The City We Became suggests that people’s beliefs and concepts determine how they perceive reality—by making beliefs and concepts literally capable of transforming material reality in its science-fictional universe. Beliefs and concepts, including stereotypes, can be positive, neutral, or destructive, which means that what one believes really matters. In the novel, all life exists in a “multiverse” of parallel dimensions. Choices, beliefs, ideas, stories, and so on can cause new dimensions to split off from old ones, so that new realities are constantly proliferating. Arguably, the science-fiction trope of a multiverse created by choices and beliefs makes literal the idea that every person, due to their unique set of beliefs and experiences, figuratively lives in their own world.
In the novel, beliefs and concepts can transform the material world even within a single dimension. In the dimension in which the novel takes place, cities come alive once enough residents, through their history and culture, “tell enough stories about it”—at which point the city chooses a human avatar to represent and protect it. A city’s human avatar embodies the concept of that city. When New York City comes alive and chooses not only a primary avatar but also five avatars to represent each of its boroughs (the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island), it chooses people who could be the quintessential New Yorker or the quintessential resident of that borough—in other words, people who fit stereotypes. The city’s avatars are then able to use city- or borough-specific stereotypes to access the city’s power. In one memorable scene, the Bronx’s avatar Bronca activates the stereotype of aggressive New York drivers by going 70 in a 25 mph speed zone—which summons the city’s power to protect her car from alien attackers. While stereotypes about New York City drivers are relatively harmless, not all stereotypes are. In another scene, an extradimensional alien invader called the Woman in White uses a painting representing virulently racist stereotypes about residents of Chinatown to summon paint monsters that attack Bronca. Though fantastical, this scene implies that negative stereotypes can lead to real-world violence. Thus, beliefs, concepts, and stereotypes have real power to affect reality—in the science-fictional world of the novel and, the novel implies, in the reader’s world as well.
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Beliefs, Concepts, and Stereotypes ThemeTracker
Beliefs, Concepts, and Stereotypes Quotes in The City We Became
Back when I was in school, there was an artist who came in on Fridays to give us free lessons in perspective and lighting and other shit that white people go to art school to learn. Except this guy had done that, and he was Black. I’d never seen a Black artist before. For a minute I thought I could maybe be one, too.
He’s been talking like this since he showed up—places that never were, things that can’t be, omens and portents. I figure it’s bullshit because he’s telling it to me, a kid whose own mama kicked him out and prays for him to die every day and probably hates me. God hates me. And I fucking hate God back, so why would he choose me for anything? But that’s really why I start paying attention: because of God. I don’t have to believe in something for it to fuck up my life.
“But seriously, thanks for helping me. You hear all kinds of stuff about how rude New Yorkers are, but . . . thanks.”
“Eh, we’re only assholes to people who are assholes first,” she says, but she smiles as she says it.
“Heard they were calling in emergency personnel from the whole, what do you call it? Tri-state area? for this mess. God, I can’t wait to see which entire ethnic group they’re going to scapegoat in the wake of this one.”
“Maybe it’s a white guy. Again.”
“A ‘lone wolf’ with mental health issues, right!”
I am Manhattan, he thinks again, this time in a slow upwelling of despair. Every murderer. Every slave broker. Every slumlord who shut off the heat and froze children to death. Every stockbroker who got rich off war and suffering.
It’s only the truth. He doesn’t have to like it, though.
So when she’d seen this man step out of the crumbling entryway of an old building shell, with a smirk on his lips and his hand prominently resting on the handle of his gun, she’d felt like she does now, fiftyish years later in an art center bathroom. She’d felt bigger. Beyond fear or anger. She’d gone to the doorway, of course. Then she grabbed its sides to brace herself, and kicked in his knee. He’d spent three months in traction, claiming he’d slipped on a brick, and never messed with her again. Six years later, having bought her own pair of steel-toed boots, Bronca had done the same thing to a police informant at Stonewall—another time she’d been part of something bigger.
Bigger. As big as the whole goddamn borough.
