He Loves New York So Much

On Missing New York, Mamdani, And Recent Events

Sketch Of A Dog, 1270BC, Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access

I’ve been sitting with what I think of as a sundog of information—and by this, I mean happiness—after the election of Mayor Mamdani in New York City last week. If you don’t know me well, New York City was my home for over 20 years before this and a place where I still have so many friends who I miss terribly. I left in 2016 for the job I have now and it broke my heart and it still does a few times a year on nights like last Tuesday, when I wanted desperately to be back in my old neighborhood to celebrate. Before 2016, I had taught writing up and down Route 91 but New Hampshire was just too far away to pretend as I once had that I was in the furthest furthest outer borough, even with all of the former New Yorkers here. I left for a few reasons, one of them being that teaching creative writing in New York City all too often means failing to live off of what they pay you there. The major programs back then were always ready to hire someone younger who just got their degree and didn’t mind the low pay yet. They may still. And I had seen older colleagues, beloved writers, struggling to pay the bills there with pay stuck in the 1990s. I didn’t want that as my present or my future.

But also, the city seemed gripped by a collective Atlantean hubris and I was getting older. I cheered with a student who was also excited for the victory, also a New Yorker. I looked at my friends taking pictures with Mamdani on social media, and then for some reason remembered in 2011 taping up the windows on the writing office I used to share at the Asian American Writers Workshop with Ed Lin and Ed Park, as we prepared for the arrival of Hurricane Irene. We left that tape on for a while afterwards, partly because of inertia, but partly because… what if we needed it again? Hurricane Irene marked the first time NYC ordered the evacuation of the coastal areas including hospitals. It was a chilling moment for me. And when Sandy came the next year, the chill stayed.

Many of my life decisions in America are based on a simple formula: “How will I die because someone didn’t pay attention to the infrastructure, and what can I do about it?” This was on my mind when I left New York knowing how far the water might rise before our apartment became waterfront—a block away, on 11th Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen.

But then came this halo effect that was part of the Mamdani campaign, which educated people on the New York City communities where he was campaigning and their concerns. And the scavenger hunt day, a game made from New York mayoral history trivia. He made running for mayor seem like the most fun thing ever, something Cuomo never did. When did I ever want to learn about Mayor LaGuardia? Never. Cuomo meanwhile didn’t even seem to understand New York City or even live there, renting an apartment to make it seem like he wasn’t just lounging around a his Albany house. Cuomo expected to ride on his record but his record was terrible. Now it seems he might run for the seat recently vacated by Jerry Nadler.

“He just loves New York so much,” I said to a friend yesterday who stopped into my office and asked me what I thought of Mamdani. “I feel like he deserved it just for that.” That may sound glib, but what I mean here is that it was a pleasure to watch his victory speech and be reminded of the Yemeni bodega on my corner back in Hell’s Kitchen, where I had sandwiches made for me for fifteen years, and where I am still introduced to the new young men behind the counter by the now slightly older young men who I was introduced to back when they first started working there. To see Mamdani pet a bodega cat or walk the length of Manhattan as a part of making his “closing argument” on the weekend before the primary, he just seemed to genuinely be enjoying himself. I have seen people comment on his boundless energy but I feel like I need people to think about how much fun this campaign had while also doing all of the difficult things, the coalition building and outreach, the knocking on doors, or the way he went to the courthouse the day Brad Lander was arrested for accompanying immigrants to their immigration hearings, seized by ICE. The message of the campaign consistently was “how great is it to be here?” and in that sense his campaign was also an ad for living in New York. And I know I’m not alone in wanting to move back just because he’s mayor now.

All of the accusations made against him—that he, not Cuomo, was somehow the real nepo baby in this race, or that he was too inexperienced, or that he was naive, all seemed stranger and stranger as he just kept moving and showed up in a stadium to address a crowd of mostly Haitian American attendees and pronounced Haiti correctly when speaking to them, asking for their support. That isn’t naive at all, for example. That’s the move of someone courting their vote. Something a lot of politicians could take note of. Cuomo acted like the inexperienced one. He seemed to feel he deserved to win just because he wanted to, but… he didn’t really seem to want to that much also. He couldn’t match the energy of this campaign because he doesn’t love it. When he said he’d move away if Mamdani won, I thought, you already left. But sure, stop getting parking tickets here.

