In less than six months San Francisco has come to feel like home, maybe even more than the Netherlands and I’ve been pondering why.
The highlight of my time in San Francisco unexpectedly has been the people. I didn’t leave the Netherlands looking for a new home, I left searching for a new environment, to challenge my perspectives and come out of my comfort zone. Instead, it feels like I found a new comfort zone. For the first time, perhaps ever, I felt some sense of belonging.
When I arrived, everything was new, strange and unfamiliar. Now, it’s become familiar to the extent that I know where the different homeless people sleep, who the baristas are at my favourite cafes and cookie shops and the owners at each of the different corner stores on my block. In San Francisco, I feel at ease. Running into familiar faces in the randomest of places at odd times and always feeling welcome.
I’ve often felt like an outsider, in the Netherlands, and also in Shanghai. Not quite Chinese, not quite Dutch. In Shanghai, I was “the crazy girl on the bike” without brakes aggressively battling my way through the heavily congested streets of Shanghai on my mother’s old Oma Fiets. In the Netherlands, I was a Chinese person, whose parents strangely did not own a restaurant and can’t handle spicy food for ****. It felt like people were constantly trying to put me in a box, but I didn’t really fit into any.
In San Francisco, I was more confident that the insults I’d receive for running a red light wouldn’t be race-based than whether I would make it up the next hill if it was over >20%. I remember one of the first things I noticed when I arrived was the number of languages all the signage at the airport and on the BART was translated to. Everyone was from everywhere, and everyone had a story.
It felt like I genuinely connected with the people I met in San Francisco, because they understood me and where I came from. All the other stuff didn’t matter. In the Netherlands, we say “doe maar normaal, dan doe je al gek genoeg” (acting normal is crazy enough, see my other post). After all these years, it never occurred to me until now, that Chinese culture has that same principle. In San Francisco, it felt ok to be me.
Only as I write this, from the same cafe in Mexico City that I worked from last year, has it started to dawn on me how unreal leaving San Francisco feels. As though I’m not actually leaving and that this move is only temporary. As if there’s a degree unavoidable of certainty that I’ll be back.
What am I going to miss most about San Francisco? The people, but I’ll see them around.
