Go Back to New Jersey: Contradictions, Ghosts, and the Loop That Wouldn't Close
Date
April 21, 2026
Tags
16 days, three cities, and a trip that refused to cohere. On diversity that excludes, selves that don't exist, and why holding contradictions might be the point.
The Same Bus
On the same bus, a child is laughing with her parents, a person is struggling to hold onto the outer door while crawling inward, and another person has a strong odor and pants not fully pulled up. All in a city where capital flows like water under a beautiful sunset.
This was San Francisco, riding back from Mission District. The bus was better than I expected.
A week later, I'd be standing outside an upscale Manhattan apartment, pizza in hand, being told where I couldn't sit. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Sixteen days. Three cities. A trip that refused to cohere. Maybe that was the point.
The Hollowed Center
San Francisco was supposed to be the tech capital. It felt like a movie set.
Our Lyft driver from the airport was a Canton immigrant. The BART was cleaner than I imagined. Powell Street smelled like nothing, which itself felt wrong. We roamed around downtown and something was missing. The buildings had no depth. The streets were empty in a way that suggested evacuation rather than quietude.
In-N-Out was beyond overrated. The fries were mushy in a way that made me question whether Californians had ever encountered a potato before.
Waymo, though. Waymo was insane. Thirty-five dollars for a fourteen-kilometer city tour where the driver was a ghost. The car knew things. It anticipated. I sat in the passenger seat of the future and wondered why the present felt so hollow.
We drove to Stanford. Beautiful, obviously. The kind of beautiful that makes you feel small in ways both inspiring and uncomfortable.
Google's visitor center was stale and unmemorable, but even a random parking lot attendant was friendlier than the staff inside. Apple was gorgeous. I bought a matte black Swell bottle even though I already had a brushed silver one my cousin gave me, worn in over two and a half years of use. The black would scratch. The silver wore its scratches as patina. I didn't think about this until later.
At Blue Bottle in Palo Alto, the kind of place where unassuming people could be founders of the next big thing or VCs managing billions. I was probably profiling and romanticizing at the same time.
My dad dropped family lore out of nowhere. We'd been talking about luggage. Then, without transition, my grandfather: what he lost young, what he built, what a crash took from him decades later. My dad told it plainly, the way you mention weather.
People contain multitudes and those that rarely reveal themselves. But when they do, it's surely interesting.
The Golden Gate Bridge was massive. The wind was brutal. The scale reminded me how grand this corner of the world is. But I took no memorable shots. The sky was cloudy. The city itself remained the impression: artificial, emptied, capital flowing through streets that felt like corridors rather than places.
The City That Hit Different
New York announced itself immediately.
The first night, we arrived at our apartment on the Upper West Side and went to Los Tacos. The line was almost unbearably chaotic, yet it moved fast. Finance bros and people who looked like they'd seen too much shared the same subway car. Within minutes of arriving, we got stopped by a boxer named Michael Dominguez. He welcomed us to the city, told us to search him up, mentioned his sister who's a famous singer, then warned us to be mindful. Welcome and warning, inseparable.
I love this place. That was my first thought. I love the diversity, the sounds, how overwhelming it is. Chaotic and quiet at the same time. The camera mostly stayed in my pocket. I couldn't get a single good shot. It didn't matter.
The first full day: 35,000 steps. A sudden peak cherry blossom bloom in Central Park, more impressive than my ten-year-old Tokyo memories, temporary against forecasted rain. Apollo Bagel kept me full until nine at night. We wandered Fifth Avenue, drank seven-dollar matchas, passed through Grand Central without stopping, found a vintage shop on the fourteenth floor of an unassuming building. The camera stayed mostly pocketed. The city moved too fast to frame.
MoMA Design Store was a threat to our wallet. I got dangerously close to buying an OP-1. The ice cream scoop was gorgeous even though I barely eat ice cream.
7th Burger. The staff messed around like friends and served like professionals. People who actually love their jobs. It shows.
We rushed the MET in three hours, which is criminal but unavoidable. Louder than the Vatican, bigger than the Uffizi, less organized than both. I loved "Dawn — Early Spring." I loved "Sunset on the Sea" from 1872, my favorite of the trip. I loved "Repast of the Lion." But the African section stole the show. Whimsical and goofy shapes. Endless creativity from similar textures. The Western canon expects you to be impressed by the Vermeers. I was impressed by the masks.
Then came Theodora, the highlight of the trip. Puffer fish ceviche. Bread with cream that walked a perfect line between sweet and savory. The waiter wore an Issey Miyake TO watch, minimal and metallic. Everything was exceptional. The afternoon tension, dad being grumpy, weather making the day difficult, resolved in the face of fusion between distinctively brilliant sauces and fresh ingredients. 250 for three before tax and tips. Worth it.
