The Richmond

I hated where we lived in San Francisco’s Richmond District, three blocks from the Pacific Ocean, two blocks from the community center with its low ceilings and dreary salt-scrubbed façade. I hated the Richmond’s brackish air, its June fog when everywhere else was warm in the summer. I hated my middle school, which boasted of its only claim to fame (a contest to see who could wear shorts all summer long) in its annual newsletter.

“Mama, why can’t we just move to a better district?” I asked on the last day of sixth grade. I was eleven, my hands stuffed into my pockets to warm them in the foggy June chill. We were waiting for our bus, watching the rich kids get into their parents’ cars.

Mama ignored my question. Instead, she waved at a mom she recognized in a car headed for the special math-and-science summer camp that offered its pupils brand-name sodas and brand-name futures. The mom wore shiny black curls that reminded me of Mrs. Wan, one of my parents’ oldest friends, who permed her hair with abandon. I pictured both Mrs. Wan and the woman from the car sleeping in hard plastic curlers, waking with pink, tender scalps each morning.

The woman’s daughter, who was also the sixth-grade class president, stuck her tongue out at me through the open car window as they drove past. I stared down at my shoes, wishing to disappear. Mama turned to study my face, her eyes soft and brown and puzzled. She didn’t look toward the street when a driver honked their horn at another car. She didn’t point out the stain on my shirt from my cranberry juice box. When she spoke, she did so quietly and firmly. “What do people know?” she said. “Having more money doesn’t mean anything if you can’t keep your tongue inside of your head.”

I pushed Mama’s kindness away with a violent shake of my head. I didn’t know how to tell her that it wasn’t the pink tongue wagging in the wind I was upset about. It was Mrs. Waterson, the substitute food slinger, a graying white woman with shriveled arms who’d filled in for our beloved cafeteria manager Mr. Gonzalez.

“Do. You. Want. A. Scoop. Of. This?” Mrs. Waterson had asked the student before me in line, a shy eighth-grade Chinese girl with a purple birthmark the size of a hand on her right cheek. “Do. You. Want. Po-ta-toes?” She enunciated each syllable, her volume turned up just slightly.

When the eighth-grader declined, Mrs. Waterson turned her syrupy smile to me, the same scoop of dreary, off-white mashed potatoes stretched out in front of her. “How. About. You? Do. You. Want. Mashed. Potatoes?” Again, the saccharine smile.

My cheeks flushed, and I could feel my heart pounding in my ears. I clutched the plastic tray, unsure what was happening to me. All I knew was that Mrs. Waterson had not spoken like this with the two white kids who’d gone ahead of us in line. I didn’t understand what it was about the old woman’s voice that cut through me.

In my dreams now, I often return to that moment. It is once again 1970. I am eleven years old and I understand what ignorance looks and sounds like. I have the language to describe that feeling of being singled out, of needing to constantly prove my worth, my humanity. I am eleven and I understand that the things we put in our mouths can hurt us as much as the poison that comes out. That these tiny humiliations can fissure rooms into Belonging and Not Belonging, stamp invisible passports that give only certain people the freedom to inhabit the world without question, allow these same people to be the default everyone else is compared to. They call out your name, slowly, deliberately, with a smile that cleaves you in two.

“Why do we live here?” I asked Mama again. I gestured around at the gray sidewalk, the seagull droppings that stained the concrete. What I really wanted to know was whether I’d ever make it to the sheltered heart of our city—a place I imagined like the lost city of Atlantis, a place I wasn’t sure even existed, so circumscribed were our lives. I imagined a golden school with grand basketball courts and libraries, with no math tests, with teachers and kids who looked and sounded like me. And where this new school was, it would never be foggy. There would be crisp blue skies, wide and open and full of possibilities.

Mama looked hard at me for a moment, then up into the tangled, black spider web of trolley cables that choked the sky overhead. “What do you mean ‘here,’ Mei?” she asked, brushing a strand of hair out of my face.

I winced, imagining how Mrs. Waterson would have spoken to Mama if she’d heard her accent.

“Why do you always have to take everything so personally?” Mama asked. “You’re not going to survive if you don’t know how to just shake it off when someone sticks their tongue out at you. She’ll grow up.”

“Is this all you want for me? This school, the stupid rich kids who get everything? Mrs. Waterson?”

“Who is this Mrs. Waterson?”

I frowned, crossed my arms over my chest. The bus arrived, and we sat in silence until we reached the stop in front of our apartment.

“Mei?” asked Mama gently, as she opened the front door with her jangle of keys. I didn’t know what to say. But when she placed a plate of my favorite after-school snack—smudges of blended chicken liver smeared onto large, square, whole-grain crackers—my resolve finally snapped, and the story about Mrs. Waterson spilled out. Mama listened as she finished the dishes, her fingers pink and pruned. She wiped her hands on her apron and sat down beside me.

