A Labyrinth Named Choice
I was born in the hospital at New York University, yet I would spend more time in cities outside this nation’s borders than in the metropolis of my first breath. I said my first words in a Chinese dialect, which no longer rolls off my tongue, and took my first steps in my grandparents’ fifth floor apartment in Fujian, China. I mastered coloring inside the lines of a coloring book and putting on snow pants while living in a small, cramped space in Montreal, Quebec. Before I could learn to say “au revoir”, without people thinking that I was nauseous, my family boarded the train that would take us from the French-speaking, Canadian province of Quebec to Toronto, Ontario. There I learned I was musically inept.
This self-discovery could be traced back to the day my father gave me my Chinese name, as one of the characters directly translates to “poem”. My parents sincerely hoped that I would grow up to be a sophisticated individual. In their good-nature, they assumed that I would also need a little push to get there, and thus began my years-long enrollment in music classes. I was first registered for recorder classes, then for classes in piano, steel pan, and the flute. Piano lessons because there was only one pianist in a symphony orchestra, so they were “unique”. On the first day of classes, I learned that everyone else had similar motivations. Meanwhile, my steel pan and flute lessons were complementary to the music curriculum at school. I chose the flute from the ensemble of woodwind instruments offered because all the popular girls played the flute. Unfortunately, my vain aspiration to be popular was not fulfilled by my mediocre flute playing.
Had it not been for the city-funded music programs, my abandonment of these musical pursuits would not only be calculated in the lost time I would have otherwise spent dangling off monkey bars, but also by the gaping hole it would have left in my father’s wallet.
Amidst my desertion of silvery buttons for unsupervised mischief, and abandonment of ivory keys to play Marco Polo at the community pool, my father announced that our family would be relocating back to New York. I recall feeling desperately helpless and small from my lack of choice in this decision. At that time, I had dwelled in Toronto for most of my life and could not imagine uprooting myself from there. A few months later, while watching planes take off at Pearson Airport, I subconsciously wished that one day I could make my own choices from a wider array of alternatives. In retrospect, that day came sooner than I expected. Stepping beyond the glass doors of LaGuardia Airport, where a long line of yellow taxis waited by the curb, I was immediately bombarded with opportunities to make choices.
While I spent most of my life in metropolitan areas, I had remained oblivious to the surplus of choices in Western, industrial societies until moving back to New York. Living in foreign cities, I was too young to understand what psychologist Barry Schwartz called “the paradox of choice”, where individuals are plagued by indecision when encountered with an abundance of choices. According to Schwartz, there are consequences for having access to an abundance of choices. When faced with an overwhelming spread of possibilities, we assume that there must be a perfect choice for us, thus making us highly susceptible to disappointment. Should we find any dissatisfaction from the selection we made, we are quick to fantasize about a different, better choice that we could have pursued. Individuals raise their expectations when additional options are added to their disposal.
My first summer back in New York was spent laying on the cool wooden floor of my new apartment, with a perpetual supply of popsicles in hand, paralyzed by irresolution. I felt older, having recently passed a benchmark birthday that unlocked new freedoms and growing pains. My recent independence was attributed to a dramatic shift in parental dynamics upon moving to New York. The latter years of my time in Toronto were mostly spent with my maternal figure, while in New York I was under the care of my father. A majority of my time in Toronto was spent under house arrest, as I didn’t yet display the appropriate mental capabilities to roam the city unchaperoned. On the other hand, my father’s parenting philosophy capitalized on fostering interpersonal relations—meaning he shooed me out of the house whenever I got too comfortable.
Suddenly, I was stuck in a limbo. There was no one breathing down my neck to practice for the piano recital, or to work on my French conjugations. I felt daunted by my newfound freedom. This plethora of choices plagued me, exceeding the boundaries of my trivial matters, and infringing on more important decisions; most notably, which universities I was applying to. Ultimately, I applied to twenty schools. My attempt to minimize opportunity cost—the most desirable alternative given up when you make a choice—by maximizing the choices made was not without consequence. After all, most of these applications were spontaneous and unmeaningful.
Contrary to popular opinion, Time Square is not a “must visit” location for me. The blinking neon billboards resemble eyes, they watch me contemplate whether to go skating at Bryant Park, or to take the train to Union Square and visit The Strand. The towering skyscrapers of New York cue my claustrophobia. Walking down Fifth Avenue I am surrounded by towering glass giants and cement monstrosities that crowd the skyline. They lean over each other, creating shadows on the sidewalk. I cannot help but feel like a zoo animal, absent from my natural habitat, as visitors crane their necks over the barbed fence to observe what decision I would make next. Occasionally, I sit on the steps of the Schwartzman Library and watch pedestrians make their way up and down Fifth Avenue. I hear the click-clack of their shoes, and I see them stealing frantic glances at their watches.
I feel like an imposter in this city. Nobody else seems to be estranged by their excess of choices. I was under the impression that I must always make the perfect decision. After all, there were so many choices, so there must be a perfect one for me. More often than not, when the most suitable decision eludes me, I resort to self-blame. Schwartz explains in his book, The Paradox of Choice, that individuals experience this self-condemnation because it is easy to imagine making different choices that could have yielded better results. The decision maker is induced to regret the decision they already made, at the prospect of this better choice that they rubbed shoulders with. I was no exception to this phenomenon.
After that initial visit to Time Square, I have continued to find myself nearby Forty-second Street, emptying my checking account on meals that my friends insisted we try. Still plagued by the consequences of my plethora of choices, I developed an unfortunate habit that I am still struggling to reverse; the relinquishing of my decision making to somebody else. From which restaurant I dined at, to what sports team I joined, everyone else already seemed to know what to choose. So, why not jump on the bandwagon?