I wrote in my journal that night, shoes wet from Brooklyn rain, stomach full, feeling grateful and beyond privileged.
The Contradictions Emerge
The city started showing its other face.
The Highline after the Vessel: brutal, unrelenting wind that made four degrees feel like negative four. Breakfast at a supposedly good spot: fine, but not sixty-three dollars for three fine.
West Village and Pier 59: beautiful but uninspiring. "Creative shops" displaying things you see in premium mediocre Airbnb images. Pretty but personality-less.
The museum near the Highline had beautiful typography on its brochure. Some of the art inside I found questionable without context. The dilemma of art and its context that I'm still struggling with. If art needs explanation to matter, does it matter without one?
But I loved a piece called "Those Who Chant Do not die." A visual and audio piece on Palestinian emotions. You could almost guess its subject before reading the placard. The context confirmed rather than created the meaning.
Then came the pizza.
Go Back to New Jersey
We stopped at a pretty good pizza shop. Hot honey made it unforgettable. We were eating across the street, my sister and I sitting on tree fences, plates balanced on our legs. Quite a makeshift table. In front of a supposedly upscale apartment.
An elderly man with a dog walked down after the doorman opened his car. He walked straight to us and the people at the next tree.
"No, you can't sit here and eat pizza."
We, ignorant to local laws and afraid to get into trouble, simply went back to the store. But the crowd next to us didn't take the offense lightly. Young, maybe tourists judging from their Hermès shopping bags.
"It seems like you're ignoring the warning and I'm gonna call the police," the man said after some verbal fighting.
Then the line that would stay with me: "Go back to New Jersey."
He stormed back to the apartment.
I thought about that moment more than I would like to admit. Maybe out of regret that I should have stood my ground. Maybe out of realizing how excluding some people still are.
We walked to Katz's. Good, worth the twenty-minute wait. We dipped our toes into SoHo and Chinatown. But my mood remained low. The diversity I loved contained exclusions I couldn't ignore. The city that felt alive also felt predatory. Both things, simultaneously true, refusing to resolve.
The Afternoon Alone
Sister went to meet friends traveling through the city. I had the afternoon to myself.
No itinerary. After a carrot donut and a few shops, I walked at my own pace—fast, intense on the legs. Chinatown to Little Italy to Roosevelt Park, circling twice looking for a restroom I never found. Eventually I sat on a bench at Hunter's Point South Park under cherry blossoms, waiting for my dad to meet me later.
I finally took a few good images. Not the light-scattered Chinatown I'd been chasing. A slow shutter in Grand Central: a couple kissing for their wedding photos while commuters moved behind them, blurred into streaks. The best shot came from standing still after a day of hunting.
Even writing in my journal while waiting for laundry, I didn't feel particularly changed by the city. Not the way the Dolomites or the suburbs of Venice changed me months earlier. But I found myself more at home in the quiet parks, the empty tables, than the crowded streets. This place felt like home in a way I couldn't articulate then. I still can't.
Contradictions in Time
NYC grew on me in a more natural sense. Beautiful and inspiring. But I became mindful of its darker side.
Walking through SoHo. Riding the subway. Watching hot dog stands and stock exchanges coexist within five meters. I kept noticing how the same density that creates the vitality is the density that makes rent unaffordable. The same diversity that welcomes everyone is the diversity that lets someone scream "Go back to New Jersey" at strangers eating pizza. These aren't failures of the city. They're just the city, being itself.
Several friends had suggested I go abroad for undergrad. The general consensus: the US is the bigger stage. I thought about it more than I should have. The ifs multiplied. What if I'd aimed for abroad from the start? Could I have a slim shot at Berkeley, Stanford, somewhere around driven students, closer to startups, but farther from family growing older as I grew into whatever I'm becoming?
On the flight to Newark, I watched another passenger watch Past Lives. Celine Song's film about the selves we didn't become, the lives we didn't live. We'd visited Jane's Carousel in Brooklyn, where they shot one scene: two characters standing in a place that holds versions of themselves they'll never meet. The ifs and possibilities witnessed but never resolved.
I started thinking of it this way: contradictions are ifs in space. Ifs are contradictions in time. The city contains the finance bro and the homeless person simultaneously. They don't resolve into a single story about New York. I contain the self who stayed in Taiwan and the ghost who went abroad simultaneously. They don't resolve into a single story about me.
Maybe coherence is a story I tell about things that happened. Contradiction is what's actually happening.
The Bus That Held Everything
Writing on our overnight Greyhound to Boston. The type of liminal space that shows you glimpses of places you want to visit but can't.
