Dreamscape: Part 1

Dreamscape is a multi-part love letter from a transplant to the city of San Francisco, especially its people and beauty in the 2010s—conventional, absurd, or otherwise. How many parts? Still TBD.

Suggested music for Part 1: Changüí Para San Francisco

“We’re a come-as-you-are type of environment! You’ll see coworkers wearing jeans, shorts, slacks, and skirts. We don’t have a dress code; we just ask that employees be clean and respectful in their dress. On the other hand, a few folks recently started a weekly ‘Formal Friday’ thing, but that’s more of a fun ritual, not a company policy.”

The HR coordinator responded to me three days before June 17, 2013, that fateful first Monday of a new job at a San Francisco tech startup of 60 employees. I had just moved to the city the same week, and thought of “just one more question” to ask. In my inquiry, I explained that my relocation cube had not arrived, along with all the business formal/casual outfits, and offered to go shopping over the weekend if necessary. Not nearly ready, I resorted to over-preparing to mask being equal parts wide-eyed, exhilarated, and nervous. Six years into the U.S., a solo cross-country move for a new job felt more than substantial, even absurd.

The job before, the first one out of college at a massive professional services firm on the east coast, required at minimum business casual with the exception of an occasional “Casual Friday” (but in office only, never on client sites).

Dress code was one of the numerous reasons that, for a 24-year-old, self-proclaimed “more of a cultural person than a business person,” I found ruika@startup.com much sexier than rlin61@professionalservicesfirm.com. Even though young, I’d be deemed at least someone with a name and an earned spot in a supposed community, not an anonymous headcount in a vast “global workforce” of over 150,000 people. Even though young, I’d be valued not by my attire that blended in but by my first name that stood out, surely a strange desire for someone who’d just moved to the U.S. six years before from a collectivist home country.

Both mornings of that last weekend between jobs, I woke up on the couch to Latin music playing from a neighbor’s house near the Cole Valley apartment. Never had I been serenaded by passionate Spanish tunes at breakfast; certainly not back home in Chengdu, and not once in Virginia. The upbeat rhythm, along with the clanging bell of the N-Judah train picking up commuters right outside the bay windows, unsettled more than delighted me. It seemed absurd that there were actual people living their normal lives in this west coast city, a dream destination that now bewildered me like a Dalí painting once I became its resident. Moments later, I found that very thought equally absurd. “People of course have lived here all along, for over 200 years no less! America clearly isn’t just the east coast. I know that.”

But dreams are absurd too. The destination one longs for reveals itself only after arrival. On her journey there, she knows little about what she longs for, and is propelled only by vague contours and generic hearsay.

Clueless about the ordeal of moving to San Francisco, I was exceedingly lucky to have secured a one-year lease in a desirable area right away. It was a murky choice between a three-bedroom apartment with two roommates in the Mission District and one with an identical setup in Cole Valley. Both were crammed inside an Edwardian triplex, with dining rooms converted to the third bedroom. But living with two politely distant and seemingly normal twentysomething full-time employees in tech and advertising felt like a better fit than with two excitable, weed-touting twentysomething startup founders in software and biotech. After all, an employer backed by venture capitalists offered me some relocation funds, not the venture capitalists themselves.

Being in one’s twenties is also absurd. The label of adulthood combined with a wildly malleable brain means one often feigns maturity with scarce lived experience and unclear values. Just a few months in, as if having known San Francisco for much longer, I declared to a date, “So far, it’s been great. And on the day I leave this place, I know that I’ll look back and say, ‘It’s been a wild ride.’” Newness fades and dreamscapes unravel; there’s never a shortcut to belonging. But I was ignorant, because I hadn’t wholeheartedly lived anywhere else in America, long enough to absorb both the thrill and anguish a place has to offer, long enough to belong somewhere. To San Francisco, I was still a rosy-eyed outsider who often slipped and called the city “San Fran” (a big no-no), just not peeking in from a distance anymore. Yet, even the immature and oblivious twentysomething intuited a finite road ahead.

