Denise Sullivan

Author, Journalist, Culture Worker

May 12, 2023 • 5:29 pm 0

Supporting San Francisco Independent Reporting

“Rally” is a film about San Francisco political figure, Rose Pak. Her life was extraordinary and the role she has played in our city’s development since the days of Moscone and Milk is perhaps not fully understood or acknowledged. Rooth Tang’s excellent film, which I hope will reach a wider release this year, debuted at the San Francisco Film Festival in April. The photograph above pictures Pak in the ’70s when she was the first ever Asian American reporter hired by the San Francisco Chronicle. Tang, an Angeleno, traveled to the center of Pak’s story in the way that perhaps only a Chinatown and San Francisco outsider could, but he had plenty of local insider assistance. As personal, political and documentaries of time and place go, Tang’s film is essential.

Kasey Rios is one of those freethinking and spirited San Franciscans that is the embodiment of our sanctuary city at its best. Serving residents of the Tenderloin and SoMa with a vision of greener and self-sustaining neighborhoods and fair wages for all seems a reasonable part of the solution toward improving our civic direction — a plan that includes all people, not just the wealthiest ones. Rios makes a case for less law enforcement and authority and more autonomy for residents, while paying folks to beautify and clean public spaces one neighborhood at a time. It’s a bottom up rather than a top down system and it is working in places like Mexico City and Paris, so why not here? Building the workforce is key: But such ideas can’t take if workers cannot afford to live here and we perpetuate a cycle of displacement and profits over people.

Like the city itself, the local media continues to experience loss, change and reorganization: Like everywhere, there has been a real drain of alternative news outlets here in recent years, and a co-opting and misunderstanding of what journalism is and can be. But there remains hope: Independent news organizations and reporting are the present and future of the form. As a new contributor to Bay City News Foundation, a local wire service and network of regional news outlets including Local News Matters, I’m happy to continue to do my work delivering under-reported stories to a wider public, as well as through the monthly live stream project, SFLives/Live Talks.

This Sunday, our guest is Malia Spanyol, a small business owner with an eye on keeping safe spaces alive for women and queer folks in the Mission District, a neighborhood that remains in persistent risk of over-gentrification. Next month on June 11, we will be in discussion with the aforementioned Kasey Rios at 10 am. SFLives livestreams on the Bird and Becket Books channel. Please join us and keep your eyes open for more on-the-ground coverage from San Francisco — from myself and other dedicated reporters from our city. We’re still here.

Filed under: Arts and Culture, gentrification, San Francisco News, Women's issues,

April 13, 2022 • 11:11 am 0

SF Lives/Live Talks Are Back!

Greetings fellow Friscans and those interested in the latest from our much maligned and beloved city. As readers know, I occasionally write about San Francisco’s people, poets, places and solutions to its problems for a project dubbed SF Lives. Its print/text version is in process of seeking a new home beyond this blog and the archives of the San Francisco Examiner. However, if you’re interested in keeping up with all the news that I see fit to report from my outpost at the edge of the world, our SF Lives/Lives Talks, is once again livestreaming conversations from Bird &Beckett Books and Records.

This month I interviewed Kelley Cutler, the human rights coordinator at the Coalition on Homelessness. Cutler is a 20-year veteran of providing services to our unhoused neighbors and has seen firsthand the way people’s lives change dramatically for the better when they are able to secure housing. But promised housing by the City of San Francisco and the supportive services to assist people in need have still not materialized: There are no beds available and a dysfunctional intake system continues to challenge and stymie the best efforts by outreach workers and the people living on our streets. In this conversation, Cutler helps us understand why the cycle of dysfunction persists. With much gratitude to her and the work she the Coalition do, I hope you will take an hour to hear why the mayor’s Tenderloin emergency plan and other efforts to house people are failing, why the city is in violation of people’s basic human rights, and why the work Cutler does is essential to all of our SFLives.

Filed under: California, gentrification, income disparity, San Francisco News, Tales of the Gentrification City, , , ,

February 22, 2022 • 6:46 pm 1

Total Recall (San Francisco Edition)

If you are getting your news about San Francisco in the national mainstream media, you are understandably confused. Take last week’s recall of three members of our school board.

For anyone seeking actual answers as to how San Francisco was played in the outcome of its particularly San Franciscan recall, educational policy expert Kevin Kumashiro, author of Surrendered: Why Progressives Are Losing The Biggest Battles In Education, offered a streamlined and clear explanation to Ian Masters on a recent edition of Background Briefing.

