Ethrane

    Some of my first years were spent in Brooklyn, NY on Avenue U above a little Chinese grocery shop. They were all Chinese shops on Avenue U, in fact, but I never learned how to speak Chinese, save for “bi zui” - shut up, and worse things that my sister whispered to me. I loved the city as a child born there would, with the bustling streets, tall grey buildings, and the old Chinese ladies handing me little packs of Haw Flakes, a Chinese sweet that I could never get enough of. For that matter, my sister couldn’t either, and we had many a squabble over those round red discs, slightly sour and exquisitely sweet.
    But despite the sweets, my sister, three years older than me and bred on the Eastern shore of Maryland never adjusted to the city in the three years we were there.
    “You can’t see far away!” she always said. “And it smells just awful,” she complained petulantly.
    She made a big deal about the faint sea breeze, and stopping to catch a whiff of it to carry the horrid exhaust fumes away. But none of that mattered after the winter I turned nine, because we left for the shores of New Jersey.