homes

Places we reside

A girl drawing with chalk on an outdoor terrace, with chairs and a bike behind her. Tropical plants and trees frame the buildings.

In the fall of twenty four we move apartments and I remember how much the place we live shapes our view of the world. I remember how much the things we discover and the ways we relax are shaped by our physical space, its location, and our attention to its decoration. In leaving our old place I say goodbye to the view, and to the neighborhood. In smaller ways I say goodbye to the quiet corners where I sat leaned against the floor to ceiling windows and to the balcony sized perfectly for the folding camping sofa. That sofa was one of my first purchases on signing the lease, an item long coveted and suddenly ideal for this balcony twenty seven floors up, able to fit either back to the house or along the side wall, looking out at the city.

There’s a long tail indeed now of apartments that have shaped where we put things, places we’ve created snug nooks and added bookshelves. Five apartments now of finding space for a liter box, from the first one that required sealing a section of crawlspace to the most recent, tucked under the edge of a bath tub larger than we’d ever purchase on our own. We’ve hung the same art on multiple continents, and re-arranged the same light panels on a variety of walls, aiming for shapes that reflect a new start, that retain the feel of our old homes. In our first Hong Kong apartment the light panels were spaceship-esque. In the current one they are a crab, copying a children’s book we love. Our inspirations shift, and the materials remain.

Some things we’ve standardized: the foreign currency remains in neat rolls but is no longer hidden in a closet. Instead a small set of Muji drawers holds both money we may never need and the stack of transit cards, bookstore memberships, climbing gym punch cards, and all the rest that remind us of how long we’ve been gathering. We keep a shocking number of business cards for no reason save the difficulty of digitizing them, the difficulty of parting with them. Each stack, of electronic component suppliers in Shenzhen, of packaging suppliers, of film extruders, of business development people and hotel concierges is a window to a world we remember but no longer visit.

In our new space we spend weeks painting and gathering plants, re-shaping the exterior to fit our needs. In the evenings we throw frisbees, ride tiny balance bikes, kick soccer balls, and do yoga on it. In the mornings we read magazines out of doors with our coffee and tea, subscriptions we’ve resumed after a half dozen years of avoiding paper. It’s a good feeling, to go backwards in these ways, and to have an outdoor space. It’s a new home for our small folding sofa, even if a larger set of chairs would fit. Like all apartment-dwellers we repurpose things bought custom for other spaces. The desk that rolls up into a set of drawers is a great part of my new office, two houses on from where it began. The tiny wooden chair, one of the only things we brought across the pacific, is perfectly at home in it’s fifth apartment, more in use than ever before. Much like the cat, who is happier than ever before, actively hunting at almost thirteen.

In Hong Kong the mystery of prior inhabitants is stronger than ever, almost every space re-shaped by some previous resident. Whole rooms and walls have been moved and created for helpers and twins long gone. A walk-in closet replete with aircon built for a banker with a library of suits to protect, and finally an open kitchen created for someone who likes to host, who likes to share breakfast across a counter with some children, as we now do daily. We repurpose some, the closet for a bedroom, the bedrooms for an office, removing doors, adding curtains, painting and spackling until we feel comfortable. Putting down the tatami in multiple rooms I wonder if future inhabitants will be able to smell the dry grass long after it’s gone, long after we have moved on. I wonder where their children will sleep, or whether they’ll tear out this remodel, now more than a decade old, for some set of spaces still unimagined.

I think about the secrets of old apartments I can no longer remember, of all the items that now reside in a Colorado basement, or were given away on leaving San Francisco. I think of our Bunjo chair, rediscovered in the mountains last summer, a joyful piece of furniture I’d long since forgotten.

“My blue worm is in Tokyo,” says our daughter. “And my other blocks”.

For a moment, like all our American friends with houses purchased on thirty year promises, I am happy to have another place, to have a place that will see fewer future residents, where the changes we make will be discovered by friends, will be remembered by our family.

And then I remember to embrace the temporary, to relish the interplay between our ancestors in residences and our as yet unforeseen homes, still occupied by people we will never meet.

