The Cost of Looking

After a missionary trip to the Dominican Republic, where I watched Haitian children drink from a contaminated waterway and helped hide a pastor in the backseat of a van from deportation, I came home to Manhattan's skyline and could not look at it the same way. In this blog article, In this blog, I reflect on what it costs to keep looking, as a high schooler in New York City, the wealthiest city in the world.

I love New York City. Whenever I walk across 42nd Street toward the subway, I feel like I have stepped into a scene I spent years watching through a screen in Korea. The Empire State Building. The Statue of Liberty. Streets I only knew through movies, and now I walk them every day like they are mine. There is something still surreal about it. You can find any community, any culture, any corner of the world by simply turning a block.

The next day, I hate New York City.

Every morning, I pass a corner near the 42nd Street station where a homeless woman sits on a torn piece of cardboard with her children. Every morning on the subway, I hear someone lean toward their child and whisper, "Don't make eye contact," as a man carrying a box shuffles through the cart asking for a penny. People look away. They look at their phones, at the ceiling, at nothing in particular. They make the man disappear by refusing to see him.

New York City is not always what it looks like from the outside. It is a city of contradictions, where Wall Street and the chronic homeless crisis exist within the same square mile. And sometimes I think it is a perfect, if brutal, representation of the world we actually live in right now.

I felt something like this for the first time on a different scale when I returned from a missionary trip to the Dominican Republic. Before the trip, I wanted to bring something for the children we would meet. I put together coloring books I had made myself and packed colored pencils, then asked my pastor for permission to bring them. He said no. I was frustrated, and I asked why. He told me it would not be appropriate, because these children did not have access to ordinary paper.

I did not fully understand what he meant until I was there. To reach the school, we drove more than two hours over mountains into an isolated region covered in banana farms. The farms existed in a particular kind of legal and social no man's land; the conditions were so dangerous and so poor that government authorities rarely entered, which made it one of the few places where Haitian immigrants could live without the constant threat of deportation. The workers were almost entirely Haitian, people who had fled a country where the government had collapsed under gang violence, who crossed into the Dominican Republic.

The school was a container. Inside, a teacher was holding up a small iPad showing a video while about fourteen children watched from their desks. Behind the container, there was a waterway. The water was visibly contaminated, a murky mixture of soil and unidentifiable waste. That was the source of water the children used to wash, to play, and to drink. The missionary told us not to touch any of the food or water there, that exposure would likely cause skin disease or worse.

The next day, we visited the village where the children lived. We walked a dirt road flanked on both sides by homes made of containers. Inside each one, the space was barely enough for a single adult to lie down and stretch out. Families of four, a mother, a father, two children, lived there together. The entire village shared one communal toilet, a small, dark box built from wood and scrap metal. Bathing was done by stepping into a half-covered enclosure on bare dirt and pouring water over yourself. 

The road to home was not easy either. We had a Haitian pastor riding with us, someone the missionary knew well, and four separate times police stopped our van to check for undocumented Haitian passengers. The pastor had already been taken before. The missionary had managed to reach someone, bribed the jailer, and gotten him released. We did not want that to happen again, so we hid him in the far corner of the backseat. The rest of us, visibly East Asian, told the officers we were tourists. They looked at us, not at the back seat, and waved us through.

The village had many young children, mothers, and elderly people, and very few men. Most of the men had already left for the United States, taking some of the most dangerous overland routes imaginable. If they survived every obstacle along the way, they became the primary source of income for the families still living in the banana farms.

Standing in all of it, I felt something close to awe. My pastor had said that trips like this were meant to show us how fortunate we are, how much privilege we carry without noticing. But I could not locate that feeling, the relief of comparison, the gratitude that comes from realizing your life is better. My head felt light, and I felt sick.

At the time, I could not name the emotion properly, but I came to understand it over time. There is a kind of comfort that people reach for when confronted with suffering at a distance. You watch a nonprofit video between YouTube ads. You donate ten dollars. You feel, briefly, that you have done your part. That feeling, the reassurance of a small gesture toward a large problem, functions less like empathy and more like a release valve. It lets you step back from the discomfort of proximity without actually closing any distance. It is charity performed for the sake of the giver's conscience, not the receiver's conditions. And if the systems producing that suffering remain untouched, if the donor returns to their life without asking what created the need in the first place, then the gesture becomes a way of sustaining the problem rather than addressing it. Giving becomes a substitute for accountability.

I could not find comfort in that, and I still cannot.

The unease followed me onto the plane and did not lift when I landed. It was sharpest on the morning I returned to school. I took the express bus, watched Manhattan emerge across the water, all shiny and light. I walked 42nd Street past the billboards and the storefronts and the ordinary performance of wealth. I got off at 66th Street and passed Lincoln Center and the edge of Central Park. These were all the things I used to love about this city. That morning, they felt like they were pressing against something I could not ignore.

While I sat in a warm classroom with a laptop open, somewhere not very far, children were hungry, being chased, unable to sit still long enough to learn anything because survival required their full attention. And the United States, the country I had just become a citizen of, was in the middle of aggressively enforcing immigration policy, processing mass deportations, sending people back to exactly the kind of conditions I had just witnessed. I am not naive enough to think immigration policy is simple. But I had seen, with my own eyes, what some of those people were running from. That changes how abstract arguments feel.

What frustrated me most was not the contradiction itself. It was that I was a high schooler. I had no power to change anything. I had only the experience and the feeling, with nowhere to put either of them.

A few months ago, students at my school organized a walkout protesting ICE. Standing in that crowd, I kept returning to one question: why do people who feel things clearly so rarely hold power, while people who seem to feel nothing so often do? I know the answer, more or less. Power is accumulated, not assigned by moral fitness. And that means if I actually want to do something with what I have seen and felt, I have to be willing to pursue it. I have to be willing to build toward something over a long period of time rather than waiting for feeling alone to accomplish anything.

What I want, when I have any real capacity to act, is to be the kind of person who has not looked away. Not someone who inherited a position and made decisions from the insulation of distance, but someone who has walked those dirt roads and still remembers exactly what the water looked like. Every morning when I pass the woman at the corner of 42nd Street, every time I see a young child on the subway holding a box of candy and asking if anyone wants to buy some, I am reminded. I try not to look away. I do not always succeed.

What kind of person I want to be inside this city, and what I want to do with the contradictions I carry, is something I will be working out for a long time. I think that is probably the right condition to be in.