When the cold wind blows, my mind naturally wanders back to those days and that place. A very long time ago, I lived on the second floor of a seven-story building on Grand Street, near Manhattan's Chinatown.
Every morning, I was woken up by the loud chattering of Chinese women riding the old, cramped elevator up to the garment factory on the seventh floor. The noise was loudest as it passed our second-floor home, but it would softly fade away as the elevator moved higher, like sinking into water. Then, I would drift back to sleep. In the evening, the chatter of the women heading home would come down from above. As they passed our floor, the noise was so loud it felt like a storm passing by. Around that time, I would stop whatever I was doing and head out to Chinatown to buy ingredients for dinner, as if joining in on their lively energy.
Before moving into this old building, my husband and I lived apart, even after making our marriage vows at City Hall. He lived in Queens with his roommate, and I lived in Queens with mine. Long before SoHo became the trendy neighborhood it is today, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs issued "Artist Certifications." This allowed artists to live and work in the empty warehouses of the SoHo and NoHo areas (known as Joint Live-Work Quarters for Artists). My husband had received this certification in 1982 and was living and working with his roommate inside a giant warehouse building. However, as a poor artist couple without steady jobs, we couldn't afford a place to live together. So, we had no choice but to keep living separately, just as we did before marriage.
After about six months, my husband's roommate suggested that the three of us live together on Grand Street. It was a huge studio with a high ceiling; the roommate took one side, and we took the other. From our respective spaces, wooden stairs led up to cozy loft bedrooms. In the corner of our bedroom, there was a pile of percussion instruments—like drums and tambourines—left behind by the previous tenant. Lying down next to that pile of instruments every night, I felt like a weary member of a traveling circus, resting in the corner of a tent after a long tour. “When will this wandering life ever end? If it never ends, what will become of my life?” On those nights, I sometimes found myself regretting marrying an artist.
Out of the $1,000 monthly rent, my husband and I paid $600, and the roommate paid $400. Our kitchen was located right below our bedroom. We hung a calendar on the corner wall, and every time we went grocery shopping, we wrote down the amount spent. At the end of the month, we split the total exactly three ways. Every time we calculated the rent and groceries, the three of us would exchange bittersweet smiles, wondering, “How much longer can we survive like this?” The winters were brutal in that vast space with absolutely no heating. When the freezing cold hit, I often thought of Doctor Zhivago wandering through the Siberian wilderness. “If I were as beautiful as Lara, the main character, where would I be right now?” I shivered in the cold while getting lost in such silly daydreams. To make matters worse, the building was so old that it crawled with mice and bugs. Every night, I would scratch myself all over until I fell asleep from exhaustion. Seeing how miserable I was, my husband would place white paper on the bed and gently tap the ceiling to catch the bugs as they fell.
Even though we could barely feed ourselves, I don't know why so many friends kept dropping by. They would take turns sleeping and hanging out on the large, stained gray sofa in the middle of the studio. Some acquaintances from Seoul even stayed with us for months until they found a place to live. People started calling our studio the "Square Church" because it was located on Grand Street. They nicknamed my husband "Pastor Lee" and our roommate "Elder Hwang." Around the holidays, our friends would practically move in, coming straight to our studio after work and leaving from there the next morning. Unlike my husband and me, who felt a bit discouraged because we graduated from second-tier universities, Elder Hwang had graduated from the prestigious Seoul National University. One night, he came back from his alumni year-end party carrying a large plastic bucket filled with leftover marinated bulgogi. With just that beef and a jar of kimchi on the table, we were the happiest people in the world. The dirtiness and the noise didn't matter at all. Why didn't it feel hard back then, with friends constantly coming and going? Looking back now, it feels as though I was living someone else's life during those days.
The building landlord was an old man who grew and sold bean sprouts in the dark basement. Once a month, when I went down to the basement to pay the rent, it was so dark that I had to call out for him at the top of my lungs. Then, from the darkness, I would hear the heavy thud-thud of his rubber boots, and the old man would appear. When I asked, "Sir, isn't it too dark down here?" he would bluntly reply, "If it's bright, the bean sprouts grow too fast, and that’s no good." After taking the rent money, he would generously wrap up three or four large handfuls of bean sprouts for me. After paying rent, we didn't have a single penny left in our pockets, so we lived on those bean sprouts—making bean sprout soup, bean sprout side dishes, and bean sprout rice. Even while buried in bean sprouts, we stubbornly held onto our brushes and kept painting.
Now that the cold wind is blowing again, I deeply miss those friends who used to lean against that old sofa and laugh together.
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