The New Paper Column: Map

When I first arrived in New York, a full week before move-in day at my dorm, my friend and I rented a cheap room in a hostel called The American Dream.

The room’s window faced a finger-distance solid wall, the public toilet was a hole in the wall with a hole in the floor, and walking down the stairs you had to be careful not to trip over any of the 9000 cats beloved (and individually named) by the hostel owner, but god help us if we weren’t the happiest people alive.

Blackened roadside bagels were authentic, hobos were refreshingly outspoken, and, best of all, the road system made sense.

Here, we thought, is a place that recognizes the reason for which numbers and the alphabet were created. Streets run numerically from 1st Street to 127th Street, and Avenues likewise from Avenue D to Avenue A, and then 1st Avenue to 12th.

Easy, we thought. And so we chucked our maps, determined not to be one of those tourists standing on road corners with maps flapping into their faces.

Of course, we proceeded to get thoroughly lost, and then even more lost, and then Jack Nicholson on Oscar night-lost, until finally, standing somewhere between Elridge and Hester (or, as we called them, Wherever and Whatever), we gave up and hailed a cab.

Since then, I have gotten lost a lot more times. Once, I set out at five in the afternoon for a five-thirty dinner party in Little Italy, and arrived at eight, smelling of roast-duck and chicken-rice from my three-year vacation in Chinatown.

You see, the thing about the Manhattan road system is that when you think you’ve got it all figured out, it sucker-punches you when you least expect it.

Roads that are supposed to be straight veer off at weird 32.5-degree angles and change their names. Orderly blocks are intersected in odd places by criss-crossing alleyways called Vandam and Gansevoort.

One moment you’re safely walking along 3rd and 5th, right on time, and the next you’re wondering why Mr. Bayard-Pell and Mr. Wooster are messing up your schedule.

It is, of course, in Chinatown that all hell breaks loose. My teacher once lived in Chinatown, and I wondered how he survived the move from Manhattanville to Salvador Dali-town. There are no cross-roads in Chinatown. There are only octagonal-roads and swirling intersections, where Henry, Madison, Monroe, Mott, Oliver, James, Chatham and Mosco meet, dance, and have tea-parties at poor unsuspecting people’s expenses. I wondered how my teacher managed to make it out of Chinatown before 2030.

But then I remembered that my teacher was already a voting Singaporean long before he moved to New York, much less Chinatown. And if a person can go to sleep as a East Coast-er, and wake up as a Marine Parade-r, when the actual Marine Parade is a 40-minute bus ride away, you’ve got to figure that that person is well equipped for the bizarre ways Manhattan carves itself up while being seemingly well-ordered.

So here’s to Singapore, from New York, and excuse me while I go buy myself a map.