Your Trip to Boston Part 3

You are tired from having to go to the Convention Center a Third time due to a last-minute interview they assigned you. But the thought of being able to work in Japan speaks to you more than the thought that Japanese companies would not easily go out of their way to bring a foreign national into Japan. You wasted your third day after spending the morning at the convention center and the rest of the time eating lunch with two friends from Toronto.

You feel a bit better after learning that one of your two friends, who is Japanese, also did not receive any job offers at the Career Forum. The other friend, however, already has had dinner with the representatives from a Japanese bank, and is basically ready to sign a work contract. A girl whom you met the night before also has gotten a job offer with a famous consulting company. You realize that unlike them, being a foreigner who seems to be from China is in fact a big turn-off for most Japanese companies. Although in the mission statements, the companies may claim that they would want to enter into the Chinese market more than ever, when in reality, they are just as nationalistic and in-group-oriented as ever.

So what was the point of coming to Boston again? You think to yourself. You want to be able to call the city your second home again. You ride the T up to Cambridge, getting off at Central Square. Everything seems the same way that you have left them. The only noticeable change is the opening of a 7-Eleven on the street corner of the Post Office and the City Hall. You take note of the building style of houses, and as you walk onto the street you used to live, you feel foreign: There were not as many houses and trees in your memory of the street. You update your memory as if refreshing a webpage, in the hope that the new images will remain with you.

In the old apartment building, you speak with the superintendent, a crude, chubby Irish man going into his 60s. He remembers you. You shake hands. He goes back to his chores suddenly. You realize that there really was not much relationship with each other after all. You start to wonder how many of your classmates in Cambridge would continue to call you a friend. You are glad to have at least the friend you are staying with.

The three of you eat lunch in Harvard Square, and you pay for the lunch with your credit card. You feel the action of swiping your card is a significant moment when you have visited Cambridge as an adult. Inside your heart, you know that the gesture is a pathetic excuse for adulthood. As you leave the restaurant you begin to see your surroundings in a pastel-colored filter, as if the pictures taken by your eyes, which will enter into your long-term memory storage, are corrupted from the beginning. You wish, at that moment, to not have gone to the Career Forum at all, and instead have spent more time taking memory snapshots.

On the T back downtown, you see a high school friend from Toronto who made it into Harvard. Although you have disliked him in the past, the sight of each other cheer both of you considerably. The high school friend invites you back to Boston again, when he would take you on a tour. You chuckle inside at the irony of the statement, but smile and reply that you would be delighted. You love yourself for being in town long enough for you to run into the high school friend. You acknowledge the probability of meeting any one person increasing in proportion to the time you spend in the proximity of that person. Even so, you wonder if the chanced meeting of the high school friend is the highlight of your trip to Boston.

At the time of writing part 3 of the trip to Boston, you have returned to Toronto for almost 2 months. The new photographs in your memory, which were a bit faded to begin with, are now rotten with small cigarette burns. You know that fundamentally, the trip has changed nothing in you or in your life. However, if you were to ask yourself if the trip was worth the time, you answer with a strong Yes. There will come a day, you tell yourself, that you would visit the city not as a child, not as a half-adult observer, but as an active ingredient, the last step in coming to terms with a city which held for you your teenage ambitions, your values, and the foundations of your understanding of the world.

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Written by micr0q. Copyright 2012. Image belongs to EMI Music Japan, no infringement intended. This is a non-profit blog.