Dreamscape: Part 2

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. Read Part 1 here.

Suggested music for Part 2: Edge of the Ocean

San Francisco’s magic spell broke my forever-unrequited-love curse with a question next to an underground MUNI train track, “Would you like to go on a date with me?” Abruptly red-faced, I secretly thanked the train station’s angled lighting and endless commotion for masking my trembling lips that blurted out a “Sure…”

This boy, the first ever to have officially asked me out, played with fire. He met me just twice through a mutual acquaintance and knew nothing about my (lack of) relationship history. Also, he invited me to the Embarcadero Plaza for a reunion among his fire-spinning friends. He specialized in fire breathing, by night at least. By day, he was a 25-year-old, mild-mannered tech executive at a startup, having graduated with a Computer Science degree on the east coast two years prior. He immigrated to the U.S. as a child, and spoke fluent Shanghainese and broken Mandarin, so we talked only in English.

Watching him step onto one of the beast-like square tubes of Vaillancourt Fountain (RIP), assume a warrior stance, and blow one last flame into the sky, I was more perplexed than smitten. I sat far away on the edge of the plaza, and crossed my arms to protect myself from the October evening breeze and the strange date. Never a fire spinner, and barely a San Franciscan, I felt doubly foreign. My date was so discreet that neither “I’m having fun” nor “I’m showing you what I’ve got” aptly described what he was doing. He walked back toward me after the “performance,” which indeed stunned me and satisfied my curiosity. But that was it; I was merely curious about the “reunion among some fire-spinning friends,” phrases so otherworldly that I wasn’t sure whether I had heard them correctly. He misinterpreted my curiosity, and I had no words or guts to convey he wasn’t my type. I wasn’t curious about him; I was curious about everyone and everything. After all, it had only been two months in San Francisco.

The only comfort on that date was the familiar sight of fire lighting up the Financial District skyscrapers, just like five years ago on my first visit to San Francisco. Drunken crowds flooded the waterfront on that New Year’s Eve; I don’t recall ever seeing the plaza or the Brutalist fountain, only a swarm of partygoers and spectacular fireworks shooting up across the bay. The 19-year-old romantic, still an international student at a southern public university, proclaimed during that formative visit that San Francisco was the greatest city on earth. The holiday fireworks then were as mesmerizing as the twirling sparks now. The date might be peculiar, the evening bay breeze still chilly. But five years apart, the Embarcadero remained warm.

It took just two encounters for the friendly Embarcadero to plant a seed.

Each romance turned into an adventure across different parts of the city. Over time, I found myself cruising from the middle, western, and southern parts of San Francisco to the northern and eastern sides. Foggy forests, vintage clothing stores, and Hippie Hill disappeared, making way for symphony halls, tourist attractions, and high-rises.

Justifying a doomed relationship with a libertarian evolved into a part-time gig during the months-long post-breakup rumination. If that rumination took me to the Roxie Theater for a documentary about modern capitalism in which Noam Chomsky appeared, so be it. But occasional visits to the Mission paused after the Roxie film. The Mission served its mission of house parties, late-night tamales, and heartbreak; it was time to move on.

The Embarcadero and its surrounding neighborhoods became my second stomping ground outside of Cole Valley. A first kiss against the backdrop of the Bay Bridge. A charming second date inside the bustling Ferry Building. A satisfying conversation by the waterfront. The Embarcadero was made for these excursions. The arts emerged as one ventured into the Financial District, parts of SoMa, Hayes Valley, and North Beach. The Yerba Buena Gardens and Center for the Arts enchanted with music, dance, an early morning DAYBREAKER rave (the sober kind), or a spontaneous afternoon outing under the sun. A fine evening at SFJazz for Eliane Elias and Christian McBride, followed by a nighttime bite at The Grove, nourished the whole person. Inside the Shared Studios’ Hayes Valley Portal, a summer fling and I conversed virtually with a dental student in Afghanistan. But beyond swapping stories about college experience and social unrest across the globe, the young Afghan of course asked us with a coy smile, “So are you guys dating?”

The summer fling started in SoMa all giddy, locked lips on Twin Peaks, played in Hayes Valley and the Castro Theater, and left my heart in shambles back in SoMa. Thankfully, SoMa remained a play space for band practices. (Because after heartbreak, one inevitably joins a rock band called It’s Time.) The Castro Theater’s restorative energy would outlast any human affairs, certainly with its endless film festivals (Arab, German, Silent, LGBTQ+) and a Loving / Moonlight double feature that left moviegoers sobbing into midnight.

