by KELLY ZEN_YIE TSAI
I’m not white, but
I love me a white person’s wireless internet café.
I don’t wear a thrift store grandpa sweater,
scraggly beard, and oversized plastic glasses
with my skinny jeans.
I don’t expect the neighborhood
to change around me. I don’t want it to,
but I am clearly the face of this change.
You could hardly gather from my eyes, my skin,
my hair, and say this girl is reppin’ Bed-Stuy…hard.
(Usually people guess Korean from Flushing.
Wrong on both counts).
This is the Bed-Stuy of Biggie’s ghost,
boarded up brownstones with “For Sale”signs,
plucked one by one, puckering
into a revivified concrete bloom.
Handwritten notes that read:
“Will buy your house for cash.
Call this number.” rolled up and
shoved into rusty wrought iron fences.
Rented dumpsters out front,
hammers and nails and saws,
brown bodies hang out third story
windows for 50 dollars cash per day,
painting the worn exteriors
of brownstones brown.
Is this life after death?
Or a parasite?
Or the green shoots of new growth?
I walk by brick and steel and
concrete boxes towering over
the old hardware store,
even I can see the neighborhood
is changing, and this change
is also a part of me.
Chinese Taiwanese from Chicago, Black
from Seattle, Jamaican from Columbus, Pakistani
from Austin, Mexican from San Francisco,
We are the slightly less visible marauders
ruffling the edges of rents upwards
hanging out at Habana Outpost,
kicking back mojitos in the summertime,
designer sneakers, designer jeans, designer
sunglasses,
(or at least, the knock-offs.)
Will the real Bed-Stuy please stand up?
The lifetime residents clinging to legacy
in rent-controlled apartments, the old folks
hanging in clusters on the stoop, the families
at Marcy projects, the bodega owners stocking
more and more organic produce, the children
who went abroad and return to family buildings
with European accents and college degrees, the
Bloods and the Crips, the storefront imams and pastors,
the hasty landlords with rings of keys and credit check forms
ready on clipboards in the driver’s seats of parked cars.
Will the real Bed-Stuy please stand up?
The Bed-Stuy of Timothy Stansbury and Rashawn Brazell.
The Bed-Stuy renamed Clinton Hill and Stuyvesant Heights by real estate agents.
The Bed-Stuy before and after white flight.
The Bed-Stuy that survived the looting and the burning of Broadway in ’77.
The Weeksville Bed-Stuy.
The Do or Die Bed-Stuy. The Bed-Stuy and Proud of It.
The neighborhood is changing.
It is plain to see.
I am a part of it. It is a part of me.
Kelly Tsai’s website is Yellow Gurl