Kumashiro has been following the nationwide dismantling of school boards in the wake of pandemic closures and the concurrent CRT debates, and breaks down how specifically GOP strategies, money and other forces came to bear on San Francisco’s maligned school board.

“This was about some people feeling the school board was putting too much of its time into ‘equity issues’ [renaming schools and admission policies], and not enough attention on reopening,” said Kumashiro. He further notes San Francisco reopened last fall like many other school districts, but the emphasis was placed on the slow action and competence of its three now-recalled board members who are, as you might’ve guessed, Black, Asian-Pacific Islander and Latina. Make no mistake: Kumashiro describes what happened in San Francisco as part of a larger plan to prey on national race anxieties that will ultimately be used to strike down affirmative action in the Supreme Court. This is cause for anyone with a pulse to feel alarmed. And yet, still not reading much real talk about this angle of the outcome of the recall in the press. Read my full report on the recall in Down With Tyranny which also links directly to the interview with Kumashiro.

Filed under: San Francisco News, , , , ,

January 18, 2022 • 3:58 pm 1

Looking For A Home

Dear Reader,

Living and working in major U.S. cities throughout my adult life, I always came back to thinking, and sometimes writing, about San Francisco. Maybe it’s because I was born here, have spent the majority of my waking and working life here, and expect to remain here (unless I make it out alive). But writing about this place I call home – whatever home means – for myself and for publication has been my preoccupation, and for the past four years, my vocation. One of the spaces I’ve found for my work as a reporter has been as a biweekly columnist at The San Francisco Examiner.

In 2018, I was invited to create and contribute SFLives, a series about people, to the paper. Since launching, I’ve written over 100 columns, earned two awards in the columnist category (from the San Francisco Press Club in 2020 and 2021), and curated and hosted a monthly hour-long talk series, live streamed from Bird & Beckett Books and Records (continuing on the second Sunday of each month). Writing the SFLives column, intended to celebrate the extraordinary lives of everyday people who make this a singular city, has been one of the greatest honors and privileges of my life. To get to know people, to be invited into the homes, businesses and lives of so many San Franciscans, particularly during the pandemic, and be trusted to tell their stories in a metropolitan newspaper, has helped me to better understand a complex city, though I can’t claim to know all its secrets just yet.

I don’t do the work alone: trusted friends and contacts have introduced me to people I may not have otherwise encountered. And of course the subjects themselves, San Francisco’s people, fulfill the major role in filling the column inches with their survival tactics, wisdom and personal histories every other week. Occasionally I get a little closer to the bone and to home, but it’s generally other people’s unsung, everyday achievements I’m interested in celebrating. Surely, I benefit far more from these tellings than do my subjects, though some of them reported back wonderful things that happened following the publication of their stories. I can’t think of anything more gratifying to me professionally, to be living and working in a complicated city with its neighborhood identities, and introducing its people to each other and to the larger community. I intend to tell these stories until my work here is done, though SFLives will no longer be hosted by the Examiner.

My consideration of our city’s emergency plan to bring “law and order” to the Tenderloin – San Francisco’s most long term troubled neighborhood – is my farewell for now. That the column concerns San Franciscans living unhoused on our streets is a sort of bittersweet occurrence but is not a coincidence. The city and its power base has not done right by its least fortunate and most vulnerable people (and the United Nations backs up that claim). Meanwhile the convulsive changes at the Examiner, a newspaper claimed by new ownership and management seeking a new identity, has recently made for a less than comfortable home for SFLives. I’ll be using my time away from it to continue my work as a teaching artist/writing instructor and a cultural reporter at other news outlets, and to further develop the SFLives project.

I am grateful to be among the housed in one of the wealthiest cities in the wealthiest region of the country, and to continue my work, documenting the lives and times of my fellow San Franciscans living through perilous times. But please keep the faith, friends and readers, that San Francisco, as a city, as an idea, as a state of mind and as a people, does the right thing and cares for its most vulnerable people this winter, as the COVID variants surge. There are plenty of good folks and organizations here, with open hearts and a willingness to communicate with care and compassion: I intend to stick with them, to keep doing my job, and telling your stories, in conjunction with partners whose values and mine are better aligned. Thank you for supporting independent thought and reporting and please return or subscribe to this space for updates.

