Chinatown

A fictional travelogue; three minute read.

I grew up surrounded by busy bodies peeking out from behind drawn curtains. Like San Quentin prison guards, they watched my every move, snitching to my parents about the car alarms I triggered, my first coughing attempt at smoking a Marlboro, the time Jennifer Cagney and I kissed. Grounded, stuck in my room, her kiss was my only comfort.

Where I lived, beige and brown bungalows fronted with tidy, close-cropped hedges and shuttered doors bored me. Hard-working Irish and Italians lived in the Sunset District, the last bit of the city before the sun sinks into the Pacific Ocean.

When I turned twelve, I was old enough to ride the bus to school, to Jennifer’s playground, to neighborhoods not my own. To escape prying adult eyes, I had my earliest travel adventures. Like the pirate hero in one of my adventure comic books, I sailed into uncharted waters.

I trekked busy Geary boulevard, poked into tawdry bodegas, traversed Golden Gate Park. Every shop window was a museum case. Municipal buses were soaring 747s flying through turbulence from potholed streets.

One Saturday, I stepped off the 30 Stockton bus into a different city. Chinatown is thirty square blocks crowded with 70,000 people eating, doing laundry, attending school, caring for the elderly, entertaining themselves out in the open—in the streets and on the sidewalks.

For sure, Chinese eyes followed my spindly white body. But by then, I knew the difference between being watched and being spied on. From sitting alone in the school cafeteria, I’d taught myself how to live with that outsider feeling.

I walked with teenage impatience behind slow-moving old people holding the hands of little kids going to school. I passed mothers and adult daughters strolling arm-in-arm. At the edge of a group of men hovering around chess sets, a grizzled gentleman in a Mao jacket poked me in the ribs and pointed out a brilliant chess move. Understanding neither Chinese nor chess, I smiled wanly.

I wandered past pagodas for the prayerful and dim sum eateries for the hungry. Laundry drying on balconies and scarlet red street lanterns swaying in the cool breezes coming off S.F. Bay.

In markets, I saw fish taking a last swim in watery tanks. Shops with jars, tins and boxes of strange spices and healing herbs. Woks, chopsticks and wood-handled ladles. Crappy tee shirts made in China for American tourists (because who else would want them). Bins and buckets overflowing with strange vegetables. Bullfrogs ready to hop into someone’s frying pan.

For lunch, I ate deep-fried chicken feet, spattering the cartilage and glaze on my shirt. No one to report back to my mother.

I walked up and down Ross Alley, the oldest alley in San Francisco. From the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, the sweet, seductive, sensuous scent of cookie dough baking—an aroma which three decades later still lingers in my nostrils—enveloped me. To this day, a handful of women cook 10,000 cookies a day on cast-iron grills, stuffing each folded cookie with a prophecy on a slip of paper.

Chinatown was my first infatuation with the excitement of travel. As if catching a chance smile from the prettiest girl in my junior high school, my last fortune from my final fortune cookie fluttered my stomach.

“You never travel alone.”

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