AN UNFORGETTABLE GEM
Staying at The Lowell is as New York as it can get
For the females in my family, staying at The Lowell is something of a tradition. It started with my headstrong and rebellious great-grandmother, who, according to family lore, defied her father’s choice of a suitor for her and hied off to New York in a huff.
She ended up staying at the newly opened hotel near Central Park. “It probably didn’t look intimidating,” – this, according to my mother. My great-gran stayed there for three days that first time, before her father fetched her, all notion of marrying her off to the suitor forgotten. By then, it was too late; my great-gran, strongwilled as ever, fell in love with New York and decided to stay.
She did eventually move back to Hong Kong and settle down to respectable domesticity though, but my family’s great love affair with the hotel and the city was established. My grandmother, on her first solo trip to the Big Apple stayed there, as did her sisters, when their turn came. It became a right of passage for us Wang girls, to accompany our mums to the city for these bonding trips.
Truth be told, it was only recently that I understood what the love affair was all about. In my younger years, I wanted to be where the action was, and the quiet and genteel Upper East Side did not exactly attract me. More my speed were the East Village and CBGB, by then on its last legs by the time I was old enough to travel to the US on my own.