In solidarity,

Denise

SFLives

    Filed under: Arts and Culture, California, San Francisco News, , , , , ,

    November 8, 2021 • 4:57 pm 0

    Celebrating 100 San Francisco Lives

    Corner Launderette, California Street, Inner Richmond District, San Francisco, 2021 photo by Denise Sullivan

    The idea of the “soul of San Francisco,” and whether it’s been lost or found in these years of our gentrification and more recently the pandemic is worn-out. But what exactly does it mean, to go in search of something as ephemeral as a city’s spirit? After 99 columns, I’m still trying to find out.

    “One of the things people say to me all the time is they’re happy we’re still here. As if they are expecting me not to be,” said Paula Tejada, the self-proclaimed Empanada Lady who presides over Chile Lindo, her specialty food stand and catering business on 16th between Capp and South Van Ness, the crossroads of good fortune and hard luck.

    Tejada is the among the San Franciscans I’ve talked to for SFLives, my column that has been running every other week in the San Francisco Examiner for going on four years. In that time we’ve earned second and third place awards in the columnist category of the San Francisco Press Club’s annual Northern California Journalism Awards, launched a monthly talk series at Bird and Beckett Books & Records, talked to over 100 San Franciscans and shared a bit of our own history. The space has been devoted largely to probing the idea of what keeps some of us here, while there are others who try us, then decide it’s time to leave in a hurry. The whole project has been a thorny proposition, fraught with the usual contradictions of writing about a complex city. And yet, I learn more and more about San Francisco each day by talking to folks who call this place home.

    “Foot traffic in the morning is done,” Tejada told me when I checked in on her pandemic status, three years after we first sat down for a chat.

    “There are no Google buses, people who used to walk by in the morning aren’t going to work on BART and I never know if I’m going to have that customer that’s coming in for a dozen.”

    And yet, Tejada digs into reserves she doesn’t really have to pay topflight jazz, salsa and bossa nova musicians to perform at her storefront, thanks in part to The City relaxing regulations around outdoor dining and drinking during the pandemic. She does it because she believes in that ineffable thing we call the soul of San Francisco…

    READ THE ENTIRE COLUMN HERE and 99 other columns HERE.

    As I like to say, please don’t believe everything you read in the national and international press about San Francisco. But if you get a chance to talk to one of us who lives here, you might find out, like I’ve found out, that our people have still got that indescribable something that it’s been said we San Franciscans are made of and carry with us wherever in the world we go: Maybe it’s a can-do spirit, maybe it’s soul; some might call it grace and I call it home. We all carry the place where we’re from with us, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. I truly hope that here in this place once known as the City That Knows How we can find within us and its city limits the ability to rise from this very, very broken place we’ve arrived post-pandemic. Until then, squint your eyes and try to find some light in the darkness: I promise it’s here, but you have to look up at just the right moment or you just might miss it.

    Filed under: San Francisco News, , ,

    July 13, 2021 • 8:48 am 2

    Real SF Lives Talk Real: New Series!

    First Stop/Last Stop photo by Denise Sullivan

    If you read the national news- or even some of our local papers – you might think San Francisco is beyond redemption. I blame it on seven dollar coffee and toast (the fourteen dollar snack). Some will tell you it’s the corruption inside city hall, the mishandling of affordable housing, and the public school system, and I would believe them: All of it part of the unfinished jigsaw of our city’s story and there is more to it than that. But one thing we handled, and handled well, was the pandemic. So thanks for that, to the medical professionals and city officials, essential workers and everyday citizens who did their part to mask up and slow the spread. Though it might be fair to say the statewide reopening on June 15 felt hasty and confusing to those who adhered to the guidelines for the duration -no non-essential travel, social or business activity, six feet of distance, masking and no gathering. The mask off and the rush back to life is stress-inducing and no-wonder: There is so little known about the mutation of the virus, the variants; as it is, hospitalizations are up in some California counties…

    In an effort to air some of the public’s immediate practical and emotional concerns and to feel uplifted during the transition, on June 13, a couple of days before “reopening,” we kicked off a livestreamed discussion series with our fellow San Franciscans, hosted by Bird & Beckett Books and Records. Our first guest was artist Anna Lisa Escobedo, an extraordinary San Franciscan with an LA background and a story to tell. Our second guest was columnist and independent publisher, Kelly Dessaint. Future guests will include many of the subjects of my column, SFLives, which runs every other week in the San Francisco Examiner: The folks I cover and tend to want to speak to in-depth are our on-the-ground leaders and everyday workers in arts, culture and various essential jobs that make San Francisco the place we call home.

