Look Away

When you move from a small town to the big city, you’ll have to try to fit in. It’s different living in a big city than in a small town, because there’s different “rules” you’ll have to learn and follow.
“IN rural Minnesota, where I grew up, it was the custom to greet everyone you met on the road, whether you knew the person or not, with a "hi." A muttered, uninflected "hi" was entirely acceptable, but the word had to be spoken.”
In the small town, Minnesota, where Siri Hustvedt grew up, it was common courtesy to say “hi” to one another even though you didn’t know the person you said “hi” to. In 1978, Siri Hustvedt moved to the city that never sleeps, New York. Here she couldn’t use her small town charm, because moving to the big city was like moving to another planet in some kind of way. “Within days, I absorbed the unwritten code of survival in this town, a convention communicated silently but forcefully. This simple law, one nearly every New Yorker subscribes to whenever possible, is: pretend it isn't happening.”
Siri Hustvedt here describes that it’s survival of the fittest. You’ll have to learn to look the other way to be a true New Yorker and to survive in the big city. Minnesota works in an opposite way than New York, because you’d considered as a snob, if you don’t say “hi” in Minnesota, but in New York it’s; mind your own business, and you will survive in this town.
“At 24th Street, the door opened for a woman who was wearing nothing but a flimsy bathrobe over her naked body – My friend had been staring at the woman, but was a little ashamed when he realized that nobody else had given the woman a first glance, much less a second. “
Siri Hustvedt had en Iranian friend, who’d taken the bus, when the bathrobe-lady stepped into the bus. The Iranian friend wasn’t from New York, so he/her was shocked by her different dress code, and he/her