in San Francisco...

this is an old piece I wrote when I was visiting San Francisco, on June 13, 2011

In San Francisco ...

In San francisco, I feel playful.

One of my best friends in the world picks me up from the airport... and then suddenly the city sprawls before me like a lucid wet dream;

Testament to local investment in cool politik, the walls of almost every district are replete with effervescent murals showcasing the very finest of contemporary American urban psychedelia and art-activism. San Francisco is easily one of the world’s most muraled cities… A legacy which gifts the city's residents with their own ever-changing art gallery on their way to work and play, everyday.

Here, my heart beats calmly with the slightest tinge of melancholy, for I am both indigenous of and tourist to this land. I have ‘grown up’ here (in my unapologetically spiritualist rendering of the term: as a young adult coming into my own emotionally, sexually, intellectually, spiritually), and so the Bay Area is my HOME…

But I also am legally a tourist, without rights of residence, employment, healthcare, and so on… and then, and then… but still, but still…

In San Francisco, I feel desireable.

I need not leave anything out of my speech, my sway, or my strut: I am artist, poet, queer Asian man, boy, hippie, poseur, superstar, post-loser, young activist, musician, global immigrant. I can take identity politic or I can leave it, but I am blessed with options. On my first night out in the Castro, I am sweetly spoken to by a gorgeous 20something Latino man from central California, whom my compadres had previously checked out while I had been my usual, silently dismissive self…

“Him? A guy like him? He’d never go for a guy like me," I sullenly muse to myself, avoiding his gaze.

He walks up to me and buys me a drink.

And then a few more.

The next morning, we wake up in each other’s arms in an overpriced motel. We hold our foreheads and laugh with each other at the spoils of our drunken frenzy… I remember, a deep, bodily memory: How much I love this brand of foolish freedom. I relish the freedom of enjoying my body not being so rancidly racialised by fucked up, Euro-centric conceptions of masculinity or beauty, or exoticised ideas of who I am because I am Asian;

My skin is smooth. My eyes are black.

My accent is an amalgamation of being raised upper middle class in Anglicised Singaporean and international schools, Americanised by rural New Hampshire, and then Aussified by new citizenship. My tattoos are black and red colours that stand out against the negative space of a gentle tan. THIS is my race, THIS is my ethnicity: several generations diasporic Hakka Hokkien Cantonese Chinese, my thoughts appearing and disappearing in English, my politics maybe Anglo-phonic, but wedded to no nation-state, and my heart singing their constant praises to the beautiful men whom I have loved.

I walk around the grid-planned streets of the Mission and Castro districts sipping on a cup of Philz coffee (with cream and mint), a quintessentially San Franciscan experience… The commodification of drip-coffee cool.

Then I jam electronica with one of the most important people in my life: my ex-boyfriend and ongoing compatriot. We zone for two hours going nuts at his place, doing percussion on electric violin, orchestrating rhythms on synth keys, overlaying the voice of Slavoj Zizek on phat base beats, singing nothing in particular (and then renditioning Sufjan Stevens) while rapping syncopating fingers on nylon-stringed guitar...

I remember 2008, when we were sweeter with our music, so much more languid in the lush comfort of his home in the hills of Berkeley… where it was just me on acoustic guitar and him on violin. We made music as a correlate to how we made love; The strums, the plucks, the bows, our diaphragms sore with relentless outpourings of joy…the subtle intimacies that would grow and erupt from the practiced feel of our instruments that only we will ever understand.

And the sorrow of leaving…

But that was so many years ago, when I was just as foolish as I am now, but not quite as wise... This evening, I am calm and home alone in my brother’s place in Rockridge, Oakland, sipping chamomile tea and smiling...

"I am so lucky."

And yet another fresh, chilly summer's day in the Bay draws itself to a close.