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Inside the Outside Lands

Teen peer educators Marina Schulze, Sung Park and Corvette Moore talk hapa. Photo by Maurice Ramirez.

A fresh look at the united colors of Richmond

By kevinjamesgardner

Silent and surreal, the fog creeps in. A low, soft mist spreads across the Richmond District, enveloping the streets and buildings in a cloud of smoky haze. This is a type of fog known as sea fog. Carried from place to place on air currents, it continuously forms. Inhabitants of the district — who hail from all parts of the globe — have come and gone, but the mist remains constant.

“The Richmond has a calmness,” says Alan Oliver, safety network community organizer at Richmond Area Multi-Services (RAMS). “Maybe it’s the fog, the history of the place, the Asian cultures that emphasize a quieter public face, one of being laid-back.”

Irish, Swiss and Jewish immigrants led the early development of the Richmond, followed by two waves of Russians fleeing a rising Eurasian red tide — Czarist refugees of the Russian revolution in the 1920s, and their kin from northern China and Manchuria during the communist takeover there in the 1940s-1950s. In the 1930s, a small but tightly knit community of Japanese Americans settled in the Inner Richmond, only to be shipped out during the U.S. Relocation Program of World War II. More recently, fresh waves of Russian Jewish emigres have hit the shores of the Richmond, and Chinese, Korean and other Asian communities have flourished.

(left to right) Thomas Fu, Andrew Kim and Daniel Jue hold back their tears as Kim prepares to leave the Richmond for even more outside lands. Photo by Allene Jue.

In 1990, Andrew Kim, together with his sister and parents, left Korea for the United States to join relatives and pursue better work and school opportunities. Landing in the Richmond District, the Kims opened up 18th & Geary Produce Market, and Andrew began making lots of friends, mostly Chinese American. Now a 15-year-old high school student, Kim values the small-town feel of the Richmond.

“I think it’s a good place to grow up in,” Kim remarks. “You get to know lots of people, and wherever you go, you can see people you know, and that way you can get closer to people.”

For some, however, it’s not always so easy.

Into the Mist

Writing it off as “the Great Sand Waste” and “the Outside Lands,” early settlers relegated the Richmond District to small farms and multiple cemeteries. A century later, San Franciscans still largely disregard the Richmond as some nether land boxed in by the Presidio, Divisadero and Masonic, Golden Gate park and the Pacific Ocean — a vast, misunderstood territory dividing at length the city from the sea.

To someone from the more happening areas of San Francisco, the Richmond certainly appears as dead as the cemeteries that marked its beginnings. “There’s a lack of heat here,” explains RAMS’ Oliver. “It’s not like the Mission, for example, with all its community based organizations, interest groups, causes. You don’t have that street life; people come home, stay in their houses, maybe go out to restaurants.”

Today, APIs make up almost half the Richmond population, and about one-third of the people here speak major Asian languages. And then there’s Russian, Spanish, and other tongues, European and non. San Francisco ranks fifth among U.S. cities with the largest number of foreign-born residents, and about 12 percent of the city’s total population, or 93,000, live in the Richmond. In fact, the Richmond District has been identified as one of the most culturally diverse neighborhoods in the entire United States, according to Ron Miguel, president of the Planning Association of the Richmond.

Little Russia. New Chinatown. The Richmond pops with global cuisine and multicultural bourgeoisie. As early as the turn of the last century, immigrant families have been moving up and out to the San Francisco “suburb,” turning it into a bastion of middle-class, largely first-generation European and Asian families, joined by their modern-day single, young urban professional (“yuppie”) neighbors.

Richmond residents swim in the steam of their neighborhood melting pot.

Beacon in the Fog

Web sites of community organizations mentioned in this article: Richmond Village Beacon: http://www.rvbeacon.org George Washington High School: http://www.sfusd.k12.ca.us/ schwww/sch571/ Go: http://www.gopride.org Richmond resource list: http://www.richmondsf.org (note: this site is somewhat outdated)

How do the locals navigate the somewhat tricky waters of hyper-diversity? In a series of surveys and focus groups organized by the Richmond Neighborhood Coalition (RNC) from October 1999 to April 2000, respondents expressed mixed feelings about each other. According to the RNC survey results published in the “Richmond District Community Assessment” in June 2000, “Some people felt that certain ethnic groups had special privileges or acted in an entitled, and non-community-building ways.” On the other hanÎ, the report continues, “other people wanted more multicultural events and programs that would help them meet people from other groups and learn positive ways of living together in a pluralistic society.”

