The New York Times - USA (2020-10-25)

4 MB THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2020

Flirting

DEAR DIARY:
Every Wednesday morning at
the cafe on Mott Street, Bobby
flirts with me. Wednesdays are
the days he drives into Manhat-
tan from Brooklyn.
He was a gangster, or some-
thing shady. He won’t tell me
what exactly, except that he
worked in construction engineer-
ing. I know more than he realizes
about the job. My father has
worked in the field for 25 years.
It used to bother and bewilder
me that Bobby would flirt with
me. I don’t come across as the
type to flirt with, or so I would
think, at least to someone like
him.
But I’ve come to accept it,
smile and drink my coffee. Peo-
ple, given time, grow on you. And
my boss gets a thrill out of it.

OLIVIA FUNK

A train arrived, not ours and not the M. We went up to the operator to ask about the M. We gestured toward the boy, and the operator had a blink of recognition. “Hey, Joey! Joey, get on!” he yelled to the teenager. The boy looked up, and shuffled onto the train. The operator turned back to us. “I’m friends with his older sister,” he said. “I’ll get him home.” The bell sounded, and we stood clear of the closing doors. DANIELLE KIM

Goose Bumps DEAR DIARY: It was my first trip to the city as an adult. All I wanted was to see a drag queen I had seen once in a magazine. I waited all night at Club Cum- ming, one eye always on the door. As she got out of her car, I ran up to her, and she held both of my hands in hers. I got goose bumps feeling her long acrylic nails press into my palm. She wore black velvet and lip-synced to Gene Wilders’ speech from “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” that had always scared me as a child. Then she was gone. The night before I was due home, I went to a tiny bar in Brooklyn hoping to see her one last time. There was only one person sitting on a stool by the door. We told each other stories and laughed about our broken hearts and the pieces we both still carried with us. At dawn, I had to catch my flight. ELIZABETH TEETS

Surf City DEAR DIARY: Growing up in the Rockaways, my summers were pretty idyllic. The beach, which was never crowded, provided hours of ocean swimming, boogie board- ing and long walks. Many of the young people who love Rockaway Beach now think they brought surfing culture out here, but there was a rich and rollicking surf scene in the area when I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s. Most of the guys surfed — and through most of the year, too. In

those days, there was little op- portunity for girls to surf. It simply wasn’t done and, as a female, there was no way to learn. I have long been mesmerized by the sport. I often stop when I am out for a power walk along the shore to admire the surfers’ elegance and prowess (especially in the off season). It really is a treat. With female surfers now ubiq- uitous, I had been thinking wist- fully for some time about learning. But there were the usual excuses: I’m too old. I can’t risk injury. I’ll look stupid. So when I finally took my first surfing lesson two summers ago, I was filled with trepidation, and pride. Facing down fear and doing what one has yearned to do feels pretty momentous. But it was nothing compared to the feeling of actually surfing, of getting up on the board and being at one with the Atlantic in three (and a half ) of my eight tries. I’ll take it. JANE GARFIELD FRANK

Position Desired DEAR DIARY: In the late 1960s, I worked at an employment agency in Lower Manhattan. My department was responsible for placing male high school graduates in entry level jobs. One day, I was interviewing a candidate who had filled out the necessary employment application. I read his application as we talked: name, address, year of graduation and so on. I looked at what he had written next to the box that read, “position desired.” “Near a window,” it said. SONA DORAN

Observations for this column may be sent to Metropolitan Diary at [email protected] or to The New York Times, 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018. Please include your name, mailing address and daytime telephone number. Submissions become the property of The Times and cannot be returned. They may be edited, and may be republished and adapted in all media.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY AGNES LEE

Metropolitan Diary

Rockefeller Center DEAR DIARY: The night was warm and slug- gish. We had just watched the Yankees lose. My boyfriend and I had left the Stadium, and we were switching trains at Rocke- feller Center. There was a teenager wearing a backpack on the platform. He had been in the train car on the way downtown, too, and we had noticed him wiping away tears with the back of his fist. He seemed better now, and we didn’t want to intrude. Then he approached us. “Do you know if the M is run- ning?” he said. Hard to say. It was a weekend night.

right hand at all, and said he was learning to
do everything with his left hand.
The police have made no arrests, though
Mr. Unno said the assault was captured on
camera in the subway station. He remem-
bered at least one of the attackers calling
him “Asian” and “Chinese,” along with a
profanity.

HOW QUICKLY DOESa life change course?
Tadataka Unno was fated to arrive in
New York. He started playing jazz piano at
age 9, and playing professionally in Japan at

The work was steady and gratifying,
with recording opportunities and gigs al-
most every night. But, after a decade, he felt
there was something missing, he said in a
telephone interview. He could listen to
records in Japan, but jazz was more than re-
cordings. “I needed to know the culture,” he
said.
In 2008, when he was 27, his mother cried
when he said he was moving to New York,
told him not to go. She thought New York
was dangerous.
“I wanted to meet my heroes, to play with
them, to talk, to hang out,” he said. “If I stay
in Japan it’ll never happen.”
He and his wife, Sayaka, arrived in
Harlem on June 19, 2008. Harlem was
where jazz history lived. “I didn’t know any-
body,” he said. “I didn’t have any job. But I
didn’t worry about it. I was just happy to be
in New York.”
New York breaks those dreams more of-
ten than not. But Mr. Unno made them
work.
“He’s one of the workman jazz piano play-
ers on the New York scene,” said Spike
Wilner, a pianist who owns and runs Smalls
and Mezzrow, two clubs downtown. “He
works hard, practices hard, but he’s not nec-
essarily high profile. But he’s a tasty pianist,
elegant. And a sweetheart of a guy, very
gentle. He calls me Spike-san, and I call him
Tada-san. Everybody loves him.”
He got work playing with Jimmy Cobb,
who played drums on Miles Davis’s album
“Kind of Blue,” which is like being second
from the end at Mount Rushmore. This led
to a two-year stint with the trumpeter Roy
Hargrove, a phenom closer to Mr. Unno’s
generation.
“That was a historical moment, because
Roy never hired an Asian guy before me,”
Mr. Unno said with obvious pride. Mr. Har-
grove died of cardiac arrest brought on by
kidney disease two years ago, at age 49. Mr.
Unno was his last regular pianist. “He gave
me so much love and culture, history,” Mr.
Unno said. “I feel I have a responsibility for
what I learned from him. I need to make it
my own way, through my music.”
Mr. Unno was always keenly aware of the
racial dynamic of jazz, that he was working
in a music genre developed by African-
Americans, said his friend Jerome Jen-

