April 9, 2025
In January this year, I wrote this about how I felt being away from 'home' for the Lunar New Year again:
This lunar new year eve, I am usually home in Singapore.
I am seven years old, and I wake up to the smell of roasted chilli, poached chicken, and cabbage soup.
There’s a bustle in the kitchen. My grandpa is stirring a pot, making his signature chilli paste that we all won’t eat our food without. My grandma is fussing over the roast duck, soy sauce chicken and whole fish and prawns.
I walk into the kitchen, in search of a snack. No matter how busy they are, they always have time to feed me.
Have some hae jor, beancurd rolls stuffed with pork, shrimp and chestnuts. Have a bit of everything.
My grandma calls me her ‘little baby mouse’, because I eat so slowly and carefully.
I watch TV until my cousins arrive. I put on my good clothes (but I have to be forced to do it). I greet everyone: first in Teochew, then Mandarin, then English.
Happy new year! Happy new year! Happy new year!
Eat, rub my tummy, smell everything, laugh and poke my grandpa’s tummy. I do that every day, but especially on lunar new year, he is especially jovial and happy. I tell him he looks like a fat Buddha, and he laughs.
If you hold your chopsticks that way, ah girl, you are going to move very far away from home. Very far away from me.
How right he was.
February 3, 2023
Photo taken on Olympus XA2 on Fuji Superia 400, developed and scanned by Underdog Film Lab.
Mention the Tenderloin and a certain type of San Francisco resident will definitely scrunch up their faces. "Homeless people", "poop", "crime"; look behind all of those terms and I believe the fear and condescension is "class".
The Tenderloin is a working class neighborhood with a largely Southeast Asian, trans, Mexican, Arab, queer, and Black population. It is also home to many of the city's unhoused population. We also need far more toilets. And housing. Problems aside (as a board member of the Tenderlon Community Benefit District, I am working to improve things in this neighborhood!), I live here because it immerses me deeply in my communities. It is Southeast Asian, and queer, at the same time. I am also far more comfortable around working class people than around the types of people who live across Van Ness. It has the food that I want to eat, and the groceries that I need.
The freedom to run downstairs and get the types of tofu, lemongrass, galangal, many rice types, noodle varieties that I use without having to go to a 'special store', or the 'ethnic aisle', is what makes me feel connected. I know that living in a 'nice neighborhod' where my food lives in the ethnic aisle will be extremely alienating. Not to mention inconvenient.
So here I am, and I am always giddy with joy when I get to grab the freshly made tofu, and the nice stalks of lemongrass, from a Cambodian grocer in the Tenderloin. The lady and her son speak my native language, even though we come from different countries. We have the same conversation daily. "What are you cooking today?"
Tofu is often my answer. The answer is always tofu.