I’ve made a point to remember every time I feel my heart somewhere in my stomach. Once was when the first girl I really liked kissed me for the first time. One time was when my dad came home early from Iowa for my birthday with a triple-layered chocolate cake. Another time, years before, was when my mom told me that her mom died. I was too young to know exactly why she was crying, but she said I cried with her. I loved my grandma, I think. And I loved that cake.
The last time I felt something deeply reconstructive like that was in Beijing. I was in a program a lot like ‘Honors in Berlin’ the summer before my senior year, studying international relations with other high school kids from China and the US. Every day before class for a couple weeks, I would pass a mom and her little boy selling flowers across the street from my dorms. They were never in-your-face vendors like the ones at the Silk Market or in Tiananmen Square; they stood near the curb like two solemn trees.
A little game started up between the little boy and me: one of us would wave first, and if I could wave bigger, he would try his hardest to wave even bigger. If he won, I bought a flower and used it to sweet talk the baker’s daughter down the alley for a free sugar roll. (It all depended on if I had enough quai in pocket when I passed, really. No way that kid out-waves me in full competition. I have a wingspan like King Louie.) The little champ was about four years old but laughed like Sammy Davis jr.—three big guffaws, a hitch, and then a happy wheeze. Our times were simple but so am I.
The tacit game went on for long enough that I wanted to get the backstory on this mom-and-son operation. So a couple days before going back to the States, I goaded my Chinese roommate, Eric, into accompanying me across the street to talk to the flower folks. I sat down on the curb next to the kid as Eric and the mom stood across from us, facing foot traffic. I asked the kid what his name is, and looked up at Eric to translate. The mom jutted in, coolly speaking to Eric but her eyes never left the passers-by. Eric retorted in Chinese, and the conversation went to and fro again. All the while, the boy examined my hair.
“She says he’s deaf and can’t hear you. He had an infection when he was young from bad water. His name is Xiang Lee, though.” God damn it, God damn it.
Unlike Beijing, I never knew exactly how to feel in Istanbul. Maybe I was older and a bit wiser, and maybe the things we saw just weren’t as raw. I couldn’t help myself to pass a stray kitten without giving the obligatory oohs and undergo the lugubrious pangs, but that was warm milk compared to the emotional horrors of China. Even in the geçekondu near Kanyon, where I assumed conditions would be desperate, satellite dishes pocked uneven rooftops and kids wore grimy knockoff Ralph Lauren shirts. Lifestyles appeared poor but relatively comfortable. I could not find someone gripped by the destitute conditions that I expected. Then, as these things usually do, it happened.
We went out like gangbusters for Dan Kashima’s birthday Sunday night. After dinner and frequent indulgences of raki, we went to a club in Taksim Square to embrace whatever revels Istanbul offered. Once people started winding down, I went out to smoke hookah with a small group to keep the night’s buzz roiling into the morning. The idea of staying up to watch the sunset over the Bosporus was tossed around at the beginning of the trip, and that only sounded more appealing as the hour neared. I kept Joe, Muhammed, and Dan awake for a couple extra hours. No one should watch sunrises alone.
My feet were light on our jaunt towards the bridge. It was about 5:45 in the morning then, and as we gamboled through the empty streets and shadow-drenched walkways I remember feeling like life was ripening with each forward step. And then, with alcohol and shisha still coursing through my veins, we passed two young boys sleeping on wooden benches outside a mosque near the bridge. They were not there to get a jumpstart on their morning prayers. They shivered silently. In those moments that we passed the mosque, I felt the little boy in Beijing’s pain, my mother’s pain. More than anything else, though, I felt my heart sinking into my stomach again. Fourteen years old, fifteen maybe, and needing solace on a mosque’s outer bench—when I looked at myself, wearing a sweatshirt with a logo and still high from hookah, the unfairness stung. This was the side of Istanbul that I knew lay too close to the surface to miss in one weekend. I had high hopes, but hope can’t change reality alone.
We hopped on the bridge deck with heavier steps. The anticipation of the sunrise still made my senses buzz wildly, and I took pictures of anything that caught my eye as if it was my first and last chance to use a camera, but I couldn’t shake the remorse for those boys. And I started to think: what if I had to bivouac night after night with a dingy sweater for a pillow? How easily could I lose my cotton-candy life?
The sunrise was, by any stretch, one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. We overestimated how quickly the sun actually rises, though, and so anticipation gradually subsided. Joe almost fell asleep sitting on the light-rail curb. It’s a lazy orb, the sun.
Strangely, my thoughts meandered to a barbequed-corn vendor I had seen earlier in the night. He noiselessly passed my table outside a bar, pushing his wares with a blank stare down the street. He had no glint in his eye and no pride in his posture. He just, and I don’t know exactly how to put it—hoped. It didn’t make sense to me until I saw those two kids on the bench, but that is Istanbul to me. People call it a migrant city, or a bridge of East and West, or even the next up-and-coming metropolis. I beg to differ. To me, Istanbul is an old, stodgy corn peddler who silently begs; it is a moribund litter of stray kittens; it is two kids sleeping on a mosque’s bare bench.
Flecks of tangerine light crept over the horizon and I felt good again. I vowed then to give my jacket to one of the sleeping boys—for that moment shedding the guilt of comfort. We took pictures of the rising sun (and it really was stunning, like seeing fresh snow in your backyard for the first time) all the while I thought how great it would be to bring those guys back to that same spot some years down the road. Sadly, the bridge top sunrise will fade in my memory while the benches linger.
The boys were gone when we walked back to the Bilgi dorms. I took some more sunrise pictures, but the mood was killed. The vacant benches stirred feelings with chilling severity. Istanbul evoked a lot of things: culturally, socioeconomically and spiritually, but no emotion was stronger than the letdown when we realized the poor kids were somewhere in the city. I drank the guilt without tonic before sleep.
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