San Francisco: an essay in three parts

A goodbye to the city of my childhood dreams

Once upon a time, I lived in a city that was not a city, a string of villages covered in cloud. It is a place borne of earthquake and fire; a place where the weather is always perfect; a place with the most beautiful airport in America.

I didn’t write much when I lived there. I was too content. I wrote when I visited Chicago, Seattle, New York: harder, gloomier cities that compel words. San Francisco, as I said, is barely a city at all, and the people who try to treat it like one are disappointed. It is a thing in itself.

The Physical City

San Francisco is the most beautiful place in the world. There are cities with better architecture and parks more wonderfully wild; but San Francisco is a glorious melding of nature and humanity. More than a thousand staircases lined with flowers grow from the asphalt; the bare tops of hills emerge from the houses as the fog rises. The shifting clouds make the physical city seem a living thing.

The names of bus and train lines are tinged with magic: The 52 Excelsior: Padua and Prague; the N Judah and L Taraval; West Portal, the remains of East Portal a sign on the south side of a park. The 43 Masonic takes you on a journey around a mountain, past murals, through a eucalyptus forest, and finally to the sea.

To understand San Francisco, you have to understand the light. Chicago has wonderful light, but the cities are polar opposites. Chicago is a harsh city with harsh light – light with teeth, almost erotic. In San Francisco, even at midday, the light is soft. Sunshine is ever-present but ephemeral; the fog is always about to rise or fall.

After living there, I don’t feel the need to get to know any more beautiful places. I said my long goodbye in the ever-changing light, on the grassy and bare hills that spring up from neighborhoods, on the endless staircases of flower and fog.

As I walked in Glen Canyon Park for the last time, I saw had become a lush alien wonderland, so different when I’d arrived two Novembers ago. I desperately tried to capture the flowers in the fading sunlight, as if I’d never see another sunset or another spring.

San Francisco, with its otherworldly beauty and ever-present threat of earthquake and fire, is the place I would like to die.

The Tech City

But the physical city isn’t what most people know about San Francisco, or else I think it would be more beloved. San Francisco is also a dystopia. There are many cities that are worse-off, but San Francisco is dystopic precisely because it is so rich.

San Francisco, shining beacon of tolerance. A city that uses progressive rhetoric to justify powerful men preying on women half their age. A city that coopts the language of the left to deny housing to the workers who keep it alive.

Public transit in the Bay Area is abysmal; tech workers cloister themselves in cars and charter buses. The glistening innovation capital of the world is ruled by fentanyl and meth. Any functional city can keep people from living on the street and hard drugs off trains, but not one controlled by robber barons who are above public services.

This, in one of the wealthiest cities in the wealthiest country at the wealthiest time in history. I’ve known people in awful material circumstances who still had community and something to live for. I am optimistic about Lusaka, and Delhi, and Chicago’s South Side.

But there is something deeply horrifying about both San Francisco’s open air drug markets and tech parties; a hollowness of spirit. And this is why this is not a policy piece — I have no answers. What policies would benefit a city that has gained the world for its soul?

I was part of it, of course. If I wasn’t in tech, I might as well have been. I was an overeducated east coast transplant working in digital media. I didn’t — didn’t dare to — have plans to stay long. I went to tech parties; I ran in tech circles; I learned about burning man and rationalism and crypto.

I desperately tried to convince myself that I wasn’t the death of the city, and so did the tech people. And maybe some of us weren’t in some ways. Maybe volunteering, or storytelling, was our penance.

The Real City

The city can’t only exist as a fantasy world of nature and infrastructure, or a malign, soulless policy failure. The city is real, and so there must be hundreds of thousands of real cities, one for every person who has landed here and found they’d come home.

San Francisco was the Gold Rush, the transcontinental railroad, the beautiful country. It was half-myth and legend, a tenuous link between the today and what might’ve come before. This is the story of San Francisco I claimed growing up, a weird little kid raised on weird little stories, from sea to shining sea.

I had dreamed of San Francisco from before I could remember: its glistening airport, its glittering lanterns. To me, California was synonymous with San Francisco; San Francisco was California. It was my gritty city on a hill, the pinnacle of the Chinese American dream.

If you go into the bakeries of the Richmond and Sunset, you can almost touch this city. The shops are nestled between trendier restaurants and overshadowed by historic Chinatown. They only take cash. They have the best egg tarts in America.

If you go to the barracks at Angel Island you can see poems written on the walls; you can hear the writing of detained scholars. The houses smell like they’ve been vacant for a hundred years.

There are other real cities of which vestiges remain: burrito shops founded long before the tech rush, forts with dead-eyed cannons by the sea, ancient rainbow flags flying in the Castro. The ghosts of San Francisco still lie in Colma, uprooted from the Outside Lands almost a century ago.

Real people live here. Some of them paint murals in the hollowed-out financial district. Some of them hold onto property values with wizened hands. Some of them live in tents in an underpass on Cesar Chavez. Some of them dance down Mission Street for hours in the cold summer. Some of them work in tech.

I have never seen a city with so few children. I often felt that it was dying, and — unlike other cities — what was rising to replace it was nothing good. But then, I don’t know, a new pupuseria would open. Or the poppies would come in the spring.

***

No one ever thought I was from Chicago. I wasn’t nice enough, probably.

The paradox of San Francisco is that I never thought I understood it like I understood Chicago — a city that for all its surface harshness, accepts the world and molds you in its image. San Francisco had a shifting veneer that I rarely managed to see past; I could have lived there for the rest of my life and never felt I belonged.

But everyone else thought I did. The people that knew me best knew I was happiest there. They thought I would stay.

Two weeks before I left, I said goodbye to everyone at my dentist’s office; all Californians who’d been working together for ages; a realer San Francisco than I ever could've dreamed. They thought I was like them. I'd never clarified.

“I’m moving to the East Coast.”

“It’ll be an adventure!”

“Yeah.” It would be for a Californian. Maybe I’ll come back; I thought, or maybe said, or maybe implied by the gloom in my voice.

“We’ll be here.”