What Do You Do in San Francisco?
September 2018
“Where is this place?” I asked.
“Inner Sunset,” my wife said. “It’s not too far from work. Plus, there’s a bus stop nearby.”
I ran a quick search on Google Maps. It was an area bordering Golden Gate Park to the north and a district called ‘Forest Knolls’ to the east. Shady, I thought.
“How much is it?”
“$2,500 per month. It’s a one bedroom. A small one-bedroom,” she added.
“Isn’t that a pretty good deal?”
“Right?”
$2,500 was much more expensive than our rent in New Haven for an apartment half its size, but hey, this was San Francisco, and last time I’d checked, SF had surpassed New York as the most expensive American city to live in.
“Call her.” I said. “Call that ajumma.”
It was June. My wife, who was a year behind me in medical school, had entered the lottery to do a clinical rotation at San Francisco, and she’d won it. She said she’d always won raffles since her Yale undergraduate days, scoring tickets to the Met Opera at Jonathan Edward’s Cultural Draw year after year—not to mention the fact that she’d married me.
The medical school wasn’t paying for housing: that we’d have to cover ourselves. The clinical site was a place called San Francisco Free Clinic that had been set up by two Yale alumni from years ago. I’d only heard good things from classmates who had rotated there. Plus, we could see if we liked the city. Four to five Yale kids matched into UCSF for residency every year. San Francisco – didn’t everyone want to move there?
“You just want to go see your college friends,” my wife said.
“That’s so not true. I genuinely want to try a new city with you.” I put on my best smile.
“That and your old library spot at Stanford.” She made a face.
After weeks of Craigslisting and getting machine-generated emails telling us to wire a $500 deposit, we had resorted to a Korean website, and it was here that my wife found a sublet listing in Inner Sunset by a middle-aged Korean lady, or ajumma, as we say in Korea.
Inner Sunset. It was news to me that a sunset could have dimension. There was an Outer Sunset too. Very Zen, I thought. The ajumma too, wanted a $500 deposit, but at least that was after my wife had talked to her.
“She’s a real person, right?” I asked my wife after she got off the phone. AI could mimic human voice pretty accurately these days.
“Yeah, she sounds like a nice lady. I can ask my brother to check out the place in person.”
Deal. I packed 4 pairs of shorts, a bunch of t-shirts, pajamas, and a pair of khakis in case some restaurants wouldn’t let me in. My wife packed a bouquet of summer dresses that had been sitting in the closet since last September—spring had arrived late in New England this year. We were going to the Sunshine State, or was that Florida?
———
“We’re here.” I said after retrieving our bags at SFO.
“Yup, here in the Golden State.” Golden State, that was it.
It was surprisingly cold outside. I braced myself against the gust. My wife’s brother, who works in San Jose, had come out to pick us up. I squeezed myself into the backseat of his sports car.
“How was the flight?” He asked.
“Fine,” my wife answered. “Free wifi.”
While they chatted away, I looked out the window at familiar scenes from my past. I used to take Super Shuttle to my college dorm from here. Uber didn’t exist back then.
“That’s a new building,” I pointed out.
“Yeah?”
“Cool building.” My wife glanced disinterestedly.
The ajumma, who wore her graying hair straight, greeted us outside the apartment. “This is the outside key.” She showed us a key as she opened the metal gate. “And this one is the inside key. Just use the top lock. This area is safe.” She reassured us.
The apartment was fine. We’d seen pictures and knew what to expect. It had a queen-sized bed, a futon, a TV, a table with two chairs. It had an electric stove—that was going to throw off my ramen game.
“Please water the plants if you could,” she said before getting into her car.
“Do you think she’s married?” my wife asked me.
“No. Look at her hair.” No ajumma wore her hair straight like that.
“Yeah.” She considered this truth. “Can we explore the area?”
It was a nice day, save for the occasional wind-chill. The streets were full of people. We had already scoped out restaurants on Yelp, and no joke, there was an Asian restaurant in every block. My wife made a running list of places that we’d visit during our four weeks here. In ten minutes, we had passed at least five Chinese pedicure salons.
“I like San Francisco,” my wife turned to me with a smile.
