Growing Up in San Francisco Although I was born in Salem, Oregon, my earliest memories are from San Francisco, California. My parents came to California to start over and find a better life. For a while we lived on a bus parked in front of a friend's house. When I was three years old, we moved to Potrero Hill, an area of low-income housing projects in the big city. A very famous man, O.J. Simpson, grew up there, but that was before my time. Potrero Hill was a bad neighborhood, so bad that you could not get a pizza delivered there and forget about calling the cops because they would not come. I remember the first and last time I saw a cop drive through our neighborhood. Three men from the neighborhood chased his car with baseball bats and smashed his window. The only bad thing that ever happened to my family was getting our windows broken out with garbage cans. This occurred almost every night for the first couple of months we lived there. Eventually we had to put boards over the glass to prevent them from being broken.The neighborhood was predominately black and one hundred percent poverty stricken. My family was one of the few white families around. This made the struggle to survive the neighborhood even harder than it was for others. It was a reverse racism--I was teased because I am white. Still, it did not make me prejudiced at all. My godmother was black and most of my friends were black. I used to beg my godmother, Deanna, to put my hair in corn rolls, tiny braids with beads on the end. It would take hours and was very painful, but I took the pain in order to fit in.One of my best friends was Theresa, a Vietnamese girl. I ate at her house often and I absolutely loved the food. My favorite was rice soup. We took our shoes off by the door. We sat on the floor at a short table to eat with chopsticks. My other best friend was Michael. He was half-white and half-black. For that reason, he was often teased and b...
