May 2026
My mother used to walk me up to Sunset Park on summer evenings, when the laundry closed early and the air in our apartment had gotten too thick to breathe. I waved at the old Chinese man who would sell lychees out of a cardboard box in a small grey cart; the yellow bodega where people bought their lottery tickets every Friday; the dog tied to the same pole outside the laundromat who would not stop barking; the boy who carried the newspaper on a broken bicycle; and the patch of sidewalk filled with lemonade stands on 58th where the concrete had cracked in the shape of a country I could not recognize.
Somewhere a few blocks away, at the same hour, a Sparrow had just come out of her egg with pieces of shell around her. Her eyes had just opened, seeing the sun for the first time. She did not understand that her nest was sitting on something called a fire escape, or that it belonged to a building, or that the building was in Brooklyn, or that Brooklyn was a place.
She only understood that she had been given a body, and that body was wet, and that something enormous and warm was shining on her, and that her mother was nearby, and that the whole world was waiting to meet her.
The sidewalks were hot as I could feel it through the soles of my black Nike sneakers I borrowed from my sister. My shirt would stick to my back by the time we reached a steep part of the hill (I really wanted cookies and cream ice scoops being sold on the side). And, I wore a Spider-Man t-shirt, the red and blue with the black web pattern across the front, a little faded at the shoulders from being washed too many times. I would not let my mother retire it. On Sundays, when she could, she would wash it by hand at the kitchen sink and dry it on hangers hung outside the window with chipped frames. It was bought from one of those rattled down convenient stores that I cannot remember the name of and bought because of my nagging that I wanted to be like Spider-Man.
The air smelled like Brooklyn in July, which is to say it smelled like a mixture of many things at once. Garbage in black bags cooking in the sun; pork buns and sesame oil from the bakeries; cilantro and the juice of split limes from the grocer; fume exhaust from the cars idling on Fifth Avenue; herbal shop that would hit your face two steps before you reached the door; incense from the small Buddhist altar; and sweat of people getting ready for another morning day of work. Somewhere on every block, someone was grilling something. Somewhere on every block, someone was smoking. Somewhere on every block, there was an ice cream truck with a melody all of us knew but could not name and the shaking of the ground as the F train came up out of the tunnel. The sound of the neighborhood was the sound of hundreds of life stories crammed into not enough spaces and even lower chances of making it, whatever making it meant at the time.
My mother would find a patch of grass near the top and pat the space beside her. She would hand me a bottle of water in her plastic Chinese dumplings labeled bag. She would say 看 (kan) or look in Mandarin, and I would look. I would see the whole of Lower Manhattan catching the last of the sun, the buildings throwing the light back and the harbor going slowly from blue to orange to something that I did not have a color for. The Statue of Liberty stood small and green in the middle of it. I knew who she was, and I knew she always held something up. Some kind of fire that was a torch, a torch that burned the fires of hope in the New World.
She did not know yet the word for what she was watching. She watched her mother, who would leave the nest for a minute at a time and come back with something small in her beak. She also watched the pigeons walking across the street, who all rose at once when a door slammed or something came running at them. She watched a seagull that passed so far above the rooftops that it was only a small dot.
There was a natural organization in the motion, the steady slow rhythm of following the air and beating your wings overhead. She listened to all of them while her body held very still, collecting inside of her some kind of feeling.
Slowly at first, and then all at once, the sun went down. The harbor went from the orange to the normal deep blue and gradually to almost black. The windows of the buildings across the water went dark one row at a time. The lemonade stands were packed into coolers; the boy with the broken bicycle rode past us down the hill with the last of his newspaper tucked; the dog tied to the pole had finally stopped barking; the yellow bodega switched their open lights to closed ones; the old Chinese man was folding up his cardboard box and pushing his small grey cart home on the last lychees that had not yet been sold; and the cracked piece of the sidewalk on 58th still looked like a country I could not name.