“I like it too,” I said.
“Can we get sushi for dinner? I want some fresh uni. We can’t get that in New Haven.”
We stuffed ourselves full of California uni. The bill came out to be a three-digit figure, but hey, for all I knew, the world might have ended tomorrow. The bed was not nearly as comfortable as the one back home, and the bedroom window looked out to an enclosed shaft above the parking lot, but we were tired from traveling and fell sound asleep.
———
Karl introduced himself the next day. I had read about Karl online. Karl is what people in SF call its fog, after Karl the Giant in the movie Big Fish. I understood the anthropomorphism when I saw Karl engulf the city at a frightening pace—people tend to name things that they’re afraid of, like hurricanes. It turned out that Inner Sunset was one of the foggiest and coldest districts in SF. That night, we went to the Uniqlo at Union Square and bought matching fleeces. We named them Fluffy and Floofy. We would wear them every day for the next four weeks.
Come Monday, I realized that my wife had a reason to be here. She was here to see patients. As for me, I was here because she was here. I had planned to work on my thesis, but the apartment didn’t have wifi (“Never was a problem for me,” the ajumma said). Luckily, the UCSF library was a short walk away. A short, steep walk, I found out. There was no ID scanner at the entrance. “All ethnicities All genders … All abilities” a sign reassured me.
I entered the reading room upstairs to a quartet of snoring. I had seen plenty of sleep-deprived residents at the medical library at Yale, but this was something else. This was Stage 3 or REM sleep, and these people didn’t look like residents. A man with a carry-on luggage sat down across from me and started to unpack a pair of bathroom slippers.
“There’s a big working-homeless population in SF,” my wife told me during breakfast the next morning. Our eggs had stuck to the pans and burnt, thanks to the electric stove. “A lot of them just can’t afford the rent. I see these people at the clinic. Some Uber drivers live out of their cars.”
“I miss New Haven,” I admitted as I scraped off the brown caking that was once an egg. “I miss our kitchen.”
“Me too. I miss our bed.”
Humans are known for their ability to adapt. I got into a routine of taking my morning dump in the library restroom and started saying hi to a homeless man who took his around a similar time. Once I finished a day’s worth of work, I read short stories by Raymond Carver on a couch that looked out to the hazy, shifting fog over Golden Gate Park. This time was my third time reading through his work. He’d lived in San Francisco for part of his life. There was a story in the collection titled “What Do You Do in San Francisco?”.
In the evenings, my wife and I went to a fitness studio down the street. After seeing a dozen people with yoga mats strapped on their shoulders, we had purchased a 1-month package of “high-intensity core training”. I often felt like the token male in a Lululemon ad during these sessions.
“Squeeze those glutes. Squeeze’em tight.” Our instructor, a dude straight out of the musculoskeletal chapter of my Anatomy textbook, clapped to EDM as I verged toward respiratory failure.
“My knees don’t like lunges, but I guess I’ll keep doing them until they give way.” I overheard a woman say after a session. Looking at her hands, I realized that she was much older than I had thought. These ladies were not going gentle into that good night.
My friends were doing well. They all worked in tech, naturally.
“What is that?” I asked Simon as we passed what seemed like an outdoor frat party.
“Looks like Adobe is having a private event.” Adobe, the company that makes Photoshop, I processed in my head. “How do you like SF?” Simon asked.
“It’s good. But it’s so cold in Inner Sunset. It definitely feels warmer here in SoMa.”
“SF weather is all over the place. This summer’s actually been pretty warm.”
“Yeah?”
Some had changed, for better or for worse.
“Let’s grab some Korean barbecue with Yohan before I go,” I told Nick.
“Mate, didn’t I tell you I turned vegetarian?” This was an Australian guy who used to order sliders for dessert at Outback Steakhouse.
“What? Why?”
“Mate, you should see this documentary on water footprints –”
Some had cashed out.
“I got this.” Chris said as he grabbed the check at a restaurant in Pacific Heights.
“I’ll let Chris get this. Microsoft bought his company last month,” I told my wife.
“Are you guys thinking of moving here later?” Chris asked. “UCSF has good programs, right?”
