I was staring at a tram passing by Market Street that evening, waiting to cross the road, when the passing tram revealed this woman in the middle of the street, dancing.
Her eyes were closed as she danced to some silent disco, no headphones in sight. She was at the divider in the middle of the street, with cars and trams passing by in opposite directions around her. She pumped her hands into the air as she bobbed along. She was black, her long wild hair barely constrained in a fluffy ponytail.
The few people who were waiting beside me were also tourists, and they muttered something about the homeless people, people who were not right in the head.
The pedestrian lights turned white – not green – and I hurried across the road, trying not to stare at her. But still, the image of her, dancing so freely in the middle of the street, replayed itself over and over in my head.
*
I’m very much a city girl. I love exploring cities, I love how predictable cities can be in their functional design – no matter where in the world you are, you know the big blocks that make up a city; the city centre and its activity, the main transport nodes and lines, the availability of Google maps and reliable data connections. To me, it provides a solid counterbalance to the cultural shocks and the uncertainty of being in an alien country.
I loved San Francisco’s grid-like streets. It didn’t matter if I got lost, because I knew I just need to find the next turn and get back to the right grid line. And exploring them in 15 degrees Celcius weather was very enjoyable.
Except for the homeless people on the streets.
People warned me about them, of course. They told me to prepare myself, especially since I live in Singapore and was obviously not used to homeless folks. But I was still caught off-guard by how ubiquitous they are, even at the city centre where my hotel and office were. And there were all kinds of folks: a plump, stoic-looking bearded guy sitting cross-legged at a corner among his belongings; a young looking long-haired punk who radiated pride and resentment; folks who walk with a limp, or a slouch; middle-aged men who yelled and argued with invisible enemies as they walk past; people who held out Big-Gulp cups for change. They were black and white, young and old, male and female.
It is not that I’m not used to seeing homeless people – there are many cities in Asia where you still see them – it just struck me as so weird that they were everywhere in San Francisco, one of the richest cities there is and home to many tech companies. This is a city that so many people across the world aspire to go to and work in, and somehow the mass of homeless people was just incongruent with the image of such a place.
I know about the high property prices and the inflation, of course. I majored in economics, I understand the mechanics of why these happen. But every time I averted eye contact, every time I sped up my pace or dodged sideways, I wondered how they got there. I wonder what their stories were, and whether they got here because they chased their dreams here.
This is the flip side of freedom, I tell myself. You are free to build a start-up and become a millionaire, but you are also free to fail, and free to grab a corner on the street when you do. And when you got there, who says you can’t dance in the middle of the street to the memory of your favourite song?
I am making sweeping generalisations and assumptions here, of course. But in SF I feel like I tasted freedom in its rawest form. Life is what you make of it. You do what you can to thrive, to survive.
It makes a lot of sense, but it still left me cold.
*
I was in SF for a week for work, and I barely had time to really explore. But in the evenings my teammates there brought me and other out-of-town folks out, and I still found it ironic that they brought me to Mexican places and a Chinese dumpling restaurant, and not somewhere more ‘local’. These are the best food in SF, they said.
I was reminded then of how America is a nation of migrants, just like Singapore, Malaysia, and probably hundreds of other countries. And it is always in the biggest cities, the most dynamic commerce centers, that you find a melting pot of cultures. Here, you take the best of each culture and create something better. You stay open-minded because you know how silly it is to insist on staying the same.
And here, both success and failure are exaggerated. You can bump into a millionaire on the street or another homeless person. And between the two extremes, you have a large sea of people who are trying hard to come up top.
One sign of how hard they try is the insane commutes. Many of them have to live in adjacent cities to keep living costs down, and endure two-hour commutes one-way each day to get to work. This is not new to me at all; I have, after all, sworn to never do daily commutes from JB – my hometown and a city next to Singapore – after seeing the toll it took on my parents. Knowing that people do that in SF just made me appreciate how lucky I am to be able to afford this choice.
For those who work in the HQ of the big tech companies, it could be worse. The giant campuses of these companies are not in SF at all but at neighbouring towns or cities. There is, I found out, a complex network of shuttle buses and train options to get from SF to those campuses. The companies also provide varying transport subsidies or programs.
My company conducts a very comprehensive survey about employee commutes every year. For someone who works in Singapore, with its efficient transport system, I never understood why they asked so many questions about commute and feedback. Now I could finally appreciate how they use the results.
On one of the mornings, my team had to get to Sunnyvale for a series of morning meetings. We had to meet at a random street corner at 6.30am to catch the company bus. We almost got on the bus to the wrong tech company HQ because there are just so many of these buses ferrying employees around, and all of them low-profile with no company logos on the bus itself. When we got on, the teammate who was local got us the wifi passwords for the bus’ network, and I noticed that quite a number of the people on the bus were working on their laptops. I was too drowsy to be shocked then, and just slept for most of the hour-long journey.
(From the bus ride to Sunnyvale, probably around 7am. Sprawling houses everywhere)
*
Two weeks on, I still think about that woman dancing in the street, and I still think about what it means to be free. Whatever her circumstances, she seemed to be enjoying herself at that moment in time. She seemed free.
As for myself and the other tourists who judged her – how free were we, chasing our dreams to San Francisco, drawn here by stories of others?
Between Worlds 