My mother had zipped up her bag already and offered me her hand, and I took my mother’s hand on the way down the hill. We walked back through the same, but different streets we had walked up from. My mother held my hand the whole way, and I did not let go, even when we passed the corner where she usually let me run ahead.
When we got home, my father was still working at the Donna shop. He and my mother had bought it close to the year I was born, selling run-of-the-mill merchandise—socks, t-shirts, plastic flowers, and whatever else they could buy in bulk and mark up by a few dollars. The fluorescent lights inside were always a little too bright for me; the radio always played some Mandarin AM station that I never quite understood; and down in the basement always included our small kettle and cardboard boxes.
It was the first thing they had owned in this country and the first thing of its kind they had ever tried to run. My father had kept a small English dictionary under the counter with Mandarin translations, and when a customer asked him a question with words he did not understand, he would try to spell out how the word sounded on a small piece of paper hurriedly and then look it up afterwards.
He studied at night when the shop was closed and wanted to share that with me. Likewise, my mother kept a notebook in her apron with phrases she had practiced at home in front of the bathroom mirror. How can I help you? We are out of that one. Let me check the back. Thank you for coming in. My parents in their early thirties were trying their best not to fail at the only chance they might only get.
The Sparrow was also trying. She had been on the same tangle combination of dried grass and torn plastic for most of the day. She continued watching her mother leave the nest and come back almost six times today, and she had also watched some small brown birds and seagulls take off in the distance and land again. The watching, she did not yet know, was the work.
For now, she only knew the nest, the air on her new features, warmth of her mother, and the strange, small twitching movements of her own body. The world was already becoming familiar to her, and her only way of being ready was to start with the watching, and then to start with the trying and then to keep trying, and to fail in small ways until she failed in fewer of them, and to do this with her whole body for the rest of her short life, because that was what being a sparrow was. That was what being any of us was.
When I had to go to school the next day, the auditorium smelled like floor polish, old curtains, and the lunch in the cafeteria next door. We sat on the grey folding seats, and we were separated by the third graders sitting on the left, fourth graders sitting in the middle, and the fifth graders sitting on the right who pretended to be too old to be excited.
The principal said that the assembly was going to be about science, and there was a man on the stage in a blue collared shirt with a small NASA badge on his chest. He had set up a long table with things on it I could not entirely see from where I was sitting. I saw a black plastic case, two clear bottles of water, a box of latex gloves, a metal bowl, and a pink carnation lying flat on the table.
He talked about the cold that we would feel outside during the winter and how he was going to show us a cold so cold that it could just disappear. Two men had figured out how, more than a hundred years ago, working at the same time together, caring only about how to figure it out. He said that was usually how it went—people did not always figure things out all by themselves. People figured things out near other people who were also trying to figure things out, and after a while, the world cracked a little for them, and a new piece of the world fell, and now they put it on a table on a stage in front of a room of children, and the children were us, so that one day we may figure things out, too.
He picked up the pink carnation and held it by the stem, and he poured something out of the containers into the metal bowl slowly. The something was not water, and it looked like it was smoking. It moved like water but the smoke came off the top like it was burning. He said the words Liquid Nitrogen as he lowered the carnation into the bowl, holding it for a few seconds before pulling it out. Something that was so beautiful could be frozen but still alive and trapped. Then, he tapped it once against the side of the table: it did not shatter right away but the third time shattered the flower into pieces, falling off the stage. The flower had not known it was already gone.
I knew then that this was the kind of control I wanted. The kind the man on the stage had over the bowl, over the flower, over the temperature of a thing in a room he had walked into that morning. I wanted that. I wanted to be the one who could help decide what a thing was going to be.
I would have called it science because that was the word the principal and the man had used, and for a long time after that I did call it science when in reality it was just power. Power to take my control of my life and the environment around me. Power to have my parents work less and spend more time with me. Power to make sure my parents would not be discriminated against simply because they were still learning English. Power to keep the rent from going up every January. Power to keep the families on our block from being evicted. Power to make sure the country my parents had crossed an ocean for would actually be the country it had been promised to be. Power to hope that things would get better in this world.
