J-Church Newbies
Ileana at Bored is the New Busy sent over a diary on the J during the Chinese New Year Parade earlier in the year:
I’m on the outbound J, my second favorite train because it comes second closest to my house. I got on at Powell St. station along with a pile of others leaving the Chinese New Year Parade. The crush of bodies boarding the double-time procession of train cars heading anywhere-but-here is unusually dense and unusually overwhelming. We all feel it. We take shallow breaths, inching closer to the edge of the platform, filling one car after another.
Approaching: Outbound K, followed by 2-carNN, followed by one-car J.
The doors on the K open, no one gets off; no one can get on; the doors close. We wait, hope that the NN has room.
A woman in hospital-issue slipper socks squeezes through with the aid of a walker, mumbling, “Why do I bother? What’s the point? Why don’t you all go back to goddamn China? We don’t need your goddamn parade! It’s like I’m not even a citizen in my own country! I can’t even get on my own goddamn train because of you people. You go back to China. You go back to China, all of you! Taking away my rights as a citizen.”
The following is by Suzanne