    In recent columns, I’ve covered the controversy surrounding the opening of the Great Highway from a very personal perspective; I’ve spoken to photojournalist/filmmaker Lou Dematteis, musician/composer Jon Jang, artist/urban farmer/community historian Lisa Ruth Elliott and Japantown community leader Grace Horikiri (You can peruse nearly 100 columns at the Examiner’s website).

    Porthole photo by Denise Sullivan

    In some of these talks we take on gentrification issues, the ways in which the city has ceded the people’s interests to newly minted tech barons and their minions and pretty much successfully destroyed our international reputation as a sanctuary for artists and outsiders. Yes, that. But mostly in 2020 and beyond it, we confronted pandemic issues, how we coped and how our hometown did that aforementioned exemplary job at keeping the spread under control, even though we as a city continue to fail our most vulnerable — those without homes, seniors without families, and developmentally and physically disabled folks. As for the rocky “reopening,” we’ll be talking about that too: Nobody really knows how to handle the summer rush. There are no workers for low-wage jobs. And as the unvaxed and unmasked descend upon us, the most committed lovers of this place are at the brink: There are stories we’re moving out in droves, moving to Tahoe (and ruining the way of life there). A recent New York Times story about organized shoplifting crimes at Walgreen’s is the latest outrage, meanwhile, children remain out of school while a dysfunctional school board (we voted for) squabbles over….don’t ask, most of us have lost the plot; discontent –no, rage–directed at the district attorney (we voted for) has degenerated into moms shouting down other moms at the neighborhood farmer’s markets. Finally, the web of deep corruption within city hall and other city agencies continues to be investigated by the feds. These are just a few of the challenges confronting us in perilous times. Yes, this place is for the birds. And where isn’t right now?

    What I feel like I’ve failed to put into words, ever, but especially in these times, is there is nowhere else I would rather be. This is that elusive place called home. There is something about waking up in the City and County of San Francisco seeing the sun (or at this time of year, fog), and feeling in your bones it’s the right place to be; that there is something to be said for enduring our cold summer winters, days like these. And on other days, one peek at the sky, if it’s that particular shade of blue I have not yet found words to describe, with clouds that seem to move as I go, the contentment and acceptance that I’m in San Francisco turns to deep joy and gratitude that I’m San Franciscan. In the blue, I can breathe more deeply, though why that is I haven’t yet discovered. So until then, I’ll keep talking about this place with you. And taking photos. And writing about it. Here’s to another day in the beautiful city. I have so much left to learn.

    Please join the conversation with San Francisco’s artists, essential service providers and and everyday people as we talk about this place we call home. Coming up, Sunday August 8, 10 a.m. live from Bird and Beckett, filmmaker Eric Goodfield.

    Filed under: Arts and Culture, California, photography, San Francisco News, serial, Tales of the Gentrification City, , ,

    March 18, 2021 • 6:25 pm 0

    San Francisco: Where there’s hatred, let love rule

    Sometimes there are coincidences that can’t be ignored. That’s what I said to the Reverend Roland Gordon and author/activist Benjamin Bac Sierra who echoed similar ideas when I interviewed them individually about their San Francisco lives and times for my San Francisco Examiner column, SFLives: Both men preach love and tolerance, Gordon (pictured below right) from the pulpit at Ingleside Presbyterian Church and Bac Sierra (pictured below left) from the podium in his classroom at City College of San Francisco (though for the past 365 days of the pandemic, their work has been done virtually). Both men are situated a matter of blocks from each other, coincidentally or not, just blocks from where I lived for the first several years of life with my parents, behind the restaurant and home of my grandparents. But when both Bac Sierra and Gordon conjured St. Francis, namesake of our city, I had to pause and acknowledge the source outside ourselves at play: A higher vibration that sometimes goes by the name of Love.

    photos courtesy of Ben Bac Sierra and Kevin Hume for San Francisco Examiner

    In this pandemic year, I’ve made fewer trips across town, had less in-person contact and left reporting from the frontlines to those who receive the hazard pay to do so. My writing has been more from the armchair and virtual perspective due to my own limitations; I’ve relied more than ever on my files and list of ideas and contacts — the ones I’d been meaning to get to but hadn’t, for one reason or another, than unearthing new discoveries. But then, that’s been the experience for many of us – exploring the great indoors, whether metaphorical or metaphysical, has been some of the work of our pandemic lives.

