Where I'm From
I grew up in the 1970s and 80s in Daly City -- a working-class, fog-kissed town at San Francisco’s southern foot. My early memories are of a place and time disconnected from the ones I occupy today.
Curious hair-do's swam through black and white static on a small glass portal in the back room. People wrapped in polyester invoked words like “space age,” “non-stick,” “jet plane,” and “allow six to eight weeks for delivery” to conjure a fairytale landscape of the boundless consumer future awaiting us all.
In our little boxes, we couldn't yet hear the groans of capitalism’s destruction. [Check out the actual song; its subversively cute package exposes a disturbing reality!]
My dad was a barber in the union shop in the strip mall across the street. My mom, also a rep in her union, was a teacher’s aide for special-needs students in the public school district my older brother and I attended. They also worked night and evening jobs -- selling wares in department stores, cleaning carpets in restaurants and airplanes, showing properties for realtors, and painting our own little box to defray the rent. In their spare time, they took turns squeezing in night classes at a community college.
My parents didn't just put a roof over our heads; they helped us see that ours was the very roof where the world’s most magnificent discoveries happened day-in and -out.
Our environment was rich in so many ways. Our friends were Black, Pinoy, Latino, Asian, Middle Eastern, Samoan, immigrants, refugees, and the white kids whose families also treasured the community we built together. We played, learned, laughed, supported, and grew together.
An interjection from the Needless to Say Department: it wasn't all rose petals and multi-cultural hand-holding. We watched many white families join the flight down the peninsula “for better schools and fewer languages.” And in one of my earliest memories, graffiti of white supremacist, torch-carrying terrorist figures was covered and repeatedly repainted on a prominent retaining wall a few blocks away from where we lived.
Our community was also defined by its ignorance, fear, and hatred.
At least in this way, it was a place and time exactly like today -- one defined by conflict, atrocities, and shameful mistakes it's long past time we stopped repeating.
Both foreign and familiar, exemplary and reprehensible, this blip in space and time placed me among the family, friends, and community who shaped me.
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