My date, also an east coast transplant who had moved to the Bay Area a few years earlier, seemed amused by my declaration. We had just met at a house party a week prior, drunkenly discussing "institutions" at length; apparently, we both liked to philosophize, and San Francisco generously allows that at parties. Now on a lunch date near the idyllic Duboce Park, we playfully debated the meaning of salad and pizza, and tiptoed around who we were individually (but never once mentioned our day jobs), which may or may not eventually morph into who we were as a unit. There may have been a barely discernible frown creeping across his face while I disclosed my future separation from the place we both lived in and hardly belonged to. The lack of clarity was deliberate and charged. The undertone of my declaration may have been to test his interest level, or to prematurely elicit a commitment. His 40+ housemates at a “crypto co-living space” and an upcoming trip to Burning Man protected him from falling for it.

One’s twenties are absurd like that; encounters start out as games. Spending one’s twenties in San Francisco, the Neverland for adults, one gets to play her heart out for as long as she wants. Particularly for the twentysomethings who've missed out on or wish to extend “the college life,” the city is a boundless playground.

This particular game, with its code of omission, power struggles, and house parties, fittingly turned out to be a finite but wild ride. Even though its ending was foreshadowed in that very first lunch date, the game took me countless times to the buzzing Mission District, the neighborhood that got away. Spanish music played there all day and night; patrons of dive bars, hacker houses, budget corner shops, and fancy cafés coexisted (not always peacefully). Once, an old drunk squatting outside a grocery store called Pay and Save hollered “Fiery and educated!” as two girlfriends and I speed-walked past him—only in the Mission, I suppose. We kept walking, pursed our lips, and ignored him; he might just be playing, but we were bemused.

While play and bemusement define much of San Francisco, Dolores Park is a standout. The Mission’s happening spot, the park squeezes a hodgepodge of ice cream, tacos, weed (and beyond), and pee (and beyond) into its 16-acre slope, against the backdrop of majestic palm trees and Spanish-style architecture. Sweaty tech bros, scantily-dressed sunbathers, and dogs of all breeds are sprinkled (or crammed, depending on fog) throughout the hills. Occasionally, a brass marching band where musicians dress as sailors and Sailor Moons twirls across the field, drowning out the cacophony of laughs, barks, and Radiohead. Unless it happened to be Halloween 2015, when a bitcoin-worshiping housemate of my date hosted the “biggest wedding ever” in the park for free. Evidently, he and his wife attempted a Guinness World Record, and the wedding party drew close to 5,000 attendees. My date and I had broken up about a year before, but the Dolores Park wedding made the news.

(Once on a double date, this housemate asked me if I had any bitcoin. When I said no, he turned to my date and gently advised, "You should give her some." Well, I would have been retired by now if that transaction had actually occurred.)

The Mission’s dissonance does take a toll; hardly anyone can be on all day long. Even those steeped in the Mission melting pot prefer stepping outside once in a while, soaking up San Francisco’s more conventional beauty. While calling the Mission home, my date did enjoy spending time with me in other parts of the city with a less in-your-face blend of play and bemusement. A genuinely delightful hike up Twin Peaks and the stunning view of downtown on a fogless day cemented my years-long ritual of taking all the boys up there. A night-time dance downhill after a breath-of-fresh-air visit to the Presidio was pure bliss, even without melody. A first kiss in front of the Bay Bridge, brisk waterfront wind on an April evening stroking our cheeks. A post-breakup stroll by the Golden Gate Park weekly roller disco party, where a muscular skater spun towards us and beamed, the unbothered Shih Tzu in his left arm ready for some petting.

It turned out that we both philosophized to detach from vulnerable feelings. It also turned out that my anxiety and his avoidance made a perfect match. His outward assurance of himself was tinged with self-mockery, his disarming presence concealing anger and grief. A twisted source of pride, our affair was in part proof to my former self that even an international student who didn’t know what the word “priority” meant on her first day in America could now tread the precarious waters of cross-cultural romance. The cultures shaping us proved too distant to cross. Those eight months stretched me far away from everything I came from. Compared to his radical week at Burning Man, the most transgressive rebound I could venture was two hours at a massive (but still a fraction of the size of Black Rock City) outdoors party featuring thunderous dance music and theatrical fights in Thunderdome. I was back in Cole Valley by midnight, decompressed for a day, and went back to work the Monday after.

A wide-eyed foreigner from China dating a thick-skinned American libertarian might have been nothing but a game of novelty. Novelty fades and dreamscapes unravel. When the first fervent romance burned out, San Francisco’s surrealist façade turned to dust for me, a memory palace for him. The first glimmer of belonging emerged from the ashes.

Part 2 coming soon in September 2026.