    It’s said timing is everything and in the case of these two profiles, I can’t agree more: The stories crossed my desk/came to mind/dropped in my lap at the one year mark of the pandemic and our shelter-in-place orders. It’s been a watermark, a time when people and The City (as we call it) are suffering from the fatigue of isolation and light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel anticipation, mixed with COVID-anxiety and variant dread. For some of us, the vaccine is not yet available. It hasn’t been an easy year: Not for the families who have lost members and not for people with disabilities and high risk conditions, including those who suffer the pain of depression due to isolation. It’s been hard on essential workers, healthcare professionals and especially for Black and Brown communities disproportionately impacted by the virus. And there is an additional layer of distress on Asian American Pacific Islanders, who for the last year have been targets of an appalling number of hate crimes here — yes here, in the city of St. Francis, where over one-third of our population identifies as AAPI.

    For Bac Sierra, a combat vet with an incredible backstory of survival and an evolving story of reclamation and redemption as an writer and educator, this time of year not only marks the anniversary of the pandemic: It’s been 30 years since he returned from the Gulf War and seven since his friend, Alex Nieto, was shot 59 times by SFPD. This is a solemn week in San Francisco as we once again remember those lives that were taken by police violence. Bac Sierra continues to honor his friend with Amor For Alex, an ongoing demonstration of love in action, a movement “beyond justice,” he said.

    As for Rev. Gordon, the idea behind his Great Cloud of Witness, a giant building-sized collage mural devoted to Black excellence he’s crafted over several decades, is to inspire youth toward greatness. He established a basketball league and community center to develop community engagement and has been an advocate for over 30 years. Extending beyond his neighborhood, he offers the San Francisco World Peace Affirmation, based on the words of the prayer commonly referred to as The Prayer to St. Francis, but tailored so as to affirm peace in the now. “If you’re talking about love and honor and respect for everybody, San Francisco could be a microcosm of the world,” said Gordon. We still have quite a bit of work to do, thus the prayer and affirmation.

    Francis of Assisi was born late in the 12th Century. By the turn of 13th Century, his visions of Christ drew him deeper toward living a life more like Jesus, renouncing his family and worldly goods and tending to the sick and poor (this is of course a general and capsule take on one of the most important figures to all of Christendom). He honored the elements, all creatures, and is the patron saint of nature and animals. It is probably needless to say that some thought he was mad. There are others, even those outside the faith, who believe in the prayer named for him, though not written by his hand: It is the prayer that begins, Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace; where there is hatred let me sow love… You may’ve heard it. If not, I encourage you to look it up, if you’re the praying kind.

    The future of San Francisco, and the rest of the world, is still untold. Some would say we are at the point in our so-called civilization that only a divine source, the power of a miracle or some higher force outside ourselves is going to turn around this mess we humans have gotten into. But where there is love there is hope. I hope you will read the stories of Rev. Gordon and Ben Bac Sierra in the column and love what they have to say as much as I loved being reminded by them of the saint meant to guide our city and its actions, and the words to the prayer that bears his name: Grant that we may not so much seek to be loved as to love.

    Filed under: anti-capitalist, anti-war, Arts and Culture, California, San Francisco News, , , , , , ,

    September 30, 2020 • 8:30 pm 0

    Columnist Nabs Greater Bay Area Journalism Award

    For the first time since I was in high school (which was a really long time ago), I’ve received acknowledgement for my work as a reporter. This month, I was awarded third place honors in the columnist category for my biweekly column, SFLives, for the San Francisco Examiner, by the Greater Bay Area Journalism Awards, held by the San Francisco Press Club and judged by members of the San Diego, St. Louis, Cleveland and New Orleans Press Clubs. Among the 70 columns I’ve written for the San Francisco Examiner since early 2018, I have my personal favorites to be sure, and all of them were made possible with the participation of some extraordinary San Franciscans who make our city what it has been historically and what it is in these unprecedented times. Our people are freethinkers, visionaries and lionhearted beacons who lead the rest of the country in their respective pursuits and professions. Whether working in the arts, activism or as essential workers, we simply could not endure, survive and thrive in these times at the edge of the world without the everyday people who make The City extraordinary (the tagline of SFLives). Congratulations to all of the great journalists and photographers who participated and received acknowledgement and thanks to all who voted. But the biggest thanks of course belongs to the subjects of SF Lives: There is no column without San Francisco and our people. My recognition from the San Francisco Press Club belongs to all of us – thank you.