In what seems a clear indicator of an evolving, more refined desire for greater cross-cultural community, some Richmond residents voiced their wish for programs and services that allow them to join with other cultures while preserving elements of their own cultural integrity. For example, the report concludes that “one parent wanted a multi-cultural pre-school, where her child can interact with children from other cultures and at least one teacher could speak Cantonese to the elders in the family who help with childcare.”

The Richmond District Neighborhood Center (RDNC) is one of the agencies trying to respond to the dynamic needs of this complex community, backed by a public/private partnership. As a self-governing nonprofit agency sitting on property owned by the San Francisco Unified School District, the RDNC offers childcare, a senior center, and a community music center.

And right next door, at George Washington High School, the agency runs the Richmond Village Beacon, “a center for connecting people, enriching lives and celebrating diversity in the Richmond District.” By housing and facilitating youth-focused, inter-generational programs, in addition to its own educational curriculum, this public high school has become “ground zero” for cutting-edge, cross-cultural community development.

It All Comes Out in the Wash

George Washington High School, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and the stunning California coastline, screams diversity. Around 2,300 kids of every possible color and background come together every school day and challenge each other’s psycho-social realities. Andrew Kim tried a few Beacon activities, including a breakdancing class earlier this year and a health fair he attended with friends last week to kick off the beginning of a school-wide Pride Week.

On the last day before spring break, students celebrate the end of Pride Week with a lunchtime sexual identity alliance talk in a self-styled “rainbow café.” School is out in June when Pride is normally celebrated, so the Go project — supported by Beacon, the Presidio YMCA, Youth Initiated Projects, the Horizons Foundation, and the PG&E Lesbian and Gay Youth Fund — put together a springtime week of awareness-raising events, including the health fair, a day of silence, and a series of lunchtime panel discussions.

Go leader Greg Zhovreboff, 17, a third-generation Russian American whose grandparents came from the Manchurian White Russian community over 50 years ago, via the Philippines and Australia, chats with a group of about 20 students, teachers and advisers about building solidarity between young people of different sexual orientations. Some of the teens are there to show their support of their friends.

“I was invited by my teacher to learn something,” Jimmy Tran, a senior, says. “I like a girl who is gay.”

Somewhere Over the Rainbow

“Stand up if you are often asked what your ethnicity is.” Students rise in response at a hapa presentation by the Peer Resource Center in a health education class at George Washington High School, Friday, April 6. Photo by Maurice Ramirez.

For the last period of the school day, a couple of the same teens from the rainbow café team up with a young alumna of Washington to lead a health education class about the hapa (mixed race) experience. They start with a role-play.

“Bachelor No. 2, say it’s our second date and you found out that I was a different ethnicity than you originally assumed,” proposes 18-year-old Corvette Moore, playing her role in an interethnic Dating Game. “Would that make a difference?”

YNah, that’s more race for me!” pipes up Bachelor No. 2, played by Frankie De-Levy, 15.

“Odds are, I’m the same race,” adds Bachelor No. 3, otherwise known as Gabriel Lowe, 15.

These teens bring to their classroom discussion on interethnic relations remarkable humor, honesty and sophistication, openly sharing their experiences of trying to socialize across color lines.

“When I first started dating interracially, at 14, no one accepted it,” recounts Moore to the rest of the multicolored class. “My brother would say, ‘Oh, you’re a sellout, whitewash, going out with the Master.’ I would get really f***** up by things being said to me. That’s why I do the hapa presentation, to support people who date interracially.”

While the rest of the country tries to sort out the various ethnic data from the recent Census, these Washington High students question the validity of ethnic statistics in the first place, especially when it comes to school testing.

“Why does it matter what you are in taking tests?” asks Narine Geodzhayan, 15. “I’m Armenian, but I’m not white. I’m fine marking ‘other.’ ”

“If we all need to be treated equally, why does it matter if we’re black or Russian or whatever?” Lowe chimes in.

“So they can put in their little newspapers what nationality is doing the best,” De-Levy concludes wryly. These kids are not happy about having to choose and mark only one ethnic box on standardized test forms, or have them thrown out and not counted if they mark more than one box.

When asked if they are often questioned about their ethnicity, almost the entire class stands up. They have mixed feelings about being counted according to ethnicity, yet they want their heritage to be validated. Many just want to hang out with each other across boundaries of race, ethnicity, and sexuality, without having to justify why.

Culture Class

But crossing that rainbow divide isn’t so easy. “Asians and blacks don’t like to hang out with each other. They don’t like each other,” says Thomas Fu, 16, a Richmond student at Lowell High School. “They just look at each other, mug at each other. They don’t really talk.”