“I’m so proud of you for sharing this with me,” she began. “These things . . . I cannot tell you that these things will not happen to you again.”

“Why can’t we go somewhere else where we don’t have to deal with people like her?”

“You think that it’s better outside of the Richmond?” Mama’s voice was slightly raised, her cheeks pink. “You leave here, then where would you go?”

“Chinatown,” I said.

“Chinatown? It’s not so easy. We move to Chinatown, and you think they won’t tease you for speaking Chinese with an American accent? For being born here? For being too American? Or that they won’t look down on me for raising you in all this?” She gestured around at our tiny kitchen. I didn’t know what she was trying to point at, so I stuck my gaze on the pair of shears with razor-sharp teeth that she used to cut whole chicken carcasses in half.

I’d always known that Mama and Baba refused to leave our foggy little Chinese hamlet. Although my parents had traveled here from across the world—me smaller than a twig inside Mama’s uterus when they first arrived in the States—now they would no longer travel east of Arguello Boulevard. I’d thought it was because the Richmond was filled with all the top-notch vegetable markets, gossipy fishmongers, and bustling Chinese restaurants serving cow’s throat tendon, pork dumplings, cloud-ear fungus, hotpots overflowing with steamy, bubbling chicken broth. Each Sunday morning, Mama and Baba proudly stalked the streets, hunting for bargains among other Chinese couples—packs of silver- and black-haired people wearing the same sensible flat sneakers, the same unfussy jackets and lumpy hand-knitted sweaters.

“Mei, look at me,” Mama said softly when I began to pull on a loose thread. When I refused to look at her, she placed her hand on mine to stop me from fidgeting. “You have to understand that there is no way to get it ‘right,’ no way that we can behave, nowhere we can go that will change some people’s minds about immigrants.”

I shook my head, angry tears blurring my eyes when I realized that she was probably right. “I’m not an immigrant,” I finally said, swallowing my tears and looking directly into her eyes, speaking with as much false confidence as I could muster. “You and Baba are. Why are you punishing me? I’m not like you.”

Mama sighed and looked at me with an expression I’d only seen once before, when I’d had my first fight with a friend at the age of six. Mama had found me inconsolable, screaming at the top of my lungs at a friend who’d inexplicably stabbed me in the leg with a pencil. I remembered sitting on Mama’s lap, her rubbing my back in slow circles, her gentle shhh-shhh-shhh. The stickiness of my tears, the snot I wouldn’t wipe away because I wanted to show her how much I hurt. And I remembered the worry and sadness in Mama’s eyes, not because of the small wound on my leg, which had already stopped bleeding, but because, I think, it was a hurt she could not explain away, a hurt that had no logic in its cruelty.

“I cannot make you understand.” Mama stood, and pushed in her chair. “But I hope that you will try.”

She crossed the kitchen, carefully removed and folded her apron, and placed it inside a drawer. My tears fell silently, plopping on the tops of my hands as I yanked furiously on the loose thread which began to unravel the hem of my sweatshirt. I watched Mama’s retreating back. Would I ever leave the Richmond, our glass home, clear for everyone to see our stamped passports, question our borrowed belonging?

*

Every Sunday we had dinner with the first friends my parents made in the States. When the Wans, former aristocrats from Shanghai, visited us, their lively gossip with Mama and Baba filled our tiny kitchen with a jumble of Cantonese, Mandarin, Toisan, and Shanghainese. Like sparrows, my parents communicated in lyrical warbles, trilling echoes of Shanghai. Our home on these nights smelled of shrimp, fermented bean paste, and green onion.

The Wans were the most adventurous people I knew: they were like the dashing bandits in the Westerns Baba and I watched together. They were the first in my parents’ circle of friends to successfully digest American cheese, and Mr. Wan swam for an hour in the freezing San Francisco Bay every morning, while Mrs. Wan taught tai chi to creaky old men and women in the nearby city park. Once, they even successfully stopped a group of bored teenagers from using bottles of bleach to poison the tide pools, shouting profanities in Chinese at the top of their lungs until the delinquents ran away. In the Wans’ first year of living in San Francisco, they visited nearly every neighborhood in the city, from Lake Merced to North Beach, whether they were welcome or not. The only thing they seemed to have in common with my parents was that they refused to live anywhere but the Richmond.

