Art in Bloom

Macy's

I had a much needed, quiet weekend, with dim sum on Saturday and the Macy's Flower Show on Sunday. Dim sum, as usual, never disappoints. Most of the really good places are ones where there are only large tables, so you have to share with a bunch of strangers. I wonder if they have a system for grouping. I went with. A Chinese American friend, and we bypassed the white people table, and a Chinese from China table, to be seated at a table with a bunch of other ABCs (American Born Chinese). This place is called Oriental Garden, and what I liked was that the food, especially the shumai, was really good, and there was no wait, which is rare for a dim sum place on the weekends.

I always forget how foreign a lot of Chinese food, especially fruit, are to some people. The Manhattan Chinatown is a tourist destination, and during the weekends a lot of visitors come to take pictures and gawk at our weird food. It can be stressful, because when I go to Chinatown I just want to buy groceries and eat (a lot), so threading my way through the crowd of people taking a photo of a perfectly normal dragon fruit can be exhausting. But still worth it.

Once I receive a strange request from a young girl around my age. She said, "my boyfriend is Australian, and he loves Asian women, and I'm always insecure because I'm not Asian." 

I said, "well if he's with you, he obviously likes you." Who knows what strange motives people have though.

She shrugged, and then asked me if we could take a photo together so she could send it to him so he could look at me. It felt a bit weird, so I said no. On a related note, I think a lot of minority women in the U.S. grow up where the standard of beauty is overwhelmingly white, and it can be hard to navigate trends when very few, if any, examples of beauty in the media resemble you. I think that's changing a lot today though, and it's become more common to see Asian models in advertisements. I do hope in the future that women (and men) stop holding themselves so rigidly to those standards, whether it's a billboard, or a significant other who apparently has a very specific preference. 

Display of desert plants

A Chinese artist painting at Macy's

The flower show was underwhelming. I guess I expected more grandeur, like Macy's parades. It was pretty though, and I probably would have liked it more if I hadn't gone in with such high expectations.

Flowers

Not part of the show, but I always liked these mixers; I've had the standard
white since I was 11, and it has held up really well!