Is there a city that stood out, or that you found especially memorable? Why? Does any city remind you of a city you have lived in or visited, and if so, in what ways?
One of the cities I found especially memorable is Chloe, where “the people who move through the streets are all strangers”. In Chloe, people imagine stories with others in mind at encounter, but never stop and greet each other. It stood out to me because my thoughts changed more or less along with reading each paragraphs and overall it inspired me to think a lot. After reading the first paragraph, the city impressed me because the social life in this city diverges a lot from what we are doing and taught to do in daily life. The great difference brought me a feeling of isolation that I can hardly imagine in detail how people behave in Chloe. Then, by the description of diverse citizens in the second paragraph, the city Chloe gave me a stronger feeling of disorder — the inhabitants are of distinct characteristics while they all stick to one rule of socializing. Since when we talk about diversity of people, we will relate to freedom and self-realization. But in Chloe, diversity coexists with the oppression, the word in my understanding lying behind the strange rule of socialization. And its last paragraph echoes my thoughts because in Chloe men and women also have desires and dreams, which unfortunately will be destroyed in the end. However, the existence of the phantom makes the whole thing more creepy and scary, at the same time leaving me more questions: does the phantom refer to anything; why is there the phantom; what is the relationship between the habitants and the phantoms. Moreover, the subtitle is “trading cities” for Chloe but I cannot connect the ideas in a persuasive logic. Remaining these questions in mind and looking back on how I thought about this city along the reading process, I found there is intersection between Chloe and cities in our real world, but it is interesting that I remembered it because there’s part of it I cannot relate to.
Esmeralda, city of water, naturally reminded me of Venice, also known as a water city, which I visited last winter. When I read “a network of canals and a network of streets span and intersects each other”, things appearing in my mind is when I followed Google Map direction on my phone to walk through the narrow streets and cross countless canals in Venice. When reading “to go from one place to another you have always the choice between land and boat”, I recalled my experience to take ferries from Murano to Burano in Venice and due to limited ferry routes and times, I waited on the pier for quite a few minutes. Of course, the network in Venice is not as dynamic as that in Esmeralda since Venice only has one level, at least from my experience. But same with Esmeralda, the route from one point to the other tends to be a “zigzag” and has a couple of alternative plans. In summary, Esmeralda can remind me of Venice because they both have special characteristics like abundant with water, having a network of canals and a network of streets, which differentiate them from other cities. And when reading the words about Esmeralda, my memories in Venice with matched images would pop up and make up my imagination about the city Esmeralda.