“I don’t know. It’s too cold here.” My wife shivered inside Fluffy.
“It’s not really a metropolis like Seoul or New York, you know? It’s more like a town. I can’t figure it out,” I said. “Plus, this fog.” I pointed at Karl looming outside the restaurant.
“Yeah, SF is kind of weird.” Chris admitted.
“We are thinking LA. Maybe.”
“We are going there next weekend to see what it’s like,” my wife added.
“LA’s fun. Definitely better weather than SF.” Chris said as he wrote down a hefty tip.
“I love LA,” my wife said one week later, tipsy from the cheap wine we’d bought at Safeway.
We were sitting on the porch of our Airbnb in West LA. Leftover chips from our Mexican take-out dotted the table between us. The sky was turning from pink to violet, the first real sunset we’d seen since coming to California.
“Let’s move here when we graduate.” I tapped the table three times for effect.
“Can we get a house with a yard?”
“Of course.” The wine gave me courage. “How about a pool?”
“No pool. But I want a yard. A yard with an orange tree.”
I leaned back in my chair. The light was draining from the sky. Life, to be sure, was absurd, but if one had to live, one might as well live in a house with an orange tree.
———
We did see the sunset once from Inner Sunset. It was my wife’s last half-day at the clinic, and after lunch, we had taken the Muni downtown to take advantage of the sunny weather. We got back early in the evening and decided to go for a run while there was still light. Rather than running towards the park, we headed in the opposite direction, following our street up a steep hill in the distance.
I stopped at an intersection ten minutes later. I could see the top of the Golden Gate Bridge from here.
“Keep going?” I asked my wife.
“Up to you,” she said as she caught up.
I turned right and followed a dead-end street until I came upon a flight of stairs that climbed the side of what seemed like a viewpoint. I waited for my wife.
“Do you want to go up?” I asked.
“Up to you,” she said again.
There were two women at the top, sharing a tall can of beer. The wind blasted through my t-shirt and shorts. I walked to the edge of the fenced viewpoint and looked down at a panorama of San Francisco. I made out the tall buildings of FiDi to my right, then followed the rows of Victorian houses like spilt dominos along the dark pelt of the Golden Gate Park. To my left, the Pacific Ocean lapped onto a thin strip of sand that was the western edge of America. Straight ahead, the Golden Gate Bridge hung between two landmasses like a thing made of toothpicks.
It was then that I understood the etymology of Inner Sunset. The setting sun stained the sky a deep orange from the northwest. Outer Sunset faced the natural elements like a frontier, and there was Inner Sunset, sheltered like a child from the knowledge of its vulnerability. Looking at what seemed like the last-remaining city on earth, I could forgive this city’s obsession with the future, its bravado that man is something more than a forked animal. How else could one face such a vista?
My wife stood several feet to my right, lost in her own thoughts. A year of marriage had taught us much, including the fact that it could be challenging at times. Earlier that day, we had bickered at the mall then gotten into an argument about whether to take an Uber or the Muni home. Surrounded by strangers, we had settled into our singular selves, the space between us curtained with noise. Swaying on the homebound Muni, I had started to believe, as I often had, that life is a river where each of us rows alone, though we sometimes stop to be kissed.
To tell the truth, I had lived in this city six summers ago. But some memories cannot be shared, are private like dreams. During our Uber rides in the past few weeks, I had silently noticed the street signs, each one an epitaph to a previous life. The past is irrevocable yet calls you back. Perhaps this was why Carver wrote, I thought.
I didn’t know what she was thinking.
“Can you see the ocean from there?” I yelled over the wind.
She nodded. Her hair whipped around her face like a flame. It occurred to me that she had followed me all the way up here. Fluffy bellowed as if to carry her away. I walked over to her.
“Pretty view, isn’t it?”
“I wish I’d brought my iPhone,” she said.
“Me too.” Then I thought, perhaps it was better that I hadn’t. “Shall we head down?”
“Yes, I’m cold,” she said. Her pale skin showed under her shorts.
“Okay, let’s go.”
I put my arms around her. I held her cold hand, and we started to row in the dark.