At the opening of the exhibition, I met 8 old friends.It was the end of the year, and it felt sad to say goodbye so soon. Everyone stood there, just looking at each other, not ready to leave. So we moved to another place to keep talking.
Six of the eight friends had graduated from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Another friend and I had visited Pratt, but we chose different schools because the neighborhood felt too dangerous back then. We thought, “Forget school—let’s just survive first.”
Our stories went back to the late 1970s and early 1980s. We started talking about getting mugged near Myrtle and Willoughby Avenues, close to Pratt. Now the area is full of beautiful old brownstone houses and feels safe, but back then, even taxi drivers didn’t want to go there.
People got robbed—even in the middle of the day.
One friend said she watched a horror movie called The Twilight Zone: A Stop at Willoughby. After that, she was so scared of Willoughby Avenue that she rushed to get married—she felt like she needed a man to protect her. Another friend was robbed in broad daylight. She was so shocked that she flew to Seoul for vacation and said she never wanted to come back to New York.
Since I didn’t go to Pratt, I didn’t have much to say, so I stayed quiet.
But then I joked,
“Okay, fine, there are no more robbers… but where did all the rats and cockroaches go?”
“They’re still around! I saw a rat the size of a human arm in Manhattan the other day.”
“It's just that now, we’re all living in better places than before.”
Back then, if I turned on the lights in my studio, cockroaches would run and hide everywhere. One friend said she had to keep all her dishes in ziplock bags. I said I would scream and jump on a chair whenever a mouse came out, especially if I was cooking fish. I hated mice as much as I hated robbers. So I thought, “I need a man who can catch mice.”
And I married someone who could.
My husband is really good at catching mice. He puts a small piece of yellow cheese on a trap, adds one drop of sesame oil, and soon we catch mouse after mouse. If a mouse is still moving, he buries it in the backyard, along with small dead birds that fall between the wall and our neighbor’s house. The soil back there is now very rich and healthy.
We didn’t marry him for love or looks—but because men could fight off rats and street criminals. Now, life is good. There are no more rats, and we don’t see many shady people anymore. We all live well now.
Even though we laughed a lot, I could feel those hard memories rising deep from our hearts. We had been through a lot. We talked and talked, and it felt like the stories would never end.
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