Americans, José is a nightmare come true: an “illegal” immigrant who, far from hiding in the shadows, spends what little time he has free from work criticizing conditions here in the U.S.

The fear and anger towards “illegal” immigrants falls most heavily on the few immigrants’ rights organizations whose members do speak out, staging protests and, in the case of MJB, filing lawsuits against abusive landlords. Even in New York, where undocumented immigrants have long found refuge from American xenophobia, activists like José are increasingly at risk of deportation.

“If they are caught demonstrating, the thing that ICE should do is ask them for their ID. If they don’t have ID, they should be investigated,” a Minutemen spokesman recently told me over the phone. His high-pitched voice quivered as he grew angrier and angrier. “If a man doesn’t got an ID, he’s got a problem.”

But perched atop a handrail in the park, José doesn’t look worried about being approached by the Feds or asked for ID. Instead, he worries that MJB is misunderstood by the public, by its activist supporters and by some of its own members.

“The media and activists like to hear about defeating Steven Kessner, about a victory over one landlord,” he says, referring to the landlord MJB pressured to leave El Barrio. “But, for us, it’s more important that the community is growing in confidence,” José says. Small scars dot his hands and forearms. He speaks quickly and passionately, words pouring quickly from his barrel chest.

When I ask José what the future holds for MJB, he pauses. Kessner sold his 47 buildings to Dawnay, Day, a $4 billion international corporation with property on five continents. Since then, little has improved for the hundreds of MJB members living in what are now Dawnay-owned apartment buildings. Mysterious fines continue to pile-up, crumbling walls and ceilings go unfixed, and misleading letters urging tenants to take cash settlements and move out are slipped under creaky doors.

“Things aren’t going to change here in El Barrio just because people agree with us,” José says. But when immigrants get up and speak in front like they did at City Hall, it means something. “When they chanted ‘Sí se puede,’ their children were there. They heard them, and now they’ll grow up thinking that they can change things.”

MJB has grown bolder in its criticism of city government officials—particularly East Harlem Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito—and offices, like HPD, which it considers complicit in landlord abuses. Meanwhile, a new “International Campaign in Defense of El Barrio,” including trips overseas by MJB members, provides “insurance” against the growing list of enemies the group has made in New York, José says.

It is only when speaking to José that MJB truly begins to make sense, that I begin to understand how a tenants’ rights organization could have taken up Zapatismo, filed a lawsuit against a billionaire international corporation, and protested on the steps of City Hall.

But there is a flip side to this success. The louder their stories, the more likely MJB members are to be harassed or, worse, deported. When José and another MJB member attended a public meeting on Columbia University’s expansion into West Harlem last year, he got up and asked Mark-Viverito why she had “betrayed” the community and reneged on her promise to vote against the plan.

“Her people approached us afterwards. They asked why I said ‘betrayed,’ saying that it was too strong a word to use in front of the community,” José says. “But I told them it was the right word to use, because that’s what she had done. Then they invited us to a ‘private meeting,’ but we said ‘no thanks’ and left.”

When I mention the risk of deportation, José pauses again. The sounds of Union Square wash back over our conversation, a thousand footsteps shuffling past us.

Yes, he says, he worries that things will get more dangerous for him and other MJB members in the months to come, as the organization shifts its criticism from landlords to the city that fails to regulate them.

In the end, something has to give, both in the U.S. and in Mexico, José says. The people will organize, from El Barrio to the factories in Tijuana and the farmlands in Puebla.

By the end of our conversation, José has torn the orange juice label to pieces. The idyllic farmland, the corporate logo, the friendly face of all that José sees wrong in the U.S. and Mexico, lies in tatters on the ground. Just then, a man in a green jump suit comes by and silently sweeps it up into the trash.

It was sweltering that day—the first day of summer—and even though it wasn’t the most practical choice for moving day, I wore one of those tank tops with the built-in bras. Horrified, I thought I must have popped out of my top picking up a box. Why else would an 8-year-old boy stare at me like that?

I looked at myself, then at him again. I was decent but he was still staring. I looked again and it became clear. I was a white lady moving into this Dominican kid’s home. I made eye contact with him and I smiled a little, as if to say: Sorry, kid, it’s true. I live here now.

Choosing to live in Washington Heights had been easy: it was in Manhattan, along with my husband’s new job, and we could afford a two-bedroom apartment so our 3-year-old daughter could finally have her own room. While I packed up my old apartment in Boston, I read everything I could about Washington Heights, wanting to plunge in and immediately feel it was my home. I learned the neighborhood had been a refuge for European Jews in the 1930s and ’40s, only to be displaced by so many Greeks, by the 1960s the neighborhood was “the Astoria of Manhattan.” The Greeks left the neighborhood to the Dominicans—the largest population outside the Dominican Republic, in fact. I filed this away as merely another neat little fact, like how Harry Belafonte, Henry Kissinger, and Red Sox left-fielder Manny Ramírez had each attended George Washington High at the end of my new street.

