I Heart NY - Part 2

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I Heart NY - Part 1

The regional jet made a hairpin turn over Manhattan before touching down at La Guardia. It was a treat to end an otherwise uninteresting flight from Toronto to New York. At 5,000 feet, office towers in every shape looked like young sprouts shooting from the ground, competing for light. The silver spire of the iconic Chrysler Building shimmered gloriously, its beauty matched only by the mélange of red, orange and yellow that was the changing foliage in Central Park. My heart felt an immediate magnetic pull – I was home.

I left New York four years ago to take up a job in Hong Kong, ending my half-decade stint in a city that has held the title as Capital of the World comfortably for nearly a century. To defend my own title as a “Noo-Yawker,” I make every effort to visit at least once a year, invariably around Thanksgiving or Christmas when the city is most irresistible. The Big Apple holds a special place in my heart: it was there I began my career as a corporate lawyer and spent many a sleepless night on deals that wound up on page 3 of the Financial Times. Surviving New York was as much a personal ambition as it was a necessity, and in the process I came to understand what it was like to fall in love with a city. It had me at wassup.

Manhattan is the crown jewel among the five boroughs that make up the City of New York. The Brooklyn peninsula, like Kowloon, plays second fiddle to its island sister superior in every way. The Manhattan-Hong Kong analogy is complete once you consider how Manhattanites can go through life without ever crossing the East River to the “dark side” but the reverse can never be said about their counterparts in Brooklyn. Manhattan’s topography is elegant in its simplicity. The phallic island is made up of twelve avenues slicing through its length from north to south, while 130-some “cross-town” streets connect the west end to the east. The most prominent exception to this perfect grid plan is Broadway, a thoroughfare that runs diagonally through the entire island, creating interesting six-way intersections that became such landmarks as Columbus Circle, Times Square and the Flatiron District.

After dropping off my luggage at the hotel, I hopped onto the “V” train to visit my brother in Chelsea. Many big metropolises are defined by their public transport and New York is no exception. The 105-year-old subway system, the largest in the world, is every bit as idiosyncratic as the riders who love it and loathe it with equal intensity. With 26 crisscrossing train lines (there were only three in Hong Kong until recently), the NYC subway system is a Gordian Knot for out-of-towners but fodder for lively debate among New Yorkers. If ever one person is asked to give directions, everybody will jump into the fray and offer a different permutation of connecting trains. Back in my commuting years, I braved the elements waiting on the air-conditionless platform, watched rats as big as household cats scamper off with their finds and had my ears split every time those old clunkers rumbled violently down the tracks. But as the quirky New York Times columnist Alice Rawthorn aptly pointed out, the familiar subway signage printed in clean, crisp Helvetica typeface is a comforting sight that makes up for all that dirt, noise, smells and delays.

Shopping is a national pastime in New York. The city remains the last bastion of the department store culture despite the onslaught of specialty stores that have forever changed the country’s shopping habits. From the venerable Bergdorf Goodman, Barneys and Saks Fifth Avenue, to the more mass-market Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s that occupy entire avenue blocks, these New York institutions are at once sanctuaries and Venus flytraps for the Carrie Bradshaws among the citizens. In a city of shopaholics, even grocery shopping has been elevated from a household chore to an art form. The mere act of picking through beautifully arranged organic vegetables is therapeutic in its own right, while actually cooking the ingredients is, for the most part, optional. Gourmet supermarkets like Dean & Deluca, Whole Foods and Citarella pop up on every street corner, any of which would make our own City Super or Three-Sixty look jejune. My favorite kind of shopping, however, is far less glamorous: buying used books. On any given weekend, I could spend an entire afternoon climbing up and down those Jacob’s ladders to literary heaven at Strand’s, a megastore that boasts 18 miles of books. Or I would walk into the dreamy, otherworldly Argosy Bookstore on 59th and Lexington and walk out with an out-of-print title or a vintage map fell out of a half-century-old atlas. Moments like that made happiness seem just a little more within reach.

But no account of Gotham is complete without mentioning its hyperactive restaurant scene. I pride myself as the walking Zagat’s (a survey of over 3,000 restaurants published annually under its signature burgundy-colored cover). At the top of my list is Bouley in the swanky TriBeCa area. Fitted with vaulted ceilings and a foyer full of fresh MacIntosh apples, the restaurant is a playroom for celebrity chef David Bouley to experiment with nuanced, thoughtful culinary concoctions. Prix-fixe dinner for two at these “all-caps” restaurants -- so called because their names appear in all capital letters in the Zagat’s for their popularity -- would set you back around US$300, a steep price by any standard but is still far better value than most hyped-up hotel restaurants in Hong Kong.

The following morning on my way to a business meeting in Midtown, I passed by Rockefeller Center where workers were busy putting up a gorgeous 80-foot Christmas spruce. Distracted by the wholesomeness of it all, I inadvertently stepped on something mushy on the sidewalk. I looked down and there it was, a giant dead rat lying prostrate between my dress shoe and the cold asphalt. Passersby looked but did not slow down, neither a wince nor a gasp. I lifted my foot off the roadkill and continued my walk down 51st Street. It was a classic New York moment. In the City that Never Sleeps, everyone has places to go and people to see. The good, the bad and the ugly – New Yorkers have seen it all. That is why we love New York.

