My San Francisco is a series of posts that describes my own personal relationship with The City. My San Francisco pieces might be photo essays, or life stories, or commentaries – or a combinations of all three. My impressions aren’t always paeans to San Francisco. It’s a beautiful city, but like any city, it’s dirty, noisy and has its fair share of urban warts. These pieces will always have one common theme; they are expressions of my personal San Francisco experience.
Intro: I first wrote this post in May of 2019, just two months after a pandemic shut down the world. Over the years it became one of the most read posts on this site. After rereading the original piece along with a review of my notes I decided to do a rewrite. Hopefully this doesn’t turn into a lesson in, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’
Waverly – Lunar New Year 2019
“My mother named me after the street that we lived on: Waverly Place Jong, my official name for important American documents.” ~ From The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan.
I’m standing at the end of the alley, gawking at a street sign, just before taking a photo of it. Even if you endorse the old saying about a picture and it’s worth in words, a dirty white sign against a typically gray San Francisco morning sky seems pretty damned mute. Tourists swirl about, bumping, dodging, gawking, some probably wondering why this random old fool thinks there’s something special about a street sign. Maybe they figure I’m an eccentric member of their itinerant species, trying to find his bearings in the ocean of activity that’s San Francisco’s Chinatown in February.
In any other off season month, there wouldn’t be such a crush of out of towners. Or locals for that matter.
Local tourists are a year round breed. They come from the suburbs, patiently – or not – waiting out the traffic on either the Golden Gate or the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (part of which was, on May 6, 2026, officially designated as the Willie Mays Highway). On a clear day the views from the raised vantage point of a historic bridge can be spectacular, unless you have to sit in the shit every day, in which case the classic elevated view of Alcatraz peering through feelers of morning fog has long ago lost its appeal.
The Peninsula dwellers wait out the jam on 101. The crush begins at about Cesar Chavez (likely to be renamed because of recent revelations about Chavez, the man). Traffic creeps past rolling Bernal Heights on the left, and to the right, the vintage sign on The Old Clam House (which started serving seafood the same year that the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter). It’s been four decades or more since I first passed that sign and promised myself that I’d try the place.
I still haven’t. Maybe this will be the year. Yeah – likely not.
These northbound suburbanites will likely as not be held up by a routine (dare I say, obligatory) fender bender where 101 makes a bend at Hospital Curve, named after San Francisco General, which sits just off to the left. I once knew a nurse who worked in the emergency room at S.F. Gen. She told me that if you ever feel the need to visit the E.R, San Francisco General is the place to go. That’s the way of a county general. They see it all; from heart attacks to broken bones, to gunshot wounds, to injured earthquake victims.
Now S.F. Gen is called Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, and if the nomenclators knew then what they know now they might have chosen a different name; Morally Bankrupt Child Addicting Douchie Billionaire General comes immediately to mind.
The locals often return to Chinatown for old times sake; dim sum at a place that might still be there as they remember it, but has more likely changed hands any number of times. The City, particularly after COVID, is transitory. Just ask anyone who’s tried to keep a business alive on Market Street.
Maybe they’re Bourdain fans, in Chinatown to walk upright into the darkly lit Li Po Lounge and then stagger out after having had one of that little dive’s lethal Mai Tais that got Bourdain magnificently shit faced on an episode of The Layover. The Mai Tai? According to the website, The Search for the Ultimate Mai Tai, the Li Po cocktail is, “a mix of dark, light, and 151 rums, pineapple, and Chinese Liqueur . . . very freely poured” (I assume that “very freely,” translates to a lot”. The article goes on, “The Chinese liqueur used is called Ng Ka Py, a Sorghum-based spirit that is bottled at 48% ABV.”
Or maybe they visit just to see how much the always colorful and vibrant (if you don’t count COVID times) neighborhood has changed.
But it’s early February now, smack in the middle of the two months long Lunar New Year season, and Chinatown is experiencing its annual winter spike.
The souvenir shops, always brilliant with brightly colored gewgaws and imported junk, are now packed with the red and gold lucky money envelopes called hóngbāo, and all manner of little piggy dolls (it’s 2019 and this new year celebrates the Year of the Pig). Lion dancers enthrall knots of visitors, and the unexpected staccato of a bursting string of fire crackers frightens the blood out of even the most seasoned Lunar New Year visitor.
The Life in My Years 