Break from New York to Washington

I have been fascinated by New York City, where I stayed and worked for the last three years. But I was equally excited with the opportunity to shift to Washington DC on a new assignment, for I could know more about the "mystic" capital of the United States.

I like New York, half of whose inhabitants were born outside the US. It's a colorful city for all the good and bad things. So when one of my colleagues working in DC told me that Washingtonians are friendlier than New Yorkers, I didn't really know what that meant, although my experience during my many previous visits to the US capital had been good.

I agree with Jerry Cohen, a respected legal expert on Chinese law, who told me last week that it was an important time to be in DC. However, the political dramas unfolding in DC during the past weeks and the ones to come in the months and years ahead are totally different from those being staged in the Theater District in the Big Apple every day.

At the New Year's Eve party in our Times Square office on Monday, as friends and colleagues waited and watched the ball drop amid a huge festive crowd downstairs in freezing temperature, several of us had been keeping an eye on TV screens for hours to see how the US House of Representatives would vote on the fiscal cliff bill.

The so-called fiscal cliff, which would have automatically triggered tax increases and spending cuts, has been temporarily avoided. But the watered-down solution does not seem to solve any long-term problem for the US.

For one, the mounting US debt still shows no sign of decline, and US President Barack Obama will have to fight another tough battle in the next two months to get Congress to lift the debt ceiling in order to avoid a government shutdown.

Obama talked tough on the issue before he returned to Hawaii for vacation in a victorious mood after the House passed the fiscal cliff bill. He had had to leave his wife and two daughters there and rush back to the White House last week to make a last-ditch effort to seek a compromise with Republicans.

Such a deal and more spending cuts, as demanded by the Republicans, means that Obama's plan to rebuild the US by, among other things, investing in education and infrastructure may be all talk and no action during his second term in office.

One of my constant puzzles while living in New York was why the world's greatest city had failed to provide cell phone service in its subway. If you think time is money for Wall Street folks, it's quite astonishing that not many of them seem annoyed by this inconvenience. You enter the world of the 1980s once you are underground.

The DC subway system is newer. But when I called a colleague Thursday morning, the cell phone signal quickly faded into oblivion as the train went deep into the tunnel.

The National Press Building in DC, where my new office and many of the news organizations are located, has the same problem. You get uninterrupted cell phone signals only in corners near the window and near the elevators. Does that mean I will miss many calls?

Washington DC is a different place. Washington residents' faces are less expressive than their New York counterparts. And now I am not even sure whether Washingtonians are friendlier.

On Wednesday evening when my friends were helping me move boxes and suitcases into my apartment, two women saw the scene and told me that I should instead go through the back door.

I told them that I have authorization from the building manager. One elder woman, nevertheless, pulled out her cell phone and started taking pictures of us. And she promised to report us to the building's board of directors.

Welcome to Washington DC.

The author, based in Washington, is deputy editor of China Daily USA. E-mail: chenweihua@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 01/05/2013 page5)