In my freshman year of high school, a classmate from instrumental band revealed that she intended to join the school’s track-and-field team. Four simple words then changed the trajectory of my freshman year— “you should join too”— and before I knew it, I was handing in the signed permission slips to the head coach. In retrospect, there were many problems with this decision, not just the superficial fact that I—as Jennifer Aniston once said in Friends— “run like a cross between Kermit the Frog and The Six Million Dollar Man.” On sunny days, our coach would have us run on the outdoor track. Linden Hill Methodist Cemetery was right down the corner from my school, so on days when he felt especially sadistic, he had us running its perimeter.
Like a Chinese opera singer, I was rotating through different masks of identity—from musical instruments, to sports, to new potential fields of interest—I couldn’t find a mask that fit perfectly. Either it was too long, too wide, or the strings didn’t tie comfortably at the back. I felt like a phony, for not being able to make the perfect choice from such a varied litter of sport options offered at my high-school. Too often, I ended up with the less appealing alternative. The cemetery chanted, “Imposter! Imposter! Imposter!”, with each step I took around its perimeter. The cemetery felt like a symbol of my withering spirit. During the winter season, track meets were held indoors at the Armory Track, all the way uptown at Fort Washington Street. These “meets” would begin at ungodly hours on the weekends, or last until the streets were startlingly quiet on weekdays. Track meets could take up to four hours, because all of the public high-schools affiliated with PSAL raced at the same time.
Miserable passengers on the same A-train carriage as my track team—a group of girls conversing at an unearthly decibel—frowned at us in disbelief as we rode our way uptown. The ear-piercing laughter we emitted on these subway rides, at the expense of our fellow passengers’ eardrums, became the highlight of my time on the team. After the track meet, the girls would split up. Some were picked up by parents, and others were going to visit family in the neighborhood. Either way, the team would disperse.
Taking the A-train back downtown was a vastly different experience. With one shoulder carrying the drawstring bag with my track uniform, and the other shoulder carrying my book bag. I would lean against a pole to watch the passing scenery outside the windows of the train. There wasn’t much to see, just walls after walls of dark tunnels and the occasional light from a train on the adjacent track. The sound of the train’s wheels rolling against the tracks was at a low enough decibel that I could still hear myself think. Setting my bags beside my feet, I realized that instead of being pumped-up with adrenaline like my teammates were after a meet, I had mixed feelings of relief and dread. I was relieved that the meet was over, but I dreaded the one scheduled in two weeks. I could still smell the gunpowder from the start of the race, when my lungs seemed to have forgotten the job they were genetically coded to do. As though the memory might induce the evaporation of the remaining oxygen in my lungs, I loosen my scarf and unzip my jacket.
I recall most of the track meets that I participated in with a fuzzy blur, except the Colgate Race hosted by Pratt Institute. When the team made their way to the race on Willoughby Avenue in Brooklyn, we were unpleasantly surprised by their lack of an indoor track. Instead, they had an indoor gymnasium. The floors of the gymnasium were smooth and shiny, and the lines that separate the different lanes were ominously thin and fading away. The distance of the race I was running was equivalent to seven laps around the slippery track. By the third lap I was staring at the gymnasium floor, hypothesizing different ways I could injure myself to get out of finishing the race. The least elaborate way was to plummet face first, but I was too vain to voluntarily suffer injuries on my face. All other methods involved varying forms of public humiliation in front of my teammates, coach, and strangers, which I was not desperate enough to try.
After two seasons of pure running, I learned an invaluable lesson: to dash for the hills, or strategic-quitting in more eloquent terms. One of the first concepts taught in Economics is cost benefit analysis—the logistic comparison of strengths and weaknesses of different options—a respectable decision-making format that I abide by, is to remedy the excessive choices I am confronted with. However, the overwhelming surplus of choices in New York fuels my impatience and frustration. So, despite my best intentions, I often end up with the less appealing alternative. Courage is required to give up these fruitless objectives that I have invested time into. More often than not, this is the decision that paralyzes me: whether I should persist or quit.
Ironically, despite my aversion to having a plethora of choices, I have also been at the mercy of minimal choices. The latter was as suffocating as the surplus of choices. If the last step of my high-school career was a mathematical equation, the process of getting into a university would be the unknown variable I was solving for. The summer before my last year of high-school, the equation became increasingly difficult as my living situation became a changing variable. The landlord notified my family of her intentions to renovate, thus we began scouring New York City for a temporary place to live. Moving into the temporary apartment, we did not realize that we would be sharing the space with other tenets—rats and cockroaches—needless to say the temporary apartment defined our New York experience.
Our mornings began with the sight of rodent defecation. During the day, we could observe the cockroaches enjoying the hospitality of our walls. In the evenings, we would be lulled to sleep by the squeaking of rats. The renovations, which were supposed to only take two months, dragged out to a year due to the construction team’s questionable work ethic, and my landlord’s persistence at favoring nepotism instead of hiring professionals. My father was adamant on waiting for the renovations to finish because the apartment’s location was close to school. My complicated relationship with choice might have stemmed from feelings of helplessness fostered in my childhood. On the one hand, I freeze when accosted with an excess of choices. On the other hand, I constantly feel that I am not entitled to the privilege of choice.
By Emily Liu
Photographs done in collaboration with the New Media Artspace at Baruch College. The New Media Artspace is a teaching exhibition space in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts at Baruch College, CUNY. Housed in the Newman Library, the New Media Artspace showcases curated experimental media and interdisciplinary artworks by international artists, students, alumni, and faculty. Special thanks to docent Kezia Velista for creating artwork for this piece.