You should see the Chinatown I dreamed last night.
Rooftop dumpling and
noodle cafe, looking over a courtyard bustling with humans and leafy
shade trees, surrounded by crumbling brick buildings, held together by
ancient layers of multicoloured, peeling paint in graphic shapes. Windows filmy with time and steam, tall windows framed by brick arches
and packed with hanging plants, drummers practicing inside. At street
level grocery stores with avocados and yams as big as your head and tea
counters full of all the artists, talking, crying, laughing, their
exquisite shoes in various states of disrepair, and having to ask them
to move to get to the precarious stacks of giant produce, everyone
laughing boisterously when a pile rolled onto the creaky old wood floor. Friends’ apartments in odd shapes at the peaks of buildings, with
window seats and skinny steep stairs down from sitting rooms to kitchens
to bedrooms. Soft pinks and lacy curtains. And kissing old friends met
on cobblestone, music in their eyes and mouths, as we laughed about how
hard it was to come down from trips to Calgary. I wondered in my dream
how I hadn’t known this Chinatown existed, after all my years of living
here, and how I could live in one of those falling down places, draped
in silk, home with my tribe.
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