If I hadn’t been welcomed to the neighborhood by a gawking kid, maybe I wouldn’t have thought it, but everywhere I went, I felt people looking at me. The first neighbor to actually speak to us was a young, beautiful Dominican woman who passed my husband in the building lobby.

She addressed him in Spanish at first, but he shrugged and said he didn’t understand.

“You live here?” the woman asked, heading towards the door.

My husband nodded. “We moved in a couple days ago.”

The woman shook her head and smiled as she opened the door.

“Now I’ve seen everything!” she laughed, and slipped away.

What had she meant? Were we a sign the neighborhood was improving or were we crazy white folk, intruding into a community that didn’t want us? Every conversation my husband and I had about the neighborhood or our neighbors went like that, questioning what people meant, whether or not they were looking at us as much as it felt like they were, and everything became a debate. One noisy neighbor would turn into a 45-minute discussion on race and class: were we doing what anyone would do, or were we being intolerant if we called 311 when their party woke us up at 4:30 a.m.? Did our neighbors see us, pale as coconut among their chocolates and cinnamons, as just another neighbor? Or were we viewed as the crest of a gentrification wave, poised to wash away another old neighborhood, leaving nothing but Starbucks and higher rents in our wake?

We could have just moved—after all, our things were still in boxes—but we were already in love with this loud, strange neighborhood. As the sun set, my husband and I would drop the kid into her new Maclaren and walk along St. Nicholas Avenue, from 191st Street to 168th and back again, just to be out in the streets to watch the night unfurl. Tall, tough-looking teenage boys would stoop to greet tiny grandmothers with a kiss. Old men set up their domino tables on the sidewalks, wearing their Cuban-style shirts and smoking cigars, their laughter heard half a block away. Every couple of blocks, the frío frío man stood with his huge block of ice, rasping it into shavings to be soaked with sugary syrups.

On these walks, I started collecting moments I felt I was being accepted, turning them over and over in my mind, until the details blurred to nothing but a warm glow. The day the Mister Softee woman smiled and handed over my cone saying, “Here you go, mami.” The girls at the playground who immediately accepted my blonde, blue-eyed daughter as one of their own. The elderly neighbor who thanked me in Spanish for taking her garbage out after I gestured wordlessly: Me? Bag? Take over there?

One Saturday morning, a month after I arrived, I stepped out to get a newspaper to find a neighborhood completely transformed for the annual Dominican Day Festival. Unable to go anywhere else, I stood and peered over the police barricades, craning to see the parade that was still just a distant din, until at last, the parade strutted and swaggered down St. Nicholas Avenue.

Masked red devils ran up and leered at small kids in the crowds. Girls in towering feathered headpieces wore sequined dresses and glinted in the sun like fresh fish. Behind a pair of gigantic fake breasts, a man in a dress and wig hid behind his parasol and shook his equally enormous fake behind at the delighted crowd.

It was like Mardi Gras and Christmas and the Fourth of July all at once, and this feeling of undaunted joy rose up from the sidewalks like the shimmering August heat. And suddenly, I started to cry. Everyone around me cheering, laughing, waving flags… and I would never genuinely be a part of that. I knew I would always be on one side of the barricade, my neighbors on the other.

I also began to understand something else: I am a complete idiot.

I was never going to be and could never even pretend to be from the same half of one small Caribbean island like almost all of my neighbors. And there would be times where people would stare and wonder what I was doing in that part of town, but I wasn’t a kid trying to fit into a new school—I was in New York City, a city based largely on the premise that no one really gives a damn where you’re from, and whatever divides us, there are many more things everyone can agree on: a sugary ice is good on a hot day; teenagers should show respect to old people, and, today, I knew a guy wearing a big fake ass is far funnier than it ought to be.

I returned home, still smiling, and entered the small concrete courtyard in front of my building where a pair of boys tossed a baseball between them. As I passed, I heard it. One of the boys speaking to the other: something something gringa something estúpido something, finishing with a snort.

My heart sank. As I fumbled for my keys, I looked back and saw the same kid who stood and stared at me the day I moved in. He looked away, then at his friend. He sucked his teeth, disgusted.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked the name-calling kid. “Why you gotta be so fucking racist all the time?”

Turning away, I swung open the front door and went home.