Before the Knife Hits the Head – Sushi Bar?!

The youth years are always a joy – playing baseball on lazy summer days, eating junk food every other day, and chasing girls are just a few things that make it so fun. I grew up in the heart of New York City – Manhattan – so I was destined in a sense to have an abnormal childhood. The eight years I had spent there was nothing short of amazing, everything that I possibly wanted was at my fingertips and the world was performing a play on my own backyard – everything happened in New York.

Diversity is claimed to be high in New York – looking in front of the street is like staring at a rainbow. Nonetheless, I was always the only Asian kid in my class (except in third grade where there was a Japanese girl, who didn’t speak a word of her mother tongue, so….. she doesn’t count), an ironic fact considering I was always in a class filled with thirty kids. When I entered middle school, my last year in the dirty great city, my wonderful classmates gave me the nickname “Sushi”, a name I dreaded more than hate itself.

I left New York the following year, heartbroken to leave the city I loved so dearly. Yet, I decided to carry with me the very nickname that I despised so dearly. But, I realized that rice covered in seaweed, and I will be forever intertwined with New York City.

Photo Credit – acnatta