on finding love on the subway, learning english, and working at a massage parlor
meet grace yi tang
meet grace yi tang
Grace Yi Tang has spent much of her life in transit, whether on her flight from Malaysia to the United States when she was 19, on the subway from Coney Island with the conductor that would eventually become her life partner, or from English classes in Queens to waitressing jobs in Brooklyn to her job as a receptionist at KEISY in the East Village. We met up with Grace to talk about her childhood in Malaysia, taking a parental role from an early age, and finding a sense of peace in life’s most stressful moments.
“I was living in Coney Island, and I ended up meeting a guy at the train station. I took my nephew to school on the train every morning, and it was his train — he was the conductor. The time I would take the train happened to align with this conductor’s schedule. I always tried to sit in the middle of the train, where the conductor was, because if something happened, I could just call for help.
He talked to me first. I would go in and sit with the kid and then, since our station was at the end of the line, the train would still have one to two minutes before it started to run. So he would come out to sit and say hello and we would start talking.
For a while, all we did was talk. And then, he disappeared. I think he was sick. One year later, he changed lines. He was on the F line. Coincidentally, I changed jobs, so I was also taking the F line. I was waiting for the F train at Broadway-Lafayette. And then when the train came, there he was! And I was like, “Oh hi! This is crazy.” After that, we were on the same schedule again, so we were talking again. And then, one day, he brought some spaghetti for me. I was like, “What would you have done if you didn’t run into me?” And he was like, “If I didn’t run into you, I would’ve eaten it.” He’s a good cook, and whatever he cooked, he’d carry it with him to bring to me. We started to become more serious, and we moved to Brooklyn together about one year later, in 2012.”
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