of diversity, disconnect & disappointing desserts

I had a surreal experience with multiculturalism last night.

I should first note that if you're in Chicago and you really want to see different cultures, you should go to Devon Street. Not the South Side. Not downtown. All of Chicago, of course, is a land of different ethnicity, but one place to really get that sensation of immigration (that just popped out.. I should write brochures) is in the far North and West, neighborhoods that typically get less travel but are extraordinarily interesting. Far more interesting, in my opinion, than the Jamba Juice on the first floor of the John Hancock.

We (T., A., and I) took the Red Line out to Morse, the third to last stop on the North Side. Almost nothing was there (note: if you're going to Devon, get off at Loyola, not Morse) so we got on a bus. A bus with some strangely loud Latinos and lots of brown people in bright colors.

Devon (if you're reading this and not from Chicago) is an Indo-Pak neighborhood (more precisely street) that caters heavily to its community. It's covered in Indian and Pakistani restaurants, grocery stores (and delis, and bakeries..), clothing shops (mostly full of rainbowy-colored and sequined and silky-looking clothing), and on, and on. Compared to other neighborhoods in Chicago, Devon feels very alive. It seemed like everyone was outside, walking around, or else huddled in groups, sitting on benches and crates, shopping bags in hand, talking. Seeing it made me feel something almost akin to nostalgia.. like that's what cities were like before the internet happened.

We ate in a restaurant that was comparatively less formal than the rest (no white tablecloths & dim lighting) but still very clean and obviously modern (it had distracting and entrancing flat screen televisions in each wall playing over and over the same Bollywood music videos and movie trailers and commercials). A. and I ordered sweet lime sodas. We had no idea what anything on the menu was, so we just ordered three random meals and a side of samosas. I ended up with a very homey lentil dish, A. got something spinachy and sweet, and T. got a sort of spicy okra thing.

Afterward, we went to a very popular-looking fast-food-but-still-classy kind of place for dessert. As with the dinner, we didn't recognize anything, so we stared through the glass and decided based on names and colors ("What do you think that green stuff is? Pistachio?"; "I don't know, but I really want one of those pink things") -- in the end we had an assortment in a darling little box and went out to a bench to try them. We were all pretty amused by the "chum-chums", so we opted for 3 pink and 3 "sandwich" chum-chums. Afterward, we found it didn't really matter, as all of it, according to our palattes, was sort of flavorless and unsweet and wet. One thing tasted a little to me like old cheese. The brown thing tasted strongly and a little revoltingly like ginger. There was an orange thing, but no one could figure out the flavor.

We took the bus back to the Loyola stop, and waited for a train. Standing around at the stop, I noticed suddenly that the same guy on our bus was waiting for the same train. An Indian guy. In lightly-colored jeans and white shoes. Carrying a baggy. T. and A. and I discussed our chum-chums and the guy kept looking, and I kept looking back. When the train came, we got in the same car. By this time everything felt a little hilarious and I was feeling kind of inexplicably manic.

Lots of distinct-looking people got on and off the train. The guy crossed his legs at the feet and leaned his head sleepily against the plexiglass pane. I glanced, looked away, glanced back. Occasionally he'd glance back, and in my head it felt like the shared glance seemed to ask the same thing: "Are we going to the same place?"

I looked at the people around me, felt strange, looked harder. Then I realized: nobody around me was sticking to their cultural stereotypes. I sat across from an African-American guy with a fedora-like hat, black leather shoes that were almost feminine, and he had his hands politely folded in his lap. A young East Asian couple got on the train looking... stereotypically black. The guy wore big, puffy, colorful shoes and baggy pants and an oversized shirt and a loud, shiny belt buckle and a big, multicolored, backwards Sox cap. The girl had neon yellow & orange Nikes and big sunglasses. They were really, really loud. The fedora guy got off the train and was replaced by another black guy, this one wearing an almost dainty white knit cap. He looked peaceful, Buddha-like.

I glanced at the Indian guy, turned to T. "Hey," I whispered, "Let's bet which stop the guy is getting off." T. was quiet for a second. "Belmont," he said. "Or else Fullerton." I watched everyone in the train, read the ads, glanced. I started to think maybe he'd fallen asleep, but then I'd see him adjust his feet, sit up just slightly. We passed Belmont & Fullerton, and T. reguessed. "Clark."

"Lake," I said.

And so it went all through the nine or so downtown stops, until it became clear he was headed for the South Side. I felt a little excited, and started laughing. "He's totally getting off at Garfield," T. said, poking me. I couldn't stop laughing. "You like him," he added suddenly. "He's like 35," I pointed out. "So what? You're thinking about jumping him, aren't you?"

Sadly, the guy got off the train at 47th, one stop short of Garfield. When we got off at Garfield, I was smiling uncontrollably, like I'd just fallen in love or something... which is what T. kept accusing me of. But that wasn't it.

I think it was a city-loneliness syndrome. We went from the same bus to the same car on the same train, and I hoped the pattern would continue, that he'd be going back to Hyde Park too, that we'd start a conversation, go get coffee somewhere and talk about interesting things. I wanted a connection amongst all the disconnect in the city.

Today I ate lunch in Ex-Libris and after I momentarily left my table with my newspaper, a table with something like 6 other chairs, someone else sat down at the opposite end, thinking it was empty. I came back and he apologized in a quick, jerked, rabbity kind of way and started frantically gathering his things. "It's OK," I said and laughed slightly, "You can stay." I don't think either of us were really starved for privacy, but in the city, public-privacy is everything.

Last night I wanted a sudden lack of privacy. But it was okay. It was somehow exhilarating enough that me & the guy shared a bus followed by a train, that our destinations were separated by one stop. (And yet I wonder: Whither goest thou, Indian guy, with thy little baggy into the night?)

T., A. and I took the bus back to our apartment and stood outside H.'s window, doing a briefly choreographed song-and-dance routine about chum-chums. After he let us in, A. one-by-one fed him about 5 or 6 sweets. "Mm," he said of the chum-chums. "It's beautiful."