field notes

last night was the first time I took the 48 home after 11pm from the mission. since moving back my faith in taking public transit after dark diminished greatly as a certain vigilance exponentially increased, with the expectation that any unsettling scenario at a bus stop or on a bus/train I created in my head would likely happen. unfortunately some of them weren’t unwarranted and I’ve witnessed grody things, reinforcing that hesitancy. but I’m becoming gratingly patient again with muni these days, not to mention with much less cash/willingness to hail a car.

but that night our driver struck conversations with anyone nearby like a dad who was bored and nosy, trying to pass his last circuit of the night as quickly as possible. to a man sitting in his immediate right: “I’ve seen you here before,” and the old man gamely replied, 'I’ve ridden this bus three times with you.' ‘where are you from?’ ‘ah, let’s not do that tonight,’ chuckling, but when the driver pressed him, he added, ‘do you know where swahili is spoken?’ ‘well, you got me.' 'parts of eastern africa, you know: the congo, uganda, kenya, mozambique, tanzania,  malawi...’ 

earlier that evening I spent almost an hour at mission pool playground. nearing sunset, pickup soccer games are ending, a man in a headband is reading a book, a cotton candy vendor walks through the gate and rests on a bench with his rainbow tower balancing on the armrest, and parents are taking their kids into the park. one girl fidgets at the gate as her mom unlatches it, and she sprints toward the abstract-looking structures that will spin her and another fellow park-going girl at 5mph until they scream out of dizziness. an elderly woman comes in and programs herself into stretches and soft punches, reaching her toes far more deftly than I can, swiveling herself on one of another structure with an impassive face. some older youths occasionally race their bikes from one end to the other, a grandpa chasing a little boy away from their paths. amnesia’s doors are wide open and jazz wafts across the street to this side. 

admittedly I’m trying to romanticize a place sanctioned from any and all that’s been written about the mission and/or the city at large. and yes, the oft-mentioned indicators of change and disparity we are very fluent about inevitably creep in: as the sun continues to disappear a couple guys walk in with a shopping cart and a bundle of wool blankets and garbage bags, respectively. just outside the park’s gates are tourists dangling SLRs, charter buses grinding along Valencia, more shopping carts strolling among my fellow twenty-somethings rushing (a lot of rushing) home from work, not daring to glance at the park. I knowingly write from a place of privilege because I can never be completely accurate of ongoing socio-economic and racial tensions of living in another very wealthy city. but hear me out.

in new york I would often feel so wrung out, stressed or especially defeated, but it would take a particular moment for me to come around and reset. it would happen at the rare times when I suddenly had the entire street to myself walking home late in uncleared streets while it snowed, or wagging eyebrows with an mta conductor for a split second before the train sped off, or being the only person sitting at the temple of dendur. a moment like that renewed reasons why I didn’t want to be anywhere else. and after more than a year back in san francisco, I’d finally found a series of those moments that evening, and I reset.

as ktsf has been shifting from multilingual to a mandarin-speaking tv station filled with pre-war dramas, I miss the days of my grandma and me catching cantonese shows whose storylines included (and weren't limited to):