Once upon a time in San Francisco

1989, my first trip to San Francisco to reunite with my father. He was there for reasons I won’t get into. At the time he lived in Daly City, he rented a room from the folks who owned Hunan Homes Restaurant (湖南又一村). Loved that restaurant as a kid. I did a quick Google search, it’s still there on Jackson street in Chinatown however, when I scrolled through the website I didn’t see my favorite dish – stir-fried rice cakes. It was such a good dish, rice cake, shredded pork, straw mushrooms, peas, carrots, and napa cabbage. That first trip ended up being a disaster. I had nightmares of my brothers telling me that I had abandoned them so I went back to Taipei crying.

Fast forward to 1990, my second attempt at going to SF, this time I settled down! Enrolled at Benjamin Franklin middle school, right past Japan town on Geary BLVD. First day of school, I couldn’t understand a word. Then at the end of the class there was insane amount of homework issued by the ESL teacher, I was so overwhelmed I cried uncontrollably, embarrassing as hell. The experiences at Ben Franklin was eye opening. Before I started school, I had this ideal version of what American schools supposed to be in my head. America’s education system is supposed to be a wonderful ideal place where children are happy, in an open and free learning environment where scholastic pressure is less than Asian schools. Well, that wasn’t true. In my first week of school, I saw my ESL teacher beat the crap out of one of the students for not turning in his homework. WHAT THE FUCK? This is America, that is not supposed to happen. She frequently beat the shit out of kids, harder than they did in Taipei where I grew up.

The ESL kids were put in homerooms with special needs students, being spat on was a common occurrence. One of the special needs kid liked to whip his thing out in science class and terrorize ESL girls because they couldn’t report him due to language issues. He sat next to me and his peen made contact with my book, many times. I didn’t do well in that class. I hated Ben Franklin middle school, couldn’t wait to get out of there. I looked forward to school being over every day. My mom enrolled me to the afterschool program at the YWCA near Chinatown so I can improve my English. I’m with other children that I aspired to be, Asian kids that could speak English. They taught me how to play kick ball, introduced me to a number of great musicians that pre-teens loved such as MC Hammer, Vanilla Ice, and Paula Abdul. You know, the classics. I even grew the long ass pony tail that Vanilla Ice was rocking back then.

The best part about the YWCA experience was getting there. Right around the corner of YWCA was a little Vietnamese coffee shop around Stockton, and I noticed all the kids would go there to get this baguette sandwich. I learned later that this sandwich is called banh mi and to this day I’d say it is the best sandwich in the world. It is Asian, it is French, it has any type of protein you like, pickles, cold cuts, pate, chilis, cilantro. If you do it right, you would hollow out the bread so it’s mostly fillings, that’s the best bread to filling ratio.

I haven’t made it in a while. You have to make the pickles and then get all the ingredients which are not easy to find especially the Vietnamese cold cuts. But I’ve found a few shops and I like to order from this one https://shop112223142.m.taobao.com/. Then you need to get the pate. I used to order the pate from Le Bec, but that’s like RMB 250 which is kind of insane. Luckily, these Taobao shops have pork pate cans that are very affordable and you can also find these canned foie gras from eleme. Game changer for sure.