Chapter 3 Manhattan

Arrived in the United States, less than Manhattan, does not count to the United States; To the United States only to Manhattan, Not even in America. Because Manhattan is unique. If one were to describe Manhattan with poor human adjectives, then Manhattan is great, chaotic, elegant, dirty, charming, grim, philosophical, ignorant, earnest, hippie, dignified, coquettish yes, diamond, shit, peaceful, crazy???? Manhattan is a small island.To me, Manhattan is like a woman lying on her side.The southernmost Statue of Liberty is the soul of this woman.Looking down in turn, the blurred Soho Village is the crappy make-up on the woman's face, and the chaotic Chinatown is just set up for the woman's appetite.Times Square is this woman's breast, which seems to be perpetually adorned in order to captivate wanderers all over the world.And Fifth Avenue is the spine of this woman, which stretches straight from the bottom of Central Park to Washington Park, which shows the straightforwardness and strength of this woman.And what is Central Park?That is a place of pure self-cultivation in New York. In our Chinese terminology, it is called Dantian.New Yorkers told me that without Central Park, Manhattan would become a madhouse overnight.

Seeing Manhattan as a woman is a surprising discovery for me, a new New Yorker, to experience and understand.When I asked the old New Yorkers, they all looked at my image with eyes wide open, and then sighed, they don’t know the real face of New York, they only live in this city.New Yorkers love and hate Manhattan the way they would a stunning slut.This kind of strange feeling is just like the Shanghainese family who were cash-strapped in those days when they crowded into a small pigeon cage in Puxi, but they looked very proud outside.Every time you think of the price of 10 million RMB, you can only buy a one-bedroom, one-living room in a prosperous residential area in New York. Those old farmers who live on a few hundred yuan for a year on the loess high slopes in China may break their heads. How houses in Manhattan are stacked up with money.

In fact, why bother talking about the old farmers on the loess high slope?I, a native of Jiangnan, China, who received a Ph.D. "A Chinese Woman in Manhattan", which produced countless controversies, and fascinated countless non-Beijingers. Now, I am actually sitting in my apartment on the East Side of Manhattan, next to Fifth Avenue, writing this masterpiece that is about to become a world sensation. It feels a little funny.Even in Manhattan, when I reported my address above to my New York colleagues, they all rolled their eyes and thought I had just won the lottery.When I told them I didn't have to pay a penny to live here, they couldn't even keep their mouths shut this time.

Actually, the reason I live on the Upper East Side, where the richest people in Manhattan live, is because I'm the least rich.The richest need help from the poorest.I'm one of the poorest helping the richest. I live here as a caretaker, so my stay is free. My job task is to be responsible for keeping the interior of the building clean every day.Fortunately, the residents in the building are all people who love cleanliness, so I don't need to bother too much.My other jobs are all related to God. After the heavy rain in summer, I cleared the water on the roof; in autumn, I cleaned the fallen leaves in front of the courtyard; It can be done, then water the flowers and plants.

I still remember when I first arrived in New York, my landlord introduced me to the secretary of a clinic in the building.I just came back from the clinic that day, dressed in a suit and leather shoes, the woman glanced at me and laughed uncontrollably: "Does the janitor wear a tie?" Hearing that, she felt very friendly, as if she had returned to the time when she first entered university in Shanghai. Countryman's feeling. Alas!My identity is a bit special. That "Chinese woman" wrote a book telling the public how easy it is to make money in Manhattan.In contrast, I am now nothing more than a trainee psychiatrist who also serves as a janitor, and I am naturally very shy about the dollar bills, so I will not introduce even my own in this book to readers who are curious about Manhattan. The gold rush secret technique that I also long for.But my understanding of the inner psychology of New Yorkers and Manhattanites in the United States is beyond the reach of ordinary people.

"Oh, the Fifth Avenue Counseling and Treatment Center in New York." Dr. Mark Luben, the principal of the Illinois School of Professional Psychology, told me, a postdoctoral fellow from China, in his office at 20 Clark Avenue in Chicago. He gave birth to a look of approval. "Yeah, Fifth Avenue, great name." I exclaimed, "I can still clearly remember how stupid I was when I first came here three years ago, and now I'm going to New York to be my intern." "You will succeed. New York is a strange and unique city, especially Manhattan. People there have a unique obsession with psychotherapy, a kind of religious obsession, and the spiritual problems that people traditionally turned to the church are now. Turning to psychotherapy. Can you imagine having a few hundred therapists in an office building in Manhattan, each with dozens of clients per week? Such a unique scenario is probably unique in the entire world.”

That's good, psychiatrists who make a living treating human psychological disorders certainly hope that there will be as many mental patients as possible.This profession is truly a God-given profession.If God made man perfect when he created man, then all doctors in the world, including psychologists, would be out of work. The living condition of human beings is such a vicious circle: if a psychiatrist cures all the patients in the world, then the profession of a psychiatrist will disappear. Discovering that your greatest achievement is actually when the time comes to let go. "Psychology, that's bragging." My dad complained that I gave up my undergraduate electronics major and turned to psychology, "But since you don't like electronics, turn to psychology to make a living. It’s also a choice.”

"Ah Yuan, I think you only have the ability to brag. If psychology is a knowledge of bragging, you will give full play to your talents." My mother encouraged. I chose psychology, which turned out to be a kind of helplessness in the eyes of my parents.I think that I really don’t have anything. After five years of studying in the Department of Electronics of East China Normal University, my attitude towards a small radio that has no sound is really useless, except for patting it left and right with my hands.I hate the strict rigidity of electronics, as long as there is a little mistake, the electronic machine will go on strike, and I am a loose-minded person who likes to play with words, so it is a big mistake to put me in the field of electronics.

Later, I used my grades to prove that I really have a unique vision and know my greatness. At the same time, I also proved to my parents that bragging is also a university question. Is bragging really a university question? At Christmas 1999, I went to New York for an interview and stayed at the home of my old colleague Dr. Ding Zhenglin.Dr. Ding learned from Mr. Liu Fonian, an authority on Chinese education. He is actually a big braggart. When the two of us sat down, we naturally had a bright future. "Well, psychology is nothing, it's all bragging." Dr. Ding launched an attack on psychology indiscriminately, regardless of my feelings.

"I think you are probably referring to the Soviet psychology you learned back then?" Of course, I want to maintain the orthodoxy of the modern Western psychology I learned. "Same thing, they're all braggarts." Dr. Ding said mercilessly. Dr. Ding disregarded my feelings of traveling across the ocean and going through hardships in the United States, and he only wanted to speak quickly, and wiped out the knowledge I had pursued for many years. It is really disgusting and hateful.In the following time, I tried to introduce the great achievements of modern psychology to Dr. Ding, but no matter how I explained, Dr. Ding was still unyielding in his granite head.I suddenly realized that the reason why I couldn't change Dr. Ding's thought was to prove Dr. Ding's argument: Is psychology a useless science?