DC: Chinatown and NMAI

This is from my trip to DC  on the weekend of December 4/5... it's raw, but I guess that's okay.

Searching for Chinatown
I walked about 6 miles this weekend, in highly uncomfortable shoes, but it was interesting nonetheless. In my work, I'm always interested in seeing where communities are and where they live. In urban centers, that generally means, for Asian communities, at least, that I should look for Chinatown. Though it's not the only Asian American neighborhood, it's often the most defined, and gives you a sense of where the community is at in relation to the City. NYC is unparalleled in the US on this regard - its main Chinatown (there are 5) is the largest settlement of Chinese outside of China. But most cities have a Chinatown - and I thought, I wanted to start there in my exploration of DC. So I walked (quite a distance from where we were staying). I walked, referred to my map, and kept walking. When I got to the general area where Chinatown was supposed to be, I saw nothing but tall buildings, and both an old and a new Washington Convention Center. I walked around for nearly 1/2 hour and couldn't even FIND Chinatown - for me, that was a real wake-up call. I have had times when I felt like I couldn't get OUT of manhattan Chinatown, it's so large. So... that was a little sad. Because I felt like Washington's Asian American communities, at least, would be a big adjustment for me - because they are quite small compared to NYC, and that's my base.


NMAI
I’m sitting in the National Museum of the American Indian, having walked here from Dupont Circle on a bit of a pilgrimage, the hunger of which I had to satiate quickly in the Mitsitam Cafe at the ground floor of the museum before seeing anything else here. The Potomac Room is really quite breathtaking – it is an enormous round open space – 120 feel tall, and 120 feet across – that extends higher than the 4 floors of the building, opening up in a small round sunlight that makes you feel like you’re in an open space, in the outdoors. It feels more grand than a room, and remains transformed by the light of the sun, both through clear glass, and well-placed prisms that splash small, poignant rainbows on the opposing wall. This main room, unencumbered by tall exhibits in its center, draws immediate reference to the main hall of the Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue. But this room feels far more grand and more intimate at the same time.

I’ve overheard mumblings of “waste of space,” and in the most linear conception of what a place should be, that may be true. But it’s remarkable, and awe-inspiring, and a room that you’re likely not to forget. Kids seem absolutely delighted at the opportunity to break free of linear 10 – 12 foot ceilings, and you feel a release from whatever heaviness or thinking that you may be feeling from the exhibits inside. This space may be less a waste than what you may see in other more “traditional” museums like the Met and the American Museum of Natural History, the multiple exceptionally tall and grand halls clearly not being utilized for anything more than providing a secular cathedral in which visitors seeking sanctuary can lose themselves in their own relative insignificance in the universe.

Next stop: Mitsitam Cafe
I think it was a good decision to make the cafe of this brand new museum reflect the peoples and cultures to whom the exhibits were giving voice. I was anxious to have a piece of frybread, the last that I’d had years ago in a previous trip to the Southwest. But I wasn’t expecting the myriad choices and strangely nouveau cuisine dreamed up by the chef in charge.

I sat alone with my frybread taco (next time, I just get frybread and a plate of veggie beans or something, and eat it the way that it’s meant to be eaten – torn apart with two hands and unencumbered by too much pomp and circumstance) and chili fries, the total of which, with my requisite root beer, put me back a hamilton and a lincoln. That’s a lot of dough for lunch, but I guess it’s still less than I’d spend just to get into the stupid MOMA, and I’ve already been in one other museum to boot (and the Air and Space Museum next door was really looking tempting).

While eating, in such close quarters, you inevitably hear the conversations around you. On one side, a woman and her husband, her mother and her grandmother. From her it seemed like they were in their forties, but looking at him, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were just a few years older than me – it’s amazing how old some people seem when they choose specific lifestyles. Though living in cities makes us tired, it keeps us young – the pulse of the city invigorating our own bloodstreams and making certain that we don’t forget what it means to be open to new possibilities. It seemed like they were from somewhere in the Midwest that isn’t cosmopolitan or progressive – could be Ohio, western PA, even Delaware – somewhere without a strong and defining accent like Georgia, MA, or even MN.

Their conversation seemed innocuous – droll, and innocuous, mind you – and then I found out that at some point, the mother was talking about something, and 50 Cent came up. The younger woman looked blankly and said “what’s that?” And the mother either said that it was “recording guy” or a “rapper guy”, but the woman had never even heard of him. Not even a clue – and she asked her husband, and he didn’t know either. It was a funny thing, actually, though I guess not at all uncommon – I was just taken, because they didn’t seem that old, and for God’s sake, your mother knows about him. It was just odd.

On my other side, there was an older couple, the man sounding off about the museum as a whole, and not really leaving any space for his wife to say much. He spoke about how he was surprised and disappointed that there was such a strong focus on contemporary communities than the anthropological side of things. He said that he was sure that there was tremendous pressure from the native communities to make sure that it represented them (which is true, and regurgitated from the many reviews about the place). But it was generally a dismissal of the importance of this place as a living museum, and maybe he went over those facts too quickly, but I’m looking forward to actually seeing a reflection of the communities now – that’s really my interest, far more than what were they then. And his wife’s contribution was a reaction to his “we’re talking about a lot of money for this place” in which she said “who’s paying for it? I’m afraid to ask”. I bit my tongue to stop from saying “who is paying for the bombs and machines we’re using to kill innocent people around the world every day?” Who’s paying for your impending social security checks? Who’s paid for your kind’s genocidal tendencies that wiped out cultures and peoples for hundreds of years? And your white guilt holds you from being able to deal with the fact that this is a testament to peoples who have fought just to maintain, just to survive, and that they, too, are America.