Phoenix Rising

Excerpt from Chapter 1: Dunkin Donuts and Phoenixville

to be so broken

to have

f a l l e n

so deeply

that the only thing

you can do is

r i s e

into a new you

(phoenix) - yung pueblo

When the Phoenix dies, it is reborn and begins its life as a chick. It is a symbol of rebirth, new beginnings, the balance of life and death, or the seasons.

It was a yoga studio in the East Village that inspired the completion of this chapter. The studio was mysteriously placed on Avenue A and had a large Phoenix just beyond the entrance. It was early 2019 and less than 6 months had passed since I moved to New York City. I spent most of my days and weekends writing this book and at times felt overwhelmed by my new life in the city. A stark contrast to the years I spent traveling, at Manav Sadhana in the Gandhi Ashram, and other experiences I had in Southeast Asia post-graduation.

The 45 minutes in that studio were a reprieve to the reverse culture shock I was still not aware I was going through. Through asanas, the Phoenix at the entrance of the yoga studio brought memories of my childhood growing up in Phoenixville, a suburban town of 15,000 people, just a 45-minute drive on the I-76 Wast from Philadelphia. For years, Phoenixville held the Phoenix Firebird Festival, a large wooden bird was set ablaze, representing renewal. The stories of the Phoenix vary by account, but it involves the phoenix bursting into flames and a newborn phoenix rising from the ashes after three days.

It’s fitting to have been born and raised in a town whose name so accurately and intensely represents the chapters of rebirth and renewal I have experienced in my own life.

---

One of my earliest memories from my childhood is sitting on a countertop in the Dunkin Donuts my dad and uncle used to own in Phoenixville. It’s evening and I’m sitting, with my feet tucked under my thighs, stealing quarters from the tip jar. The familiar sweet, musky smell of donuts and coffee mingle in the air and around my nostrils. I can imagine the scent seeping into my hair just as the familiar, poignant smell is in my mother’s hair and her clothing. After a long day’s work, sometimes I nuzzle my face in her clothes and smell the hours she spent working in the back of the Dunkin Donuts, making donuts and bagels starting at 3 AM. 

As I steal the quarters and place them into my pockets, a customer I see often catches me. I’ve been caught and I’m overcome with shame, but he just smiles and walks out of the store. I wasn’t going to do anything with the quarters nor did I even know that I could buy anything with them - I was fascinated by their shiny, silver and round exterior just as I was fascinated by the stickers I used to steal from the grocery store by stuffing under my puffy purple jacket or shiny marbles my sisters and I used to play with. 

My parents are probably in the back and I’m waiting for them to finish their work. I can imagine the machine as they cut the strips of dough into round shapes with circles cut out the middle. On a different machine, another employee, also a recently arrived Indian immigrant, places the circles into hot oil and fries them, patiently waiting and then flipping them over until they are golden brown. The process of doughnut making is comforting - I’ve spent days watching the process of making the dough, the machine cutting it, and the employees frying it. 

Often after spending hours of crying and refusing to go to school, my parents would give in. I’d sit on a bucket in the back area of the Dunkin Donuts close to my mom as she worked, watching the doughnut making process unfold. In pre-school, skipping was allowed on rare occasions, but in first grade, the allowance became less and less. “The police will come get us if you don’t go”, my dad would tell me. 

Even now, as an adult, the smell of a Dunkin Donuts is all too familiar. Each time I pass the Dunkin Donuts on the corner of Bedford Avenue and 7th street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, it overcomes my senses and is a reminder of the days sitting on the countertop or walking around the tables as older white people came in to order coffee and donuts from these Indian immigrants who had just arrived to town a few years before. There was a familiar nicotine odor that wafted through the air as Mary, a tall middle aged white woman with long brown hair and bangs, came back into the store after a cigarette break. The smell would also trail behind customers who had just spent the last 10 minutes by the grey trash can, depositing their ashes in the ashtray on top. After they’ve finished, the sound of the bell rang, signaling their arrival inside of the store. 

Some customers and employees told my father that it was unfair that immigrants received subsidies to buy businesses in the area. “That isn’t true”, he’d tell them, “We work hard for what we have and the government doesn’t give immigrants money to buy businesses”. Little did they know that their town was also started by immigrants who had come in the 1600’s, and before that, the original inhabitants of the land were the Lenape Indian tribe.

The neighborhood I grew up in was nestled across the Schuylkill River bridge from downtown Phoenixville on the side of a steep hill called Black Rock Road. The road was named after the Black Rock hills, one of the areas where the Lenape Indian tribe lived. Woven along a portion of I-76 is the Schuylkill River, which was originally called Manaiunk. For 10,000 years, the Lenape Indian tribe lived in rows of long houses that stretched along the river and in the Black Rock hills, hunting and fishing in the river and Sankanac, now called the French Creek.

From the 1600’s onwards, soon after Philadelphia was settled, an Englishman by the name of Charles Pickering borrowed a land grant from William Penn and bought several thousand acres of land, believing there were traces of silver in the stream. 

In the 1700’s, the area played a role in American Revolution. The two main businesses in the area, the first mill and the Nail Works, committed to building field hospitals for George Washington's Army. In 1813, a German engineer, Lewis Wenwag, bought the Nail Works and renamed it to the Phoenix Iron works “after seeing the resemblance of a Phoenix bird come out of the furnaces, as well as a symbolism of the company’s rise from the ashes”.

Phoenixville itself went through a rise from the ashes. It was once an unsafe, downtown area with rampant drug dealings and crime. The revitalizations made way for a new generation of business owners and dreamers to build on the backs of the immigrants and previous business owners who contributed to the town’s economic development.

I think of my own life and those before me who have laid the foundation and enabled me to dream in the ways that I do. The container for possibility only expands when you’ve seen the people before you continuously step outside of the small container they were dealt with from a young age.

Each time I come back to Phoenixville, it’s a reminder that the dreams I strive to reach are my own, but the possibility to even dream them in the present has been made possible because of the shoulders I continue to stand on.