Just spoke w someone (not Asian) who moved recently for work from a 1st tier city in China to NYC. They were so shocked ("no one would put up w this in another country, these probs have been solved") they had to go read The Power Broker to understand "how things got this way"🤯 I actually LOVE NYC (I wouldn't move there now in my 40s, but it was the dream in my 20s) but I get their point, the dirtiness, the lack of safety, the crumbling infrastructure :( The food, energy and people do make up for a lot of it though!
@ruima Wouldn't NYC residents have elected someone who can fix those problems? Unless majority of voters like things just the way they are.
@ruima I sat next to a Chinese woman at dinner the other night who recently went to NYC (her first time in the US), and when I asked how she liked it, she said, “Oh, it’s the best city in the world!” Later in the conversation she added, “because NYC is so famous.” She is from Beijing.
@ruima i would never live in manhattan. the air is infused with garbage and piss. amazing how much people pay to live there to make stuff like laundry and grocery shopping harder than it has to be
@ruima Nobody more precious, prudish, and appalled at the ugly outcomes of the democratic process than an e asia expat They prefer shuzu living underneath beijing cause they can't get hukou status, cause it lets them pretend their shangri la hotel lifestyle is actually real
@ruima Yeah, one of NYC's challenges is it built so much before everyone else, over a hundred years ago, like subways, and then never committed the resources (or stole them) to maintain & upgrade them - I tell folks Shanghai is like NYC a century ago, new & shiny; hope it fares better.
@ruima So much of the greatness of NY is intangible. When I moved back to NY from HK a couple of years ago, I saw NY for the first time with an outsider's eye. It is . . . not great on the surface, that's for sure.
@ruima I wish I’d moved there in my 20s, I for sure wouldn’t move there now
@ruima NYC went through boom and bust cycles depending on who the mayor is. The city got cleaned up under Giuliani and Bloomberg but got trashed by de Blasio and the current mayor. Now it's a hardship trip to NYC. Very sad
@ruima Yeah NYC is old. Any 1st level city in China will look better, even the Old Shanghai. Even Hefei, Anhui a 2nd low to 3rd level city which i just visited last month looks way neater, livable than NY.