What a way to say goodbye to this city. What a quick seven days.
Maybe this is what presence feels like. Knowing you're in the moment that will become memories. The head bumping to Born Sinner on the subway. The gaze out at the Hudson River as the bus drove across places I've never been to and perhaps never will, under a blue hour Friday sky on an almost empty bus.
White Ferrari came on—the demo version, with verses that cut deeper. Which part of the circle will you stand on?
It should not have been playing right now. But maybe it should have. The song about goodbyes, about dimensions where things went differently, playing as I left a city that showed me both what I loved and what I couldn't accept.
Places I've never been to and perhaps never will. The phrase kept circling. General, applicable to anywhere. Specific, because this was the moment I felt it.
The Exhale
Boston felt reserved.
The ceremony, the reason we came, was anticlimactic. Low ceiling. Terrible lighting. Wrinkled flags. Is this what they mean when they say traveling expands your horizons? Because my horizon was surely not expanding under the absurdly low ceiling for a lecture hall.
Don't even mention the pre-ceremony rush to CVS for black socks because I'd worn white with a dark grey suit. Or the speed run through the art museum thinking we were late for a grand ceremony that delayed anyway.
The morning before had been difficult. Late arrival, hunger, the small frustrations that accumulate when three people share too little space for too many days. I slept on the sofa. By the next morning, it dissipated the way these things do—not resolved, just set aside.
Then the highlight: 2nd Street thrift store.
Thirty minutes inside. 140 dollars total. A 20-dollar trench coat that looked like way more and fit too well. My sister's eye found it. A 99-dollar Naga Gen 2 LEAF hoodie, rare, in dad's favorite army green color that he'd never admit he likes. 20 dollars for a Polo jacket for my sister.
Dad spent forty on short pants but was definitely proud of our Asianness coming into play. If we had to choose between the ceremony and 2nd Street, the choice was obvious.
We walked through Harvard during golden and blue hour. I wore the new coat because it fit better with the suit underneath. We waited for Every Hour Oyster. The lobster roll was a gem.
The Loop That Almost Closed
Less than 48 hours before leaving. The coat fits. The flags were wrinkled. The city felt reserved.
I lost the black Swell bottle somewhere in the shuffle. Noticed it missing as soon as I arrived at the Airbnb. Cared less than I thought I would. Maybe because I realized the scratches came too easily on black. The silver version wears its damage as patina. The black just looks worn.
Maybe loss is sometimes clarifying.
Boston has actual texture. Not touristy the way Manhattan performs it. People here seem to live rather than perform living. I noticed how the city is dominated by Patagonia while New York drowns in Arc'teryx. Small observation. Means nothing. Means something about aspiration and identity I can't quite articulate.
On our last afternoon, we walked along the Charles River as the sun dropped behind distant buildings. I sat on a bench. Fred Again in my earphones. I didn't take a photo, or I forgot to. I'm not sure which. I just heard it: leaves washing to shore, people laughing as they ran across the bridge toward a sky tinted the lightest green, the palette of aurora. A tram gliding somewhere behind me. The moment didn't need documenting. Or maybe it did, and I failed it. I went back early, said I wanted to use the restroom. I did. But I also wanted to write it down before I lost it.
The trip didn't cohere. It wasn't supposed to. San Francisco was hollowed out by capital. New York was diverse yet excluding. Boston was old yet home to new talents. Contradictions everywhere, refusing to flatten into conclusions.
I'm still thinking about the pizza incident. Still thinking about the man with the dog, the crowd with the Hermès bags, my own silence. I complied. They didn't. Neither choice was wrong. Both choices had costs.
Somewhere, the ghost self who went abroad is living a life I'll never know. The city that screamed "Go back to New Jersey" is still welcoming someone else with the same breath.
Somewhere, the bottle I bought in Cupertino is riding a bus I'll never take. Scratches on matte paint, wearing damage without wearing it well.
The last morning. I put White Ferrari on by choice instead of waiting for the algorithm to find it. Birds outside. Light casting in. Weather that didn't know it was our last day. An ordinary morning for everyone else. I closed the suitcase shut with the weight of my body, finished half a bag of lox we'd bought too late and enjoyed anyway. The loop doesn't close. I stopped asking it to.
Acknowledgments
- Title image: The Third-Class Carriage by Honoré Daumier, Public Domain, Link. A nursing mother, an old woman, a sleeping boy, and a carriage full of strangers who will never resolve into a community. Some cities work the same way.
- To my sister, who carried the itinerary as usual and found every restaurant worth remembering
- To my dad, for the family lore at Blue Bottle
- To Michael Dominguez, wherever you are, for the welcome and the warning