chinatown

Winter,* whose other interests include competitive Scrabble and trying to change the world, is on a personal mission to visit every Starbucks on the planet and has posted pictures of lots of them on his website. I find the one closest to the hotel and head towards it, noticing that with every block, there are fewer signs in English and more in brightly colored Asian characters that look like Chinese or, occasionally, Thai. In the second-floor windows, cartoon pictures of feet tell you where you can get foot massages and for how much. In a butcher shop, a row of roasted ducks with curved necks hangs upside down, their feet attached, somehow, to a wire.

The Starbucks turns out to be across the street from the Greedy Kitty restaurant, and next to an open air market, where Asian men are carrying boxes and Asian women are sorting through oranges, chestnuts, and plums. Because I don't see any stairs, I walk up the concrete ramp to a Starbucks that looks exactly like the Starbucks I stop at every morning on my way to work. I ask for a venti nonfat latte and sit down at a table to wait for my drink. Looking at my camera, the woman who took my order, comes over to stand next to me. She's short and fat, with a face the color and texture of bread dough, the only non-Asian person I've seen all morning. She asks if I'm from out of town. I say that I am and she asks if I'm a knitter. I tell her I couldn't knit if my life depended on it, but she's not listening. She tells me about a store that I can find if I take the streetcar two stops west and turn left at the light. There, on the first floor, is the place where they have the best selection of knitting needles in town and and sell skein upon loosely coiled skein of the softest, finest yarn you've ever seen, in every color you could possibly imagine.


*He notes: "My name is Winter. Only Winter. Past articles referring to a name other than Winter reflect inaccurate/imprecise reporting because they do not tell the whole story. Since most articles do not have space to tell the whole story, simply stick to this fact: my full legal name is Winter. Nothing else. Just Winter."