The number of parents in town has been reduced from two to one, and still the activities, the activities, the all over town, the tired as a dog at the end of the day, the completely and utterly sick of every single department store, especially when the rhythm is Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and the better part of an hour spent buying six pairs of beige underwear. “I only take you to the best places,” I’d told the parentals as we traipsed along the Brooklyn Bridge or the Brooklyn Heights Promenade or Elizabeth Street or Blue Apron Foods on Union or the MSTBN at Great N.Y. Noodletown or inside the cold flower room at Chelsea Flower Market. But there is only so much steering a girl can do, and if one of your guests is hankering after six pairs of beige underwear, or if the other of your guests wants to go to the craptastic Century 21 for “nothing, just to look around,” then you just suck it up and go with. One of these days I might learn to simply point them in the direction of—maybe even walk them to the subway station and wave them good-bye—but for now the Chinese filial daughter thing is still going strong. Did I say “Chinese filial daughter thing”? I meant “Chinese daughter guilt complex thing.” Either way.

Maybe I am bitching and moaning, but only very little, and only because I am good at it. At the end of it all, we like them, these strange and unusual parents. And when interesting things happen such as my mum asking questions like what the difference is between Crate&Barrel and Pottery Barn (“What is the difference between Crate&Barrel and that other one, LockStock&Barrel?”), and then thinking about it, and then deducing, as she flips through the Pottery Barn catalogue: “Yes, Pottery Barn is more rustic. Like a barn,” well, you cannot help but like them very, very much.

In the meantime, those three pounds I lost driving around the country eating like a squirrel, subsisting on fruit and nuts and, um, cheeseburgers, like some sort of giant mutant ravenous omnivorous squirrel, those three pounds have found me again, what with the wining and dining of parents and their assorted friends. There have been: the spicy fish soup at Blue Ribbon; the early-morning brioche French toast at Balthazar; the late-nite hot noodle soups at Teriyaki Boy; the marinated artichokes and aged ham and lavender madeleines at Fig & Olive; the tomato-rosemary bread and seared duck and cashew-and-cherry salad at Spring Street Natural; the chilled English pea soup and seared tuna and lotus root crisps, and then, to follow, the hot chocolate with housemade marshmallows (in coconut, pistachio, and vanilla bean) and the buttermilk pannacotta with rhubarb marmalade at Terrace 5 at MoMA.

Oh, but I am forgetting that day when my mum’s friend Auntie K. was in town staying at the Mark. I looked up the Mark online to find out the address and the words that came up were “Mark Hotel Luxury Hotel.” And even though I was a little bit craving a donut, because I’d just gotten an e-mail from CC alerting me to these policeman-shaped air fresheners that smell like donuts, and even though I suspected that a luxury hotel on the Upper East Side may not have any donuts on hand, we got on the rush-hour train uptown to meet Auntie K. In fact, between the eggs and caviar and the truffle omelettes, the hotel restaurant menu offered no donuts. But! there was a very large wine glass of Greek yoghurt with crushed berries and a honey-sesame drizzle. Drizzle! For breakfast! Amazing. And so quiet a restaurant, the sort of thing with only murmuring, and polite clinks of silverware on china. After the Met—where the older ladies with high, candy-floss hair of spun sugar pointed and admired the gowns and suits at the Chanel exhibit—we returned later in the day, call me Eloise, for tea: delicate sandwiches in salmon and cucumber and curried tuna, light scones with cream and jam, fruit tarts, banana bread, and lychee tea in the smallest and finest of porcelain teacups.

So, but, the thing I wanted to say about MoMA a paragraph before, is this: It’s true, I am totally in love with MoMA, and not even just because of the menu at Terrace 5. More and more I go, (MoMA and MoMA I go), and more and more I am in awe of the magic miracle-making of Yoshio Taniguchi. The new space is clean and gracious and beautiful, but it is not without a whimsical glee. In the upstairs atrium, a cut-out in the wall offers a view of a security guard, bored, motionless, by the burst of Campari painting. In the sculpture garden, the sculptures are sculptures and the trees are sculptures.