Gemini Chaos

Someone asked this question in Reddit leading up to the anniversary today, and I answered with what I can remember, in no particular order and without a narrative arc.

I’m saving my answer here, since I don’t often think back to the details on that day and in the first few days following. It’s very trippy to think about how a whole generation of Americans don’t remember it, but also don’t remember what life was like before it.

My mom called me and woke me up in my dorm (this was the one year I was dorming at NYU) and told me a plane had crashed into WTC. Everyone thought it was an accident first. I called all my friends who might be in the financial district and couldn’t get a hold of them. I had class that morning so I got ready to go, but then the second plane hit and it was obvious it wasn’t an accident.

In class we were all kind of stunned. One of my classmates’ parent worked in the twin towers and was distraught. The teacher came in and told us we could leave.

Walking back from class down Fifth I could see the smoke streaming from the towers and everyone was on the street watching in stunned silence. People were covering their faces and had jaws dropped. Some people had the news on the radio blasting from their cars so everyone could listen. I stood there near a car and watched as the towers fell/disappeared from view.

Nextel phones were popular at that time, so that’s what I had—I lost signal and couldn’t call my family to tell them I was ok. I rushed back to my dorm and got online; the internet was working and someone I knew messaged me so I asked him to call my mom and tell her I was ok.

I walked to St. Vincent’s Hosptial to give blood because I’m type O. We were in line for a while when they told us the hospital was at capacity and couldn’t take us anymore but they still needed blood. A bus pulled up and we all got in it so we could get taken uptown to find a hospital that could take us.

As we drove up it was the most bizarre thing because while people were sobbing in the streets downtown, people uptown went about their days like nothing was even happening. They were having coffee outside of cafes and shit. It was outrageous tbh. People yelled through the windows of the bus at them. I still didn’t have cell service and the trains weren’t running. We ended up getting dropped off on 86th on the west side, got turned away because they didn’t need more blood or couldn’t take more blood, and I ended up walking back to the village because there was no other way to get home.

My friends I was looking for eventually got in contact that they were safe, but one of my friends went messing for days. It turned out he went to volunteer. He resurfaced a few days later.

My mom wanted me to go home but it felt wrong. The cops blocked off all of downtown south of 14th street and classes were canceled so I walked around the area each day and the air was filled with white smoke from the debris. The movie theater on Third Ave was showing movies for free. I was a journalism student and as things settled in the weeks and months following I did some reporting on Chinatown, where I had a lot of friends I grew up with. The elders there relied on Chinese newspapers for information but everything was obviously disrupted in the aftermath. As things settled down Chinatown was devastated by the loss of business. Before it fully recovered it was hit by SARS years later as well. But that’s a whole other story.

In those first several days I was in shock, I think. I can’t remember when I eventually went home (my family is local just not in Manhattan) and they kept the TV on with the news. That was when I finally was bombarded with all the footage from ground zero and I kind of snapped and couldn’t stop crying. RIP to everyone we lost that day and since then from the asbestos exposure, etc.

I think for those of us who were alive before it, who then saw it with our own eyes or even just on TV, there was a heaviness to being attacked on the mainland U.S. at such an extreme magnitude because we grew up with the privilege and illusion of safety. I was definitely shook. And angry for a moment.

But then everyone else got angry and there was a hot second where probably every American wanted to retaliate—the Bush administration jumped on that and the rest is history, then the country split in sentiment with people realizing we were being lied to justify military action. There was a long while where NYC was scary for anyone who looked middle eastern or South Asian. I started working as an intern for the local newspapers and had to cover hate crimes—people beat up and temples set on fire by racists. I was scared that something Iike Japanese internment would happen again.

My best friend was in the army and was deployed multiple times in the subsequent years. I was terrified he wouldn’t come back safe (luckily he did). It changed him forever.