Two years before I moved to the United States, I wrote something called ‘things I will miss when I have to leave Southeast Asia (because I am queer)’. I predicted that I would be deeply homesick, not for Singapore specifically, but for the entire region.
Even though I was born in Singapore, I lived many years in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.
What I could not predict: that even watching videos of people in YouTube documentaries about Southeast Asia, the birdsong is enough to make me bawl.
I have such a deep affection for and attachment to that part of the world. The weather makes sense to me. The languages make sense to me. And oh my god I miss the food.
I’ve been lucky to have such a deep familiarity with so much of it. I went to a hippie run shop in SF the other day and they played ‘mor lam’ on their record player.
It instantly brought me back to long overnight bus rides through Thailand with my mother.
In San Francisco, there’s a neighborhood called the Tenderloin. Looking it up on the Internet will tell you it’s the worst place in the world; apparently a literal war zone.
I live there. There are Thai people, Lao people, Vietnamese people. I walk my dog in my batik pajamas and sandals, just like I would back home. There’s fresh galangal in the grocery store. Sometimes a Vietnamese uncle goes fishing and I’m invited to pick some fish, with other Vietnamese aunties.
Sometimes people ask me why I don’t live in a nicer neighborhood. But I struggle to think of how any neighborhood where I can’t buy fresh galangal, speak my languages, get free soy milk, buy the only tofu I find acceptably good, is possibly nicer in any conceivable way
But mostly I am afraid that if I move, my yearning for home will give way to a bigger hole in my soul. Leaving Southeast Asia is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.
My neighbors go to the food pantry every day. They don’t have money. They came here on a scary boat ride, all those decades ago. The trauma of war and that journey still haunts them in many visible ways. They also insist on giving me vegetables that they get from the food pantry. I tell them I am not poor and I feel bad about taking free food. They laugh and say, they just want to give me something. I am the only young person who still speaks to them in their language. They like that about me.
With the benefits of community also comes the downsides. My neighbors nag at me as though they are my relatives. Don’t order food. It’s expensive. Get a house in Hayward. It’s cheaper. I help them set alarms on their phones so they can wake up to get into a shuttle to go to a temple in San Jose for Tết. They are surprised that I don’t know many traditions, like being vegetarian on the 1st day of lunar new year.
I don’t know how to say, ‘my evangelical Christian upbringing robbed me of my cultural traditions’, in either Vietnamese or Teochew or Cantonese.
Every Vietnamese American old person who speaks to me asks me, ‘why did you come here? Isn’t your country better? Cleaner?’
I also don’t know how to say ‘my country doesn’t accept me because of who I love, so I am here’. In any of the languages that I know. Which is, quite a few.
Join me on a walk around Lower Polk, a neighborhood directly adjacent to mine. I spend a lot of time here because it has the grocery stores and other shops that I go to the most. I rarely need to take a bus or car anywhere else because I get everything in the Tenderloin and Lower Polk, as well as in and around Nob Hill.
A sign of the times.
I feel lucky to be able to walk to a world class film photography store, Glass Key Photo. They have everything I need, and more.
RIP, Harvey Milk. Thanks for everything you have done for this city.
Hi-Lo has great drinks. Back when I still imbibed. These days, I just like the neon signs of these bars.
Count the rubber duckies.
Sutter St is home to a mosque frequented by the Yemeni community in the area.
This part of San Francisco has a strong link to Frank Norris, the anti-Semitic author. A bar in Lower Polk is named after one of his novels, McTeague.
All photos taken on Leica M3, 50mm Summilux, bulkrolled Kentmere Pan 400. Self developed in Ilfosol 3 (1+9) for 7 minutes, and scanned with Plustek 8200i.
Look up any travel information for San Francisco and 'helpful' people will tell you: avoid the Tenderloin! It's not safe! There's lots of.. stuff we don't like!
Well, I live there. By choice. I won't downplay the issues we face here: the living conditions on the streets are dire. They are maybe comparable to some other places in the world when you think of 'squalor'. It's not befitting of one of the richest cities, in one of the richest countries, in the world. But the squalor is there for a reason (historical and other neglect). There are few effective ways to 'improve' it (short of building more housing and providing more services), and certainly few that I personally support. I do not want to put more people behind bars simply for being so poor they no longer have a home. At the same time, many Tenderloin-dislikers have disingenuous reasons for singling out this neighborhood. We have different politics. Beyond politics, a fundamental disagreement about how we should treat people without homes.