Thus, I told my teachers I wanted to be a scientist. I told my friends that I wanted to study science, and I would write it on the back of forms I did not know what else to write.
Ruffling around, the Sparrow was learning the same thing in a different body and had just begun to move. She had already spent the morning watching, and the afternoon watching, and then somewhere in between the watching and the next thing, her body had stopped letting her be still. A foot would shift without her asking it. Her chest would rise a little higher than it had risen the breath before.
Some days, she would have to wait longer for food and her mother’s arrival. Some days, her mother would not even be there. Some days, she would have to keep her head in the nest to avoid being seen by other dangerous birds. Some days, the rain would come in sideways and soak the dried grass under her feet, and she would have to shiver until the sun came back. The sun would come back, but the dried grass would never feel quite the same again. The world had begun to teach her how cruel it can be.
She knew that the only way not to be stuck is to be like the other birds, and the only way to be is to be the one moving. The watching had been a kind of help. She did not know what moving was in the way other birds knew it, but she began feeling something. Very slowly, she had begun to feel a different kind of force. The force was inside her and asking her, in a language that she did not understand, whether holding out here was the only thing possible.
She leaned a quarter inch toward the edge of the nest. She did not understand what leaning was, but her body understood. The body had been preparing for this lean since she realized, the way the boy in the Spider-Man shirt some blocks away had been preparing, without knowing it, for the moment in the auditorium when he decided that he wanted to control his life.
She did not lean any further that day. She straightened. Her wings folded back against her sides, and the sidewalk was marked by her winged shadow. The lean would happen again tomorrow and again the day after that, and she did not know that she had moved a quarter inch more and then another quarter inch more.
Years later, I cannot find any Spider-Man shirts in my closet anymore. I have moved a lot, and the closet is in Philadelphia now after my parents saved up enough to buy their first house, no longer sharing a small apartment corridor with another family in Brooklyn. I have already transferred schools twice, and the Donna shop has been gone. They tried opening a new store, which recently went out of business. Now, they are in two different cities running their locations, separately, on their own telephones and notepads.
I came back to Brooklyn last December, and I had some time before classes in college started again. I had begun walking, the way I had walked when I was six, except now I was walking alone and walking through the snow. The walk was longer than I remembered it being, and the sidewalks were colder and less recognizable.
My breath came out in front of me in small white clouds, and as I turned the corner, I saw that the then yellow bodega now has a different name. The awning was green, and the owner was someone different. I could not find the dog, and I tried looking for the old Chinese man. But the corner had no cart, and there were no stands to be seen. The boy with the broken bicycle had to be somewhere in his twenties now.
Yet, the cracked piece of sidewalk on 58th was still there, and it was the only thing on the entire walk that had not changed, a resemblance of our society. Everything else had been replaced or removed or grown out of recognition, but the same foundations stayed. The crack was the only thing the world did not replace.
I walked down toward Sunset Park. I stood at the top of the hill where my mother used to find a patch of grass. The patch was under snow, and there was no hand on my shoulder this time. I held my hand against the thin December light. I stood there long enough for my hands to start hurting and to realize the hill was not going to give me anything back.
Then, some bird soared in front of me, its shadow the shape of a sparrow. She was bigger than I expected, and higher up. She was carrying something in her beak, a piece of bread or a small piece of fruit. She was looking for her nest. I watched her until she was a small mark against a tall grey building.
Each flap of her wings was a tiny ripple of hope. Hope was the action to fly. Hope was a verb my family had been doing for as long as I had known them. In a world that had stopped fixing its cracks, frozen in the shape of a promise it had only half kept, hope was the only thing that ever made anything new.
The Sparrow did not know any of these. She did not know what a torch was, or what a country was, or what my ancestors did to them. She only knew that she had something in her beak, and that nobody else was going to fly the food across the cold December air for her.
Despite what the world could be, I will be a scientist who hopes instead. That was when I realized I could finally fly.