Mr. Wan loved to tell the story of an elderly acquaintance of his. The acquaintance was a typewriter salesman from Beijing who traveled to downtown every day to sell his wares. “His first year, he slipped on a step and broke his ankle, and still managed to sell his best typewriter before going to the hospital.” Baba always shook his head in appreciation when Mr. Wan said this. “He has a limp to this day. I always ask him when he’ll move in with his daughter in Sacramento, into the backyard cottage she built for him. Avocados. Oranges for miles. All sun. No more fog. No more cold, achy mornings. Make his life easier. But you know what he said?” Mr. Wan looked proudly around the table. “He said, ‘I left everything once before. I’d rather break my neck than leave the Richmond.’” Mama and Baba nodded and murmured appreciatively.

While we slurped our fish-ball soup, Mrs. Wan spoke of wind in the Mission District so strong it straightened her perm. She ran her fingers through her hair and described how the air there was filled with the intoxicating aroma of cumin and oregano and cinnamon. She described hearing Spanish—its falling and rising tones, so similar to Cantonese, the lively punctuated syllables, its power and musicality. She described the wonder she experienced hearing a new language for the first time. “You let the sounds wash over you like water,” she said. “And if you do not know how to swim, you trust that the deep waters will hold you. Be fearless.”

“What is fearless to you?” asked Mama.

“Fearless is when you cannot understand what’s being said to or around you. Fearless is celebrating, honoring the not knowing.” Mrs. Wan went on to describe the sweet, sugary smells wafting out the doorways of Mexican bakeries, the pastries in brilliant colors she’d never seen before.

Years later, Mama would describe another type of fearlessness. “Kinship,” she said one night after dinner, years after Baba died, as we sat back in our chairs with our full bellies, cleaning our teeth with toothpicks. She said it was a community formed out of a need to nourish tongues with the sounds and tastes of home.

But back in 1970, on the night of my last day of sixth grade, Baba was still very much alive, and he had filled his body with whiskey and let his memories of China kick and thrash to the surface. “We here know what we left, what we lost when we escaped from China.” He was speaking to the Wans and Mama. “People who don’t know say that we ‘left’ China. We didn’t ‘leave.’ It’s not like a shop closing, business hours are over. No. We fled. We hid. We ran. We saw the worst in humans.” The adults looked knowingly at one another. “And then . . . we found the Richmond. We persevered until white people took down the signs in their windows that said ‘No Chinese Allowed.’ We carved and scraped and scoured out a life here.” He took a gulp of whiskey, smacked his lips with satisfaction. “My wife tells me Mei wants to move out of the Richmond.” Baba jabbed his thumb in my direction, then winked at Mr. Wan and Mama.

“Well, Mei, where would you go?” asked Mrs. Wan in her elegant accented English. “What are you looking for out there?”

Trying to avoid her gaze, I glanced at Mama, then Baba; both waited for my answer with expressions I couldn’t read. I shredded my napkin into my lap as I thought about leaving the Richmond to attend a swanky summer program with all the cleverest kids in my school. I imagined taking the cable car, passing underneath the deluxe skyscrapers downtown. I imagined the wind whipping through my hair in the Mission, embarking on a fearless, cumin-spiced journey into my brand-name future. I could become someone different, better, free of the Richmond’s oppressive fog, its heavy white sky, the squat, unadorned buildings weighed down by their own neediness.

Finally, I spoke. “I just don’t get it. What’s so good about here? There’s nothing here. Just oily noodles and gossiping in Chinese, and a stupid school with stupid kids, and . . . what?”

Baba pushed the cork back into the whiskey bottle and said, “Belonging.”

“But the Richmond isn’t ours.”

“We will keep trying to make it something of ours,” said Baba.

“But why? Why did you even come here?” My face blazed under the bright kitchen lights and glare of the adults’ attentiveness. I did not yet understand what dangers they’d escaped, the courage it took to face the unknown. How do you teach a child about flight when that child has never heard government rifles firing into the heads of neighbors, friends, classmates, or the beggar-poet on the street corner who shared his daily earnings with neighborhood children? I didn’t know any of this as I watched Baba uncork the bottle again, pour whiskey for himself and the Wans.

At first, there was nothing but the sound of the blood pounding in my ears. After a short while, Mr. Wan chuckled and shook his head before returning to eating. Mrs. Wan smiled sadly before turning her attention back to my parents and starting a story about her hairdresser who had five husbands living in different parts of the city. Baba sighed, and Mama gently squeezed my hand under the table. After a beat, she picked up her chopsticks and popped a fish ball into her mouth while she nodded her head at Mrs. Wan’s gossip.

In the distance, I could hear the bellow of the foghorn signaling the icy, low clouds rolling in off the ocean. Mama had given me a book about foghorns for my tenth birthday. On the glossy hardcover was a photo of a mammoth, orange-red horn, the size of a compact car, situated below the Golden Gate Bridge’s South Tower. The book said that in the 1930s, the booming foghorns used to keep residents in the Richmond awake. The city responded to the complaints by redirecting the foghorns toward the center of the bay. I thought about the disturbed sleep of the inmates at Alcatraz, how their complaints went ignored, how the deep organ tones continued to rattle their bones until the prison was closed nearly three decades later.