nings, a drummer and jazz educator who met him back in Japan. “He was always asking questions to get a better understanding of the culture,” Mr. Jennings said. “There’s a song lyric, ‘You can keep your Dixie/Drop me off in Harlem.’ Tada asked me, ‘What does Dixie mean?’ He was totally open to ingesting the culture and understanding it by any means. He just soaked it up. Living in Harlem was part of that. He understood it was where all those great musicians lived. He knew the importance.” By 2020, most of what he had envisioned when he left Tokyo for New York had come his way. He had peers, recognition and music. In June he and his wife had their first child, a son. “He was so happy,” Mr. Wilner said. “Of course, it puts a lot of pressure on him to keep working, keep things coming in. But he’s very excited.”

AS THE ATTACK WENT ON,Mr. Unno said he was saved by a woman who called for an ambulance, which took him to Harlem Hos- pital Center. He was in shock from the beat- ing and from the unwillingness of bystand- ers to step in. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He could not move his arm, and would have to return for surgery. At home, he said, he felt as if his wife had “two babies to take care of.” On Oct. 3, Mr. Jennings created a Go- FundMe campaign to raise money for medical bills and other expenses. Since the start of the pandemic in March, Mr. Unno, like other musicians, had been unable to earn money by performing. Now he has a baby at home and bills piling up. The GoFundMe campaign, which made no mention of any racial remarks made by the attackers, surpassed its modest goal of $25,000 on the first day. The money kept coming in, with posts on social media spreading the word and wishing Mr. Unno a full recovery. Then on Oct. 6, the Japanese news outlet Asahi Shimbun quoted Mr. Unno saying that one of the attackers had used the word “Chinese” during the attack. Other outlets in Asia and the United States picked up the story, emphasizing the slur. “Japanese Mu- sician Beaten Up in New York for Being ‘Chinese,’ ” ran the headline in Japan Today. Many noted that crimes against Asian- Americans had risen since the start of the pandemic. President Trump has repeatedly blamed China for the spread of the virus. The tenor of social media posts changed. Now it was a story about racism, about “white thugs” inspired by Mr. Trump in one post, or, in a Twitter post soon after, about “racist blacks in Harlem” who “get away with racial slurs and violence.” As a window on racial violence rather than a random assault, social media posts spread beyond jazz circles. Grace Meng, a

congresswoman representing part of Queens, wrote that “Hate — against AAPIs and against any community — has no place in New York,” using the abbreviation for Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders. Any uncertainty about the attackers’ motives seemed to evaporate. Mr. Unno received an outpouring of messages from Japanese Americans who re- counted their own experiences with racism. He was astonished by their number. As he read the messages, he said, “My pain was their pain.” But the motives behind a seemingly

senseless crime can be hard to know with certainty. The police have found no indication that the group attacked Mr. Unno because of his race and have not classified the attack as a bias crime. Mr. Unno said that the attack was a “blur,” but that he was sure he had heard the slur. There was no evidence that Mr. Trump’s influence had a role in the attack. An officer from the police department’s Asian Hate Crime Task Force, which formed in August because of the rise in violence, interviewed Mr. Unno but did not con- sider the attack to be motivated by race. Mr. Jennings cautioned against calling it a hate crime without more evidence. The attackers, he said, were young people in a time of heightened stress and anger. “I think some of the papers are spinning a bit,” he said. The GoFundMe campaign recently passed $165,000. Mr. Unno said he still needed “very strong painkillers” to get through the day. He is unable to play piano or hold his son, and he does not know how much function he will regain. Even as he worries about his physical recovery, he fears that recovering from the emotional trauma may be even more difficult. Since the attack he has not left the apartment except for medical treat- ments because he is afraid. He does not think he could recognize the attackers, because he lost his glasses with the first blows.

UNTIL THE ATTACK,he had never experi- enced racism in New York, he said, and it shook him. He had come to the city to mix with people not like him, and now he was suffering for this difference. He said he was considering leaving the city that once drew him like the sun, possi- bly returning to Japan. “My wife and I worry about raising kids here, especially after this happened,” he said. The messages from Asian-Americans talking about their own ordeals, he said, brought home that “there isn’t a major movement like Black Lives Matter that cre- ates a space for Asians to talk about these issues.” That needed to change, he said: “The Asian community is not so tight. Asian people need to stand up and take action.”

Attack Leaves a Life Broken and a Dream Shattered

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

SAYAKA UNNO

Tadataka Unno was a regular pianist in Roy Hargrove’s band. Mr. Hargrove is standing in the background. Mr. Unno started playing jazz piano at age 9, and playing professionally in Japan at 18. He came to Harlem at 27.

‘I wanted to meet my heroes, to play with them, to talk, to hang out.’

.

The New York Times - USA (2020-10-25)

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