It is the other place. The other him. The city he has become. New York City, as its whole and distinct self rather than the agglomeration of images and ideas that are its camouflage in this reality. He understands, suddenly, why he has seen that other place as empty; it isn’t. The people are there, but in spirit—just as New York City itself has a phantom presence in the lives of every citizen and visitor. Here in this strange, abstract mural, Manny sees the truth that he now lives.
And he knows as well: the person who is the Bronx made this.
That was what had made the paint-figures so creepy, really. To know that the things she was seeing weren’t just mindless, swirl-faced monsters, but things with minds and feelings? Minds as incomprehensibly alien as Lovecraft once imagined his fellow human beings to be.
“I keep thinking about how, at the park, she kept switching between ‘we’ and ‘I’ like the pronouns were interchangeable. Like she couldn’t keep the words straight, and they didn’t really matter anyway.”
“Maybe this isn’t her first language.”
That’s partly it. But Manny suspects the problem is less linguistic than contextual. She doesn’t get English because English draws a distinction between the individual self and the collective plural, and wherever she comes from, whatever she is, that difference doesn’t mean the same thing. If there’s a difference at all.
I’m his, he thinks suddenly, wildly. I want to be . . . oh, God, I want to be his. I live for him and will die for him if he requires it, and oh yes, I’ll kill for him, too, he needs that, and so for him and him alone I will be again the monster that I am—
[T]he modified brownstone has been shorn of the stoop that once connected it to the neighborhood. This amputation is a still-healing wound that makes the building even more susceptible to attack by foreign organisms.
“Nothing human beings do is set in stone—and even stone changes, anyway. We can change, too, anything about ourselves that we want to. We just have to want to.” She shrugs. “People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”
Everything that happens everywhere else happens on Staten Island, too, but here people try not to see the indecencies, the domestic violence, the drug use. And then, having denied what’s right in front of their eyes, they tell themselves that at least they’re living in a good place full of good people. At least it’s not the city.
[…]
Evil comes from elsewhere, Matthew Houlihan believes. Evil is other people. She will leave him this illusion, mostly because she envies his ability to keep finding comfort in simple, black-and-white views of the world. Aislyn’s ability to do the same is rapidly eroding.
“Okay, so.” Brooklyn visibly braces herself. “So what happens to those universes that our city punches through?”
[…]
“They die,” Bronca says. She’s decided to be compassionate about it, but relentless. None of them can afford sentimentality. “The punching-through? It’s a mortal wound, and that universe folds out of existence. Every time a city is born—no, really, before that. The process of our creation, what makes us alive, is the deaths of hundreds or thousands of other closely related universes, and every living thing in them.”
Brooklyn shuts her eyes for a moment. “Oh my God,” Queens breaths. “Oh my God. We’re all mass murderers.”
[…]
[Manny] takes [Padmini’s] shaking hands in his own, and looks her in the eye, and says, “Would you prefer to offer up all of your family and friends to die instead? Maybe there’s a way we can.”
There is an instant in which Aislyn’s mind tries to signal an alarm, doom, existential threat, all the usual fight-or-flight signals that are the job of the lizard brain. And if the gush of substance had been different somehow—something hideous, maybe—she would have started screaming.
Three things stop her. The first and most atavistic is that everything in her life has programmed her to associate evil with specific, easily definable things. Dark skin. Ugly people with scars or eyepatches or wheelchairs. Men. The Woman in White is the visual opposite of everything Aislyn has been taught to fear, and so . . . Even though intellectually Aislyn now has proof that what she’s seeing is just a guise, and the Woman in White’s true form could be anyone or anything . . .
. . . Aislyn also thinks, Well, she looks all right.
[Aislyn] can see [Hong’s] filthy, foreign foot planted square on the dill.
The anger comes on faster than Aislyn’s ever gotten angry in her life. It is as if Conall has broken a dam within her, and now every bit of fury she has ever suppressed over thirty years just needs the barest hair trigger to explode forth.
“Living cities aren’t defined by politics,” he says. It’s almost a shout, so urgently does he speak. “Not by city limits or county lines. They’re made of whatever the people who live in and around them believe.”