*

The next morning, Mama and Baba took me to the beach. We bundled up in our heaviest coats, stuffed our wool-socked feet into our shoes, and walked the three blocks to the ocean. We sat before the choppy waves, watching seagulls bob in the water and a group of children slap each other with long strips of seaweed.

I worked at digging a deep hole in the sand to bury a beached jellyfish. I dug diligently, occasionally looking up to watch the clouds of seafoam splatter the children’s ankles as they chased one another. By the time I’d finished digging, my fingers were numb and starting to prune from the dampness of the sand. I used a stick to prod the jellyfish, watched the gelatinous membrane dimple under the pressure, then tipped it into the bottom of the hole, where it wobbled briefly. I imagined myself the size of a small clam, jumping down to the bottom of this mighty hole with the jellyfish. I imagined looking up for the sun, the jellyfish waking up, thrashing against my ankles, stinging me, stinging itself until both our skins blistered and bled. I thought of how my parents’ world was like the jellyfish: waterlogged, thrashing against itself—the wild translucent beauty that feels so tame in history books—words and song and history that smelled of whiskey, of gunpowder, of flight. A message only for those who knew.

I dropped heavily down beside Mama, exhausted from digging. I buried my fingers in the dry sand near the surface, where it had been warmed by the sun. Mama plunged one of her hands into the sand too. Her fingertips met mine. She smiled at me, and after a moment said, “Remember that report you did about the dodo in school?”

I nodded.

“You were so upset about that silly bird, thinking about how they all died out, got themselves killed.”

As she used her other hand to pile up more sand on top of our buried hands, I thought about how frustrating that report was. How I’d asked Mama over and over how the universe could have created such a clumsy, sluggish, flightless bird, a creature so foolish that it allowed itself to be hunted to extinction. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t fight back against the humans that arrived to slaughter them in Mauritius. Why didn’t they stand their ground and peck to death anyone who came near them?

“I was thinking . . . maybe dodos were hunted to extinction because they were stupid. But maybe it’s because they learned how to trust. Imagine if they’d had fearless friends, other birds who could have flown them off that island. Imagine if they took that courage to trust themselves, and built a new life with their new friends.”

One of the children near us, who was being picked on by the others, threw her bucket at the rest of them, but the wind grabbed it and splashed it into the water. Unable to reach the bucket without wading into the frigid tide, she cried in frustration. Mama looked on as Baba went to retrieve the bucket, afraid that the child would venture into the waves for it and be swept out to sea.

“We left our home to make our new life, Mei,” she said. “And it was here we had you. Here we met the Wans. Here we ‘made do’ the best we could. You weren’t there when we fled our homes with nothing but what we could sew into the linings of our jackets. You weren’t there when my classmates, my friends, were shot in the head for not turning us in to the soldiers. My whole life was running, Mei. Your father and I, we are done searching. We belong. Do you understand?”

I wanted to say that I did. I wanted to say that I understood hunger, that I understood why China’s farmers would slaughter the country’s sparrows, and why in 1958 this meant that locusts leapt from the clouds instead of rain. I wanted to say that I understood why Mama cried when she told stories of her own youth, of this sky famine, collectivized drought. I wanted to say that I understood Baba’s crude jokes with the Wans, about how they’d escaped genocide by pointing to their neighbors then playing dead. But, at eleven, I couldn’t translate their birdsong, and thought it a sweet uselessness. I couldn’t understand that my parents, with their twisted refugee humor, understood flight as well as any bird; that their laughter was a sparrow song of sorrow, of disloyalty, of survival—a savage happiness. I couldn’t picture Mama’s childhood friend on her knees, hands tied behind her back, hair spilling over her shoulders, tears pouring from her eyes as a soldier towered over her. I could not picture the explosion of a bullet fired from a rifle, the pierced skin, the shattering skull, the blood, or Mama’s grief. I had not lost something, anything, anyone so dear, to such violence.

Mama exhaled deeply, squeezed my hand gently under the sand, then stood. She brushed off her legs, then trotted down to the water.

From where I sat high up on the beach—my back snug against the soft dunes, my fingers still plunged into the warm sand—Baba and Mama looked like little miniatures of themselves. Baba’s sunglasses just a black strip around his head, like a little bandit mask.

I pictured both Mama and Baba as little figurines in the water, clutching the pail’s curved red lip. Open to flight, a skyline full of towering telephone poles, electric lines, fog.

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