Personally, I enjoy this neighborhood's diversity and density. I have never lived somewhere less dense; the TL was literally the only place in the city that felt like home (in terms of taller buildings, and no of people). I don't do well in the suburbs. I struggle mentally and emotionally with the suburbs. I am happy being among people. And buildings. And great food.
Sun set in the Civic Center area of San Francisco
This part of the city is full of historical hotels like these. Some of these are now student housing, others are homeless support housing. Others are still rented out by the day. The conditions are not always acceptable.
I have never lived too far from transit. So being in this neighborhood is great because I can go anywhere by transit, if I am not biking. Light streaks and dust on negatives on this frame, but I quite like the character it imparts.
I have not always been confident about taking film photos at night. But in rolling my own bulk film (Kentmere Pan 400) and developing and scanning at home, I feel a little more confident about it since it costs less, and I can see the results faster. These photos were taken with a Minolta Hi-Matic 7S II, with Kentmere 400, developed in D76 1:1 for 14 minutes, and scanned on a Noritsu LS-600.
I am now 8000 miles from home but I am anchored by this Vietnamese Teochew noodle house near me. People speak to me in this language on the streets. My dog has a Teochew name. I speak it with my neighbors. On days when I am extremely homesick, I come here and order what I always ate with my grandparents, almost ten thousand kilometres away: dua kway teow tah, mai tau geh, keh ark tui.
(干捞大粿条 / 不要豆芽 / 加鸭腿 / wide rice noodles, soup on the side, no bean sprouts, add a braised duck leg)
The roasted chilli oil (not sriracha), and the soup on the side, makes it especially close to some early childhood memories.
I was especially close to my paternal grandparents, and they were my link to that culture. I felt especially thankful that I got to form these ties with them, the land they came from, and the language they spoke, in ways that many of my peers did not. By the time I was in kindergarten, I realized I was one of the few people of my generation who were able to communicate fluently with them in their first language. The political and education system in Singapore had sought to destroy all ties to non-Mandarin Chinese languages around the time I was growing up. They were largely successful: today, I speak more Teochew on the streets of the Tenderloin in San Francisco, and even more of it in Bangkok, or in Paris, than I do in Singapore (I don't know more than five people under the age of 50 who speak it well, other than my relatives).
Even as I mourn language loss in one home, I have also cultivated strong links with the community that mostly comprises Vietnamese and Cambodian Teochew people who have moved to the West Coast of the United States. I am thankful to Mr Hua, who reminds me of my late grandfather in his movements and his speech, and in his family members Nancy, Randi, Amy and others who keep these traditions alive so that somehow someone from somewhere else is able to feel like I can live in this country because I am not all alone here.
A series of unprecedented storms swept us in San Francisco in January and February. Dark clouds and gloomy skies are not your typical fare here. I felt just as gloomy, but also thankful for the rain's impact on California's drought situation.
Soon, the sky started becoming bluer and bluer. Sometimes pink too.
And now we're back to blue, and I'm happy again.
Chinatown photo taken with Olympus XA2. The rest with Nikon L35TWAD. All on Fuji Superia 400. All developed and scanned by Underdog Film Lab, Oakland.
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.
The Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco frequently gets a bad rep, but I could not live anywhere else in this city. I live on a block where I get to speak my first language, the Teochew / Chiu Chow dialect of Chaoshan, with all of the Southeast Asian Chinese people here who own restaurants, grocery stores, and who mostly settled here after the Vietnam War.
Being in community and surrounded by the intimacy of language and culture has given me a different perspective on this part of town.
My photographs will often reflect this, and here I really like these half frame photos I took around here with my Kodak H35 toy camera.
The Burmese community comes out to City Hall often to advocate for help for their country.
The people who run this noodle shop not only sound exactly like my grandparents, they also make food like my grandparents'.
Photos shot on a Kodak H35 half frame toy camera and processed at Photo Plus, San Francisco, then lightly edited by me for color and contrast
