Bah Ba mumbles, trying to direct us to make a left, but we don’t listen or are unable to hear him through the crowd. The camera held by my father pans around, but when it pans back to us, we’re gone, subsumed by shoppers. He calls for us, not angry or in desperation, but lackadaisically.
chapter 3
Apartment 171
north beach posse
What Bah Ba did to Ga Jeh colors my memories of my childhood apartment in the North Beach housing projects. I was five when we moved in, twenty-five when I moved out.
On the day we moved in, we picked bedrooms. Ga Jeh chose the room that happened to face the most foot traffic. Goh Goh and I chose the room that faced a narrow strip of lawn. Our apartment was on the ground floor, and Bah Ba, worried about Peeping Toms, made me and my brother swap rooms with our sister. I guess my brother and I understood because I don’t remember us putting up a fight. We misplaced the fear, outside our home instead of inside it.
The name of our housing project, North Beach, was mislead- ing. North Beach was up the hill. We were closer to Fisherman’s Wharf. Our backyard was Alcatraz, crab stands, and sea lions down at the pier sunbathing. A salty breeze wandered our streets. Right smack between the two blocks of our housing projects was a cable car terminal; its tracks humming nonstop. A horde of tourists would gather, cameras dangling from their necks. They’d stroll through the middle of our turf like it wasn’t shit. Our buildings didn’t intimidate, just three floors high. Across the street from the terminal were four-star hotels. Tourists were an occupying army, dressed in shorts and long socks, armed with maps and smiles. We’d launch water balloons at them from the walkways, aiming for the ones with a camera.
Once in a while a tourist would get robbed. We’d stumble upon an empty suitcase near a stairwell. Pizza delivery guys, after getting stuck up, would refuse to deliver to our doors; we had to meet them at the corner. They’d keep their engine running, windows rolled up. When I’d walk up to the car, they’d scan around to make sure it wasn’t a setup. Not because I was imposing, but because I wasn’t. Sending the innocent-looking one was the oldest trick in the book. They’d lower their window, and I’d slip them bills like a drug deal.
Each project building had a similar layout, comprised of three sections that surrounded a courtyard and a parking lot that opened up to Francisco Street. All the windows on the first floor had burglar bars that formed concentric diamonds. On the raised curbs that led into the parking lots, old men would sit and drink out of a paper bag. Or sometimes they’d sit out there just to sit. It was their porch. One with a graying beard, who’d limp around with his cane, had a dog, a Jack Russell mix who’d bark at me from a block away. Hanging out on the sidewalk would be younger guys, at the same spots day in and day out, spitting on the ground to pass the time. Sometimes it might be one dude by himself, lingering for hours, as though he had a phobia of home.
My project building was on the far end, the only one without a parking lot, a larger courtyard in its place. Unlike the other project buildings, none of our front doors faced the courtyard. We all had our back to it. And that’s what we called the courtyard: The Back. My apartment faced Columbus Avenue. Across the street were Tower Records and the Consulate of Indonesia. A few feet from my doorstep was a community garden, and in that small space in between, that’s what we called the courtyard.
In elementary school, I’d walk from my house down Francisco Street to the school bus stop and back after school. In third grade, I’d begun doing this alone. My brother was in middle school, and sometimes my sister preferred to travel on her own from school with her friends.
One day I was walking home by myself from the bus stop when some kid about my age with shiny curly hair came straight up to me and punched me. I pushed him away but not with much strength. He laughed and raised his arms in victory, strutting over to his friend standing nearby. Another time, a teenage boy grabbed me by the shoulders and shoved me towards a girl, pretending I was a stuffed animal that he wanted to give her. The day the basketball court opened after months of renovation to the playground, I was the first to show up but was soon crowded off by a large group of kids. One of them punted my ball over the chain-link fence. He didn’t take pleasure in it. More like he was doing me a favor. Better the ball than me.
There were as many Asians as Blacks in our housing projects, but it hadn’t seemed that way growing up. If you had driven by, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone hanging out who wasn’t Black.
I began to act like a tourist, wary of Black kids. I swore that I wouldn’t be caught off guard again, but this was no solution. Say the next time a kid tried to bully me, and I was ready for it, what was I really going to do? I was too proud to run, too cowardly to fight.
One afternoon, I was coming home with Ga Jeh. As she was opening the door to our apartment, we heard kids singsonging our names—“Dick-son and Cin-dy, Cin-dy and