Passing through

In the foggy chill of a November San Francisco evening I head home to a place I’ve never lived. After a jet lagged day in the office, a round of mini golf with coworkers, and dinner with an old friend I am tired and full. Crossing Dolores I am also alone, in the strange way of San Francisco where ten pm sees all responsible individuals indoors save in a few tiny commercial strips. In Hong Kong there would be dozens of folk out of doors in all directions now, a level of activity not only explained by the weather.

I’m happy to be at home in the Castro this week, a neighborhood I haven’t frequented since our early years in the city a decade ago. On these recent trips I take advantage of friends’ generosity as both a cost saving measure for the current startup and a fringe benefit of the long flights. These evenings with people I now live too far from are quite a perk. We discuss old times, sharing memories of China and San Francisco in equal measure. I am often confused about bed times and vague about meals, but good conversation is not as vulnerable to displacement.

The sense of home, though, has gone. That is the starkest change, walking home across Church, or up Market past Safeway and the Churchill. I know these places, having bought thanksgiving dinner fixings at one and fancy cocktails at the other, but they are no longer part of my city. I spend a morning thinking about this as I ride Muni to work. It’s been so long that I try to swipe my Clipper card on the way out of the gates, like Bart, only to have the station attendant remind me that’s not necessary on Muni. It must have been five years since I rode it last.

And then suddenly in a text message it’s explained to me, obviously. Visiting San Francisco now is like returning to Shanghai in two thousand ten, two years or so after moving away. Everything is familiar, it still can feel like home, but it isn’t, and in some way it doesn’t. I’ll always be comfortable here, but probably never again a resident. Just like Shanghai. And the metro confusion of the Powell street Muni gates matches so well my lack of knowledge of line 10’s stops past Xujiahui in two thousand nine. These are places we know but have forgotten, or places that have changed.

On my way to the climbing gym this evening, to meet old friends and enjoy one of the largest bouldering gyms in the world for a couple of hours before my flight, I pass Chase Center, the Warriors new home. It’s a colossus, a sparkling modern money-printing facility. The last time I rode this street I could see straight through the structure. Only the girders were in place, phantoms of the future bleachers curves mirrored in their arcs.

Like all cities, San Francisco is changing. Like all people, we are changing. Many of my friends no longer live here, not in the city proper. It has only been a single year, and yet the pace of their evacuation is startling. The people I stayed with in September have fled north since that visit, a scant two months prior. I wonder how long I will have friends here at all. And then I arrive at the gym and find another friend sprawled on the mats unexpectedly. It will be a while, I realize. My five years of connections to Shanghai have still not faded, not fully. Nine years in SF will likewise not fade too fast. It’s just the sense of home that has moved on, to warmer and denser cities where my cat wanders the park and is taken out to dinner at the noodle shop.

Time now to get back there, again on this long commute.

Neighborhoods

A boy once believed that no matter how far he went, he’d still be where he was from. That this defining character set would tie him to others, to where he’d grown up, to the person that he’d grown into. Years later does he still believe these things? That the love of fall on the east coast of the United States is an overwhelming sign of good taste, and that fixing a car late at night in driving snow represents the pinnacle of perseverance? Would he still dismiss those from further afield, as though their homes hadn’t provided similar lessons?

In my mind he would not. He has grown well, aged into a person of a different place. We are no longer close, this boy and I, partially because I no longer live on the east coast of the United States. Partially because I no longer live in the United States. Partially because, as the world grows, and we into it, such qualities shrink. They shrink not in difficulty, or beauty, but in scope. Fixing a car in driving snow becomes a challenge of location. Fixing a car in the desert’s blazing sun with no habitation for dozens of miles matches it, and that recognition changes the original pride.

We are not where we are from, yet knowledge of that place explains us.

As does the sense of scope. Meeting an unknown friend in the chill heat of a Shanghai apartment where the walls seep cold into the night as the heater pumps out dry air filled with warmth, our shared location becomes an isolating factor.