    Read the latest San Francisco Lives columns

    Filed under: Arts and Culture, column, San Francisco News, , , ,

    August 19, 2020 • 9:14 am 0

    How to support small presses, indie films and theaters during the pandemic

    Notes, Contacts, Name CQ's here

    Liam Curley, warehouse manager at the Small Press Distribution, Berkeley, CA. During the high season of the pandemic’s shelter-in-place orders, it was lonely in SPD’s warehouse where Curley worked by himself, receiving and shipping orders by hand at a fraction of his usual pace.(Photo by Carlos Avila Gonzalez/The Chronicle)

    During the early phase of the coronavirus shutdown, small publishers and the Northern California distributor that ships those books to market were doing all right, operating with scaled down staffs and shipping customer orders direct. But as the fall publishing season approaches, with no end to the virus in sight, the closures indefinite, and college course texts and bookstore futures shaky, the small press industry is navigating the same uncertain future as everyone else. If there is a silver lining to this catastrophe, small presses are generally more attuned to matters of race, gender and class than the big five publishing houses: There is a demand for books authored, edited and published by Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC). I wrote about the longstanding spirit and principle of intersectionality in small press publishing for the San Francisco Chronicle. I hope you’ll read the full story here.

    SFE-SFLives

    Documentary filmmaker Anne Flatte stands outside the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. Her film,  “River City Drumbeat,” is about a year in the life of drum corps in Louisville, Kentucky.  (Photo by Kevin N. Hume/S.F. Examiner)

    Some of the changes from digitization that impacted publishing even before the pandemic also reverberate through the art of producing, making and presenting independent film – a corner of the film business where woman traditionally find more opportunity than they do in Hollywood.  For the small art houses that regularly show movies by and about subjects that might not otherwise be seen on the big screen, the pandemic closures threaten to wipe out old time cinemas and movie-going entirely, though the best makers and curators are adapting.  Here in San Francisco, we can stream directly from our beloved Roxie, Balboa and Vogue Theaters, among others.  Filmmaker Anne Flatté is screening her latest work, River City Drumbeat, via virtual cinema. She and her co-director chose a youth drum corps as their compelling subject and made a visually captivating and emotionally powerful film about cultural legacy and survival. As a viewer, you can choose to watch indie films like River City Drumbeat in a way that supports local businesses instead of using your typical streaming services. Why would you? Well, the main multi-media/marketplace exploits its workers.  And the business models of the big streaming services also steal a disproportionate amount of revenue from the people who actually make the art. Those fat cats don’t need your money and artists need to be compensated for their work. Read more here.

    Please support a small local press, filmmaker, theater or business today or this week: They need us – and we need them – if ever we’re going to get through this mess.

    Filed under: Arts and Culture, Book news, film, San Francisco News, , , , , ,

    August 6, 2020 • 6:20 pm 0

    One of The Survivors: 75th Remembrance

    190202-sfe-sflives-005Jack Dairiki is an old-time Californian: His maternal grandfather was a hotelier and grocer in Sacramento. But in 1941, as a firstborn son, he was called with his father to the rural village outside of Hiroshima where his father was originally from.

    “We received a letter in the mail that my grandfather was ill,” he explained. “We planned a summer vacation trip.” Traveling by ship to Yokohama, they proceeded to Tokyo and into the lush, green countryside where aunts, uncles and cousins he didn’t even realize existed eagerly awaited the arrival of their American relatives.

    “My experience of seeing Japan for the first time was I noticed everything was petite: The cars, the railroad,” said Dairiki, while pouring into crystal glasses water and green tea for us to share. He recalled the culture shock upon his arrival.

    “The only time I ate with chopsticks was in Chinese restaurants,” he said. He was unaccustomed to taking off his shoes and sitting on the floor, to the sliding doors and the tatami mats.

    “I criticized my father for taking his shoes off,” he remembered. “We don’t do that in the United States, I told him, but my father had grown up in Japan. It was like being home for him.” One summer of running through rice fields and swimming in streams passed quickly. Dairiki was ready to return: to Sacramento, to Lincoln Grammar School, to his mother, his brothers and his sister. And then, World War II.

    “My father tried to secure our passage back and was told we couldn’t go,” he said.
    At home, his mother and siblings had been rounded up and taken to the Tulelake detention center; his younger brother died while in custody.
    Read the rest of my interview with A-Bomb survivor, Jack Dairiki of San Francisco in the San Francisco Examiner as we remember with horror the US attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bomb killed somewhere between 100-200,000 people, most all civilians, this week 75 years ago. “When will we ever learn?”

    Filed under: anti-war, San Francisco News, , , , , , , , , ,

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