"As Relic, As Remnant" and the New San Francisco
"As Relic, As Remnant" and
the New San Francisco
by Vivien Song
As Relic, As Remnant
Beneath old cities,
the spades divulged
finely trussed corpses:
an ancient requital
for displacing the land.
Now, history stiffens
on display
like a well-lived body:
steel carvings cracking
like bones in the moor;
papers worn fibrous
as skin; paintings flaking
with luster,
as every fine coat must.
Even the Elgin marbles
have stilled,
their mouths steeled blue
like the wet-wool nubs
knotting the clouds together.
Here, city-skirts undress
into sprawls of pale light,
chip-toothed lawns
fraying gray
like old boutique lace.
Loosed
from their ashy mouths
are graffiti walls,
rugged houses
wearing rooftops
like shingled hips—
all the vernacular homes,
the ones now wintering
into craters. Look.
The evicted rise
from placards of cardboard,
gnarled hands and creased faces
holding hardened daylight,
the city installing
fault lines at their feet
as though their removal
were a sort of renewal:
an immortalization
of the well-lived.
Yet, two storefronts down,
the statues backlit
in the museum’s glass mouths
look like any other man
in the light.
— Kate Li, AGNI 91
In February, I took the BART to San Francisco, hoping for a change in pace of my life, even if only for a day. It was the month where the drowsiness of winter was beginning to fall away.
Normally, seasons in Pleasanton bleed into each other, drip long and monotonous. Main Street bustles with life as the place where residents stop by for rolled ice cream and handcrafted lavender lattes. Kids visit the local library or the Safeway on the corner of Santa Rita to end their school day. Residential homes slip into each other in one unblinking blur, Cape Cod to Mediterranean to Victoria. On well-kept lawns stand honor roll signs, and everything follows the neat patterns of an idyllic Bay Area suburb.
West Dublin/Pleasanton Station, bound for Daly City. On the BART ride, I passed vintage shops and fluorescent billboard ads. The highways were forever undergoing construction, and the hills were gilded by years of drought. From my window seat, the Golden State seemed endless and young. I thought I could have stayed here for all eternity, flitting aimlessly from one city to the next. I didn’t know better. I thought I meant it with all my heart.
In San Francisco, you could be anything you wanted to be, as long as you believed.
I arrived in San Francisco and got off at Montgomery Station, located in the city’s tourist hotspot, close to its financial district. Before me was a dizzying array of everything: high rises, billboards, people waving selfie sticks out of the bright cable cars. In fifth grade, like any kid that grows up in California, I learned about the Gold Rush and the 49ers, the prospectors who flooded the surrounding area in search of opportunity and who ended up turning it into the biggest West Coast metropolis. By the 50s, San Francisco had become a sprawling, bustling city, known as the haven of the Beat Generation writers and other bohemian artists. Freethinkers flocked here, drawn not only to the perpetual sunshine, but the mystical haze surrounding it, rendering everything breathless and full of possibility. In San Francisco, you could be anything you wanted to be, as long as you believed.
But in recent years, that has started to change. A 2016 Brookings Institute report found that San Francisco is the sixth-most unequal city in terms of income in the United States. Seeing the clean-lit, carefully curated designer stores of Westfield Mall—Burbury, Rolex, and Tiffany—frequented by bankers and entrepreneurs in pinstripe suits, and then seeing rows and rows of beds in a homeless encampment no more than two blocks away—it is clear that the city’s existence is being threatened by an ever-widening wealth gap. Earlier that day, it had rained. The streets of the area near Civic Center were slick with water, light glinting off every surface like pennies at the bottom of a wishing well.
It is clear that the city’s existence is being threatened by an ever-widening wealth gap.
Though lauded as the heart of the tech industry, tech has been both a blessing and a curse. With money flowing in from the tech boom and rents being driven up, gentrification has run rampant, and those who are pushed out have no choice but to leave, be it to a distant corner of the city or to another city altogether. In the future, writer Rebecca Solnit explains, San Francisco may be “a frenzy of financial speculation, covert coercions, overt erasures, a barrage of novelty-item restaurants, websites, technologies and trends, the despair of unemployment replaced by the numbness of incessant work hours and the anxiety of destabilized jobs, homes and neighborhoods.”
In 1953, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti created the City Lights Bookstore as a place for writers, artists, and progressive thinkers to foster a spirit of exploration and dynamism. But as rising costs of living outpaces the ability of residents to afford them, some of the populations being evicted are precisely those who called San Francisco a home, decades ago.
Even now, landlords have a larger incentive to excise unwanted tenants of rent-controlled apartments in order to convert them into more profitable condos, adding daily to the numbers of homeless. Fires have erupted in apartments, most notably in the Mission area with low-income residents. Displacing dozens, some speculate that these fires may be incidents of arson, set to make profit because legal evictions are cumbersome. And the city, which does not build enough housing to remain affordable, is able to do little to stop this.
Like the bay that it so admires, San Francisco itself is drifting away, swallowed by its own fog.
In “As Relic, As Remnant,” Li writes of a city that shifts as it ages, one that has forsaken its former population for the glamor of a newer, richer one, forgotten the “chip-toothed lawns / fraying gray / like old boutique lace.” The poem’s city “install[s] / fault lines at [the evicted’s] feet / as though their removal / were a sort of renewal,” eerily similar to what has been termed San Francisco’s eviction epidemic. As though the eviction of these lower-income residents were for anything other than profit, anything other than an inability to preserve the city’s radiance and a semblance of empathy. The justification that others give for evictions always distills down to the same words: ungrateful, undeserving. Like the bay that it so admires, San Francisco itself is drifting away, swallowed by its own fog.
I had visited City Lights Bookstore a year earlier, and above the throngs of people on the sidewalk, above the building’s glittering windows, I saw these words by the poet Mahmoud Darwish: “Nothing is harder on the soul than the smell of dreams while they are evaporating.” For so many, San Francisco—and the rest of the Bay, too—was supposed to be paradise. Instead, what they got was overpriced coffee, scattered trinkets, a dream whose pieces they found in their hands by morning.
Vivien Song is a student at Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton, California. She has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation, National Poetry Quarterly, and Hollins University. Her work is published or forthcoming in The Margins, L'Éphémère Review, and mineral, among others. Vivien likes long, aimless walks and overnight oats.