Mamdani was accused of being inexperienced all while creating a political organization that outstripped the people with so-called experience and left many of the consultant types bewildered. His campaign was a pop-up teach-in on the city but also on how to create community, how to build relationships between communities, how to show up for people. He did everything the way the consultants opposed. He stood with trans people as he has consistently and showed up at Papi Juice to thank them for making a space for joy for queer and trans New Yorkers. He filmed a last weekend ad in Arabic while anti-Islam hate surged and Cuomo said he didn’t know the meaning of 9/11. Many of New York’s problems have felt too big to handle alone and what was so beautiful about the Mamdani campaign for me was seeing not just him but the many people who volunteered, who showed up for events, who held events in their homes effectively saying We’re not doing this alone. And last Tuesday over a million New Yorkers said as much. Cuomo lost despite getting a share of the vote larger than de Blasio’s back when he won.

Will he address the infrastructure? I hope he will. He did speak as a mayor should when he mourned the flooding deaths of people in their basement apartments. Adams, who had as much as given up the job, didn’t address it anywhere I saw, and I don’t recall that Cuomo did either.

Lex McMenamin, formerly of Teen Vogue’s politics section, published this excellent look at the campaign’s last week going into the election and the “intergenerational moments” Mamdani sought to create that I think matter a great deal to our political future. While many people even now are just finding out that the mayor-elect’s mother is the filmmaker Meera Nair, I wonder how many knew his mom was out knocking on doors, canvasing for him? And as McMenamin also chronicled the election day results for The Cut, given they were laid off from Teen Vogue as the magazine was absorbed into Vogue on election day, I read their expansive and well-reported analysis of the event, before and after through the lens of their voice being among those the administration wants to silence.

What I found myself thinking about was how the Mamdani campaign reminded me of how when I left college in 1989, ACT UP and QUEER NATION were righteous causes but also some of the most fun you could have fighting for the right things. Going to a gay club could be lonely when you were a 22 year old newcomer to San Francisco. But going to a meeting and finding a campaign, a committee, an errand or a mission—handing out condoms, for example, or helping offer HIV information, or flyering or wheatpasting for a demonstration, the demonstration itself, these all gave me a community and a sense of purpose when I needed one. I met friends I still have. Friends of all ages.

If you’re just graduating now into this hellish job market, with all of the government layoffs and AI, tariff chaos, and ICE raids, and you don’t have a network yet, political activism, or working for a campaign, might be the answer. You will meet people there and make friends who will see your value in real time. The first jobs I got out of college I got through the networks of activists I was a part of. That stayed true for some time and may still be true. We need to look out for each other and community offers what the status quo can never provide.

What I Am Reading

In my Imaginary Countries class, as we come to the end, I’m confronting the apocalyptic mode in speculative fiction in the way I think of it, especially the sort of writing that imagines only a constant dwindling down to death and disaster. The Doomer Mode but for novels and stories. The end of the world or the end of their world, I keep saying to myself. The end of the fatal status quo that needs our silence about all of this death that is the price they want us to pay for the world they want for themselves. I’m listening to Luminous, by Sylvia Park, on my commutes, and part of the pleasure of it is the way the novel talks about the reunification of Korea in the past tense.

I have been using the Co-Star app for horoscopes and they offer reading suggestions, art to go contemplate, music to listen to and suggested trips. It seems more perfect for someone who has won the lottery and can just read all day while traveling to the next destination but I’m enjoying it all the same. The other day’s horoscope kicked off with the line Your Body Is Not A Sacrifice and I was felt wide awake immediately.

Magda Szabó’s The Door was the first reading suggestion the Co-Star app gave me and the synopsis Ali Smith offers in the introduction to the Len Rix translation for NRYB had much the same effect on me:

“In modern postwar Hungary, an old woman who is now a famous author recalls a nightmare: herself as a young woman. The novel begins after she has passed through a “politically frozen” time and started to be able to write again and to be publicly lauded for it.”

I am also reading Richard Siken’s newest book of prose poems, I Do Know Some Things, suggested by my friend Joe Osmundson. Siken is writing his way back from a stroke in wiry, distilled prose that feels as if it is speaking from somewhere in your chest.

Writing Prompt From 1992 in New York City

Many years ago I took one of my first writing classes post-college, with a writer named Beatrix Gates, a lesbian translator and poet who became a mentor and a friend. I took a prose poetry class with her in her home in New York City. She was the spouse of my manager at A Different Light Bookstore, at the time the wonderful Roz Parr, who may have since retired but who went on to a career in book publishing after leaving the store sometimes in the late 1990s. Bea sent me her newest book of poetry, The Burning Key, recently, and it was a pleasure to receive it. I remembered one of her writing prompts from that class and taught it recently, and I’ll describe it for you here.

Think of someone you no longer have access to—a lover, a friend, a family member—and you’ve been separated by death or alienation. Choose someone who can never answer back. Ask them a question, and without stating what it is, write back and answer the question as this person.

I have been holding off using it despite assigning it to students this fall—I like to do the exercises I assign. But I finally figured out who I will ask the question of.

Until next time,

Alexander Chee