A Climate of Coercion

Imagine there has been a spate of thefts in your office. Every day, news of stolen wallets, cell phones and other valuables terrifies the staff and dominates water-cooler conversations. Scrambling to come up with a solution, management decides to ask each employee to volunteer to have their bags searched by building security every time they leave the office. This “Turn-Yourself-In” program, so called because of its voluntary nature, has left people scratching their heads: who, you wonder, would choose to have a stranger look through their belongings when they can simply walk straight through the door?

Absurd as that may seem, it is exactly what our government is doing to tackle the growing drug problem among our teens. After a brief period of public consultation, Education Secretary Michael Suen (孫明揚) unveiled a city-wide school-based drug test program (校本驗毒計劃) in which students are encouraged, though not required, to participate. Trials are set to begin in Tai Po (大埔) district beginning December this year. So far the scheme has received widespread support from school principals in the district amidst mild muttering from critics over the potential adverse effect on teacher-student relationships.

At first glance, the school-based program appears expedient, even clever. The scheme's voluntary nature allows the government to not only sidestep a lengthy legislative process – mandatory drug tests, the kind that has been implemented at a number of international schools in the city, require new legislation to be drafted, argued and passed – but also avoid unwanted public debate over privacy rights that could plunge the administration into another political crisis. That explains why the Education Secretary and Sally Wong Pik-yee (黃碧兒), Commissioner for Narcotics, have gone to great lengths to stress the voluntariness of the program, reassuring students that refusal to take part in the scheme will in no way be construed as an admission of guilt. At a press conference in August, a straight-faced Suen promised, “we hope the scheme will be effective by the fact that it is completely voluntary and we will keep the data confidential.”

But therein lies the fundamental (and fatal) problem of the school-based program. If the program is truly voluntary, as authorities have claimed, then it is destined to fail because students simply can't be bothered with the silliness. After all, being called out of class in the middle of the day to urinate into a plastic cup isn’t exactly what teenagers consider fun these days. Those who use drugs – the very target of the program – will most certainly snub it unless they want to turn themselves in and risk being expelled or locked up. So is the big hoopla just another publicity stunt certain to fall flat on its face?

Perhaps not. What the government doesn’t say much about, or at least hopes that no one would pay much attention to, is all the harassment that comes with not taking part in a scheme that is “voluntary” only on paper. In practice, if a student strays from the fold and checks the “no” box on the school form, then parents, social workers and school officials will descend on him like angry villagers carrying torches and pitchforks, waving banners that say “denial is proof!” To sugarcoat these dire consequences, however, Suen offered non-participating students this gentle warning: "social workers will try to find out the reason for the refusal [to take part in the program] and inform the principal who will then decide whether there is a need to arrange counseling for the student." And so if it all works according to plan, every student will be scared into checking the “yes” box and the program will achieve its stated goals to deter and detect. Bureaucrats score major political points for a job well done and parents sleep better at night. Order is restored and everybody wins.

Well, everybody except for the students. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the entire success of a voluntary scheme hangs on a single assumption: that teenagers are too ignorant to realize that they can, and probably should, say "no." There are about two dozen reasons why a person would refuse to take a drug test other than having something to hide. Privacy is one, confidentiality is another. My personal favorite, “I just don’t feel like it,” should be the default answer to anyone asking for an explanation. In the office theft analogy, if ever building security dare even raise an eyebrow over your refusal to have your bag searched, you would bark right back at him with a reminder that the program is supposed to be voluntary. But we are not to expect the same civic awareness from our students, are we? That’s why we end up with a scheme whose very creation is based on the intimidation and disempowerment of our youths. Such is the state of our society.

But that is not all. The same way students are pressured to take the drug tests, school officials are coerced to cast their "yes" vote to the scheme before they have time to figure out whether it actually makes any sense. Fearful of appearing soft on drugs or worse, trying to conceal drug problems in the schools they run, principals have uniformly embraced the government's proposal and in doing so proven themselves to be just as malleable as teenagers. Cloaked with truisms like “inaction is fatal,” “save our children” and “no time to lose,” the force of coercion sweeps through classrooms and principals’ offices alike, flattening anything that stands in its way. Angry villagers, it seems, are everywhere these days.

Six months after its trial in Tai Po, the school-based program will be reviewed for its effectiveness. The scheme may well turn out to be a smashing success, but it still will not cure the logical fallacy inherent in a “Turn-Yourself-In” program. To confront our teenage drug problem, mandatory testing seems inevitable and the legislative pill, hard as it is, has to be swallowed. Our government is doing the city enormous disservice by shying away from the legislative process, a process designed precisely to deal with situations where competing societal interests are at play. That is, after all, what we pay them to do.