“Those two are from Ithaca.”

As though that makes us the same. As though we’re both really from the same place. As though we shared the same city, and through it clothes, manner, dress. We do not. Because it is not just countries that are too large to possibly contain their population with the single adjective allowed them in popular humor.

Because countries have directions, and cities neighborhoods.

Yueyang lu is tree-lined, residential, until the bars. Yongjia lu has some shops, some restaurants, and more trees. Couples walk hand in hand and boys chase each other in and out of the school nearby. Guards watch both, and mingle in front of the Painting Institute, huddle inside their huts in chilly weather, and smoke incessantly to relieve the mind-numbing passage of time. I whisper through it in the mornings, past the fleets of women and men with their child on the rear of their bicycle for the morning lift to school before they head on to work. I slip up Yongjia, heading west, across Wulumuqi lu, past the brief block of Anting lu, to Hengshan’s bustling cacophony, busses and taxis competing with the whistle of a half-dozen crossing guards watching the five roads carefully for signs of lawlessness. Their stares and squawking whistles slap me awake, and I pause before pushing on to Gao’an, and then left up Kangping. This is the border of my neighborhood, Hengshan and Gao’an. On a map it might continue to Wanping, two blocks further west, at the edge of the park, or two blocks further north, to Huaihai or Fuxing, with their commercial bustle. East, perhaps the edge lies at Xiangyang or Shanxi, or even further, Maoming or Ruijin Er. But limits of a neighborhood are not drawn so clearly. They are shifty fleeting things of time and walking distance, of community, of school districts, of architecture, of income, of simple recognition. Xiangyang is far enough for me.

And it is with these decisions, often without thought, that we separate ourselves. So two children of New York, of the City, of the same college, of so much shared experience that to their company over diner in a small apartment in Shanghai they blend and blur, opinions overlapping, can argue, can push against the common box. Manhattan and Brooklyn are so different, they protest, and their high schools, completely different. Several others in the room agree with small nods, not necessarily of New York, but with the familiarity of past discussions, past attempts to prove their own location.

A girl, in an interview, on her home.

“Baoshan is a great place to live, a better district than Xuhui or Huangpu.”

But aren’t Xuhui and Huangpu more ‘downtown’, more convenient, her questioner wonders.

“No, Baoshan is downtown, it is the center of Shanghai.”

The fragility of her argument is made precious by her belief. Her questioner does not note Shanghai’s spherical nature, it’s circular boundaries, and it’s series of encircling rings, containing at their heart four districts, and spreading outwards. With no argument of population, nor commercial value, no mention of business districts, shopping, night life, a simple circle placed atop Shanghai’s mapped existence will reveal Baoshan’s distance from the circle’s center.

In Jintan, weeks ago, a girl wandered the street with her harmonica as the Ode to Joy found its way through her cupped fingers. The street, it’s four shops, one restaurant and two houses all mingled in a run of concrete buildings, paid her no mind. Perhaps she plays and walks each morning, in the chill of January’s end, and is a common site in this neighborhood of her birth. Along Yueyang’s shaded walks she would surprise, her clothes and accent out of place, her harmonica sure to please the foreigners who are so frequent now.

Up Xinhua lu, still rolling west, having crossed the barren spread of Huashan and touched Huaihai briefly, the neighborhood changes. From Huashan’s vacancy and Huaihai’s bus-filled rumble, Xinhua is a deep breath of space and trees again. The shops, and passers-by, are not those of Yueyang, or Yongjia. An older community, fewer foreigners, less military, more Japanese. The difference is immediate and comforting. This is where I work, this is where I eat lunch and mail letters. This street, across Dingxi lu, is being renovated, but not built up. There are but two towers, and even those are slightly at odds with the surroundings, slightly shunned by the baozi eaters cradling their dumplings on the opposite corner where the bank and steamed bun shop still stand. The tower, with its coffee shops and cell phone dealers, is the stranger, something not quite of this neighborhood, but here. So small and fragile are these distinctions, built on collective consciousness. And so hard to remember, from outside.