What about other ethnic groups? “Russians just hang out by themselves,” says Daniel Jue, 15, who attends Washington. Back in middle school, Jue and Fu remember, “There was a big ol’ Russian-Asian rivalry going on. There were fights. The school newspaper Paw Prints published an article about it.”

But there are also clashes between Asian American groups from different middle schools, neighborhoods, and socio-economic positions. To some degree, teen cliques, clusters and conflicts these days seem more about social status and territory, rather than ethnic background and skin color.

Over the years police officer Lorie Brophy has been patrolling Richmond schools, she has noticed a “blending” of the different youth groups in the Richmond, and feels that inter-group conflicts arise more because “the kids don’t know how to communicate,” rather than because of ethnic tension.

Max Lantz, one of San Francisco’s 16 youth commissioners and an eighth-grader at Presidio Junior High who hopes to go to Washington High School next year, agrees that tension tends to arise between social cliques, not ethnic groups. Having grown up in the Richmond, Lantz enjoys his own group of friends who are African American, Filipino, European, Armenian, Jewish, Chinese and Japanese.

“I think the parents mix a lot,” Lantz points out. “It’s more class with the parents, I think, because there are a lot of really, really yuppie African American people, and they bond with yuppie European people, so I think it’s about class. But I wouldn’t know, since I’m not an adult.”

Class Wars

At times, differences grow into wars.

Students leave Washington High School for spring break. Photo by Maurice Ramirez.

“There is gang activity in the Richmond,” Richmond District Police Captain Ed Springer confirmed. But he also emphasized the difference between “gang” and “group” activity, with the latter affecting more young people working through identity crises.

Recent extortion plots during Chinese New Year targeted Chinese restaurants in the neighborhood. Other violent incidents have hit the area, as well. In January alone, there were 42 burglaries, 38 cases of auto boosting, 36 motor vehicle thefts, 14 robberies, and 1 rape. Nevertheless, the Richmond is considered one of the safest neighborhoods, and roughly 90 percent of calls to the police concern pedestrian and traffic safety, according to Captain Springer.

“We are lucky, we don’t have much crime,” reports Jake McGoldrick, Supervisor for District 1 in the Richmond.

But anecdotal evidence creates fear.

According to the “Richmond District Community Assessment,” Richmond teens are “concerned about drugs, gangs, and have a globalized insecurity and fear of violence: gangs, rape, sexual harassment.”

“I hear about gangs all the time,” Jue says. “I don’t mess with them.”

He describes the district’s notorious racing “crews” — “guys with fixed up cars” who “go places like Sacramento or right here. They see someone’s car, and they don’t like the way it’s fixed up, and they start revving up, and they may start a race,” Jue says.

He knows at least two people who have died from racing car accidents over the past couple years: an acquaintance’s sister, and his cousin’s friend before that.

But less serious crime seems to be the norm. Like the rest of the city, graffiti is a problem. Some are known to draw their symbols on stickers, which they plaster to buses; others scratch their symbols on Muni windows .

Still, a sense of security hangs over the Richmond. “The neighborhood is pretty safe,” Lantz offers, a particularly hopeful observation coming from a young person who was jumped by a group of “skinheads” at night in Richmond’s Mountain Lake Park a few years ago. “You can walk around any time at night without any problems.”

Farewell to the Outside Lands

A huddled mass of 25 to 30 Asian American teens walk slowly through the nighttime drizzle, stopping at a gigantic truck, where a family’s worldly possessions were being placed. The somber group has gathered to say good-bye to Andrew Kim, whose family is migrating again, this time heading south to join his sister and other relatives living in Los Angeles.

“What will you miss most about the Richmond?” I ask.

“My friends,” Kim replies, and he begins to cry. The streetlights shine down on the heads of his young escorts as they bow and join in his sorrow. Invisible, yet powerful bonds of community surround and hold them.

The mist — and tears — drip down their faces. Kim is leaving the Outside Lands.

Neighborhood friends band together Friday night, April 6, to bid a loving farewell to Andrew Kim (front center), whose family recently left the Richmond: (back, left to right) Allene Jue, Cliffton Ho, Cindy Lee, Greg Tam, Rochelle Aguilar, William Vu, Jazabel Kwok, Geoffrey Luk, Daniel Jue, Nople Park, Willie Gao, David Lee, Chris Lui, Tian Wong (front, left to right): Donna Fok, Monica Park, Thomas Fu, Andrew Kim, Tracy Lee, Roger Wong. Photo by Maurice Ramirez.