36. Tomorrow
بكرة - كمان وكمان
I had not anticipated I would return to Brighton Beach. Ever. But I felt I had to take the express train that same night out of Manhattan, to Coney Island. For all the times I had gone to Brighton Beach, I never really understood the trains: Sometimes the majority of my ride to the Coney Island terminal ran underground, sometimes it ran overground, and I could see all of Brooklyn. That evening, it was the overground train. From a distance, I could see the Sunset Park Chinatown — one of several in the city. A friend born in China told me that the Sunset Park Chinatown looks nothing like a real Chinese city; it looks like a second-tier Chinese town in the 1980s, she said. I would not know. I’ve never seen China, and I was too young to know anything of the 198
