Stay

February 1942. President Franklin D. Roosevelt makes an executive order that uproots your people from the home they fragilely held onto for decades. You feel your father’s tight grip numb your arm as police push thousands of Japanese Americans into a train bound for the interior of these United states. Many still remember the boat that ferried them here. Fresh as that memory are the other episodes that defined their San Francisco: the great fire of ’06, segregation into “Oriental Schools”, denial of citizenship, and the simmering racism that painted these dreamers as imperial loyalists itching for any opportunity to sabotage this land that hardly knew them; a land that they abandoned everything to reach. Today, you watch that racism boil over. It is a smoldering flood that will wash away your mother and brother and dearest friends until the Nihonjin-machi you know is bleached clean so the next dreamers who adorn this city won’t find their promised land stained with shattered hopes that are not their own.

In 1946, another politician will sign a white paper with sticky ink, but this time, his signature will free you. You will return to the Fillmore you loved to find a black man living in your home – they call it “the Harlem of the West” now (for now). The few Japanese people who remain will sell ramen to rich Americans and tourists in Japantown; only five blocks. You, your family, most everyone, will be spit out to more affordable parts of the country: Ohio, Utah, Salt Lake City, Denver. When you watch your parents weep this second time, you console them by explaining that this ritual has happened before. Too many times to count. And it will happen again.

….......

Indigenous Ohlone bands loved this diamond coast as far back as 3000BC. The bay glimmered so brightly that it even infatuated tribes and nations continents away. The Spaniards were jealous lovers; displacing destroying any trace of her past suitors, they consummated their settlement by giving this city a new name. Yerba Buena remained theirs for a season, then became Mexico’s when winter fell upon European empires occupying the New world.

Eventually, Uncle Sam moved in, and he decreed that this city wasn’t Yelamu, or Mission de Francisca, or Yerba Buena. He called her “San Francisco.” He saw in her not glistening diamonds, but the more easily calculated beam of sunny gold.

If you’re reading this today, you surely already know this city. Have you heard about how prodigies rush here like storm chasers, hoping to catch and sell the future? Are you familiar with all her many colors, creeds, crimes, and histories of activism that taught her denizens tenacity? Is Golden Gate Park your favorite place in the world?

Maybe you love this city enough to call it your home. If that’s so, remember this:

San Francisco will ruin you, turn you into a slave for money or a cash-crunched basket case.

San Francisco will make you break down, sobbing, never successful enough to rest amidst a city that endlessly contrasts how little you have compared to your neighbor.

San Francisco will make you wonder if you should have even moved here in the first place.

Countless souls will have the same dreams that you did, and seek the ephemeral joy that destroyed you.

San Francisco will remain, but you cannot stay here.