Perhaps the likes of the Mission and SoMa are suitable for the aggressively single: rough around the edges, but sprawling and showy. Or perhaps belonging still hadn’t taken root anywhere else after merely two years in the city, with boys, coworkers, and communities coming and going. Newness fades and dreamscapes unravel. While Cole Valley remained an anchor, potluck and house concert guests shuffled in and out of my life. My San Francisco-only identity as a perky hostess opened doors to fervent romance and group after group of new faces, while belonging stayed elusive.

That painfully mute international student had grown enormously over eight years, but was no longer curious about everyone and everything. A random evening treasure hunt hosted by the Embassy Network, a “How to Change the World in No Easy Steps” workshop among fellow twentysomethings, the second Gui Boratto set at Audio SF, the third Nils Frahm solo at the Regency Ballroom where I bawled my eyes out. I floated across the city’s disjointed oddities and interlocking elements, caught between a topless man blasting a bagpipe near the Twitter headquarters and a smoker slash six-pack enthusiast who approached me at a pseudo-spiritual Wisdom 2.0 conference. An OkCupid guy shocked me with his “kick rocks” reply after I simply counter-proposed coffee instead of dinner, while ghosting remained common practice among the city’s unattached. Gnawing rootlessness coaxed me into saying yes to these encounters while being the only one who picked Love as the theme of discussion at a Commonwealth Club philosophy corner gathering (with about 10 mostly elderly participants who’d seen it all). However impetuous or adrift one wishes to be, especially after heartbreak, the city matches it with an unmatched number of options.

“It doesn’t matter if you were in a relationship. He cheated!” “You’re a great person; just remember that.” “Try not to trust too easily.” Be it a product designer or executive assistant, marketer or engineer, my coworkers-turned-friends, many well-versed in relationships, drunkenly delivered consoling words at office happy hours and fundraising parties. These were the spirited souls who played office ping-pong with me every day to distract me from rumination, who held my hands (and hair) after a tad too many cocktails at Jones, who debated whether the story of a product or the product itself should reign supreme, and who showed up at Guitar Center to help me pick out a first guitar. Amid my private struggles for romantic worthiness, little did I know that the close alliances among these coworkers—the first and strongest community in San Francisco that offered a semblance of belonging—would soon disintegrate.

The job that brought me to San Francisco two years before also taught me about the startup boom and bust cycle, as the tech industry’s golden era of the 2010s stretched into its second half. Funny how good times fade in waves. Shortly after the summer fling dissolved, more and more company executives began exiting, sowing fear and confusion about the company direction. On a frigid evening in January 2016, a good friend at work called to warn me about the layoff that would take place the next day. The invisible emotional threads woven across San Francisco and a decade in the U.S., potentially cut short by an H1-B visa, made for a sleepless night and panicked call to my parents on the other side of the planet. The HR coordinator who told me about the company’s casual dress code was let go; the marketing manager who once shared that I of all people would enjoy Burning Man departed. Monarch, a beloved SoMa bar next to the office, turned eerily empty at the beginning of 2016, as colleagues moved on, some to other parts of the city, others away from the Bay Area. It turned out the leadership’s assurance just a few weeks earlier was misleading; the company indeed was in financial troubles and direly needed a reorganization.

A community I once innocently (and necessarily) called family had crumbled. A seed of mistrust and cynicism took root in a longtime idealist who chose to join a “social impact” tech startup, the very company that claimed to change the world upon receiving a fresh round of funding, only to succumb to financial distress two years later.

If one has some growing-up to do, San Francisco apparently offers that too.

Throughout 2016, the year of realism, I dove back into rumination: Can one really pour one’s heart into a community underpinned by venture capital funds? Do emotional ties matter at all in the face of faceless capitalism? Is the power dynamic between people and the systems built by them so uneven that belonging can never flourish? Is the stark separation of what a job demands and what the psyche craves—the very reason I left the east coast and the professional service industry—ultimately the safer bet for a wage-earning employee?

Trust, capitalism; inner life, incentive stock options; belonging, layoff. I absorbed these phrases three years after having no vocabulary to tell my fire-breathing friend that he wasn’t my type. San Francisco effortlessly strung these words together, like a constellation of fireworks bursting across the bay, fragments of a dream at the edge of the ocean.

Part 3 coming soon in October 2026.