Letter From San Francisco
High-touch wins over hi-tech
By Andrew Lam
Pacific News Service
I just returned from a year’s sabbatical to find a different city. Gone is the dot-com frenzy when everyone frantically searched for gold in cyber-space, and lost is the vision of a hi-tech world in which all can be done online.
This San Francisco is a somber place, one with far fewer lavish parties; at my favorite haunts, many chairs and tables are empty.
But much more interesting: The city is waking up from its silicon dreams, where the whole world was connected through computer circuits. Old-school human interaction is back. Hi-tech has given way to high-touch.
Take my friend Simon. Once a well-paid headhunter, Simon has been unemployed for almost a year. He now lives on less than $5 a day.
A few years back he lived high on the hog and boasted, “you can live your entire life online.” After all, he found his job online, his dates online, his apartment online, his vacations online. Heck, he even ordered his groceries online.
Then the economy went sour. Simon lost his job. He found the Internet helped little, especially since he had saved little. Being new to the city and too busy living in the virtual world, he had few close friends and, too ashamed to go back to his parents’ home, he faced homelessness. If it hadn't been for a friend with a couch, Simon would have been on the streets. The friend was from his old world, high school.
Tim, 26, came here from the East Coast to work for a dot-com company that offered to do your shopping online. He earned a huge salary — almost three times that of his father’s — plus stock options. Out of a job for the past six months, he is selling cellular phones for $15 an hour and barely making ends meet. “I thought I was going to usher in a hi-tech world. But the truth is,” Tim admits without a hint of bitterness, “it’s still who you know more than what you know.”
Last week at a dinner party I attended, only five of the 12 at the table were employed full-time. Those still working were a doctor, two professors, a foundation officer and a computer programmer for the state. In other words, the dot-org, dot-edu, dot-gov people — those who resisted the dot-com get-rich-quick lure.
While the national unemployment rate hovers below 6 percent, among my immediate circle of friends, it’s around 40 percent.
For my sister, Nancy, what San Francisco is facing is not a recession, “it’s a downright depression.” Until half a year ago, Nancy headed an accounting department at a software company.
Today her bags reside at our parents’ home in San Jose.
Their five-bedroom house has been perceived as a place of refuge not only by their three adult children, but also by all their cousins and aunts and uncles in America. It’s where we all run to when the weather unexpectedly turns.
My mother, the eldest sister of seven siblings and a matriarch of a large clan, welcomes this idea. Having lived through two wars in Vietnam, she is unfazed by the recession. Already, mother is busy fixing my sister’s bedroom.
“Technology comes and goes,” she said, “but family bonds and relationships, that must be worked at, and that above all must last.”
Nam Nguyen, editor of the Vietnamese paper Calitoday in San Jose, says few Vietnamese forget my mother’s warning when times get tough. Many families move in together and share resources, he notes. “I see three families to a home. Others go to Vietnam and stay with relatives for a while because they can stretch their dollars further there. Many others are moving to Sacramento or Orange County, to Vietnamese communities that can absorb them.”
Here in my apartment on a hill near Chinatown, I can easily count across the street three “For Rent” signs hanging on the adjacent building. Was it only two years ago that I saw a dozen people standing in line to interview for one of those apartments? The young, white, dot-com workers are gone. Most who remain are Chinese, like the old lady who has lived for 20 years in the basement with her children and grandchildren and picks up cans at night. The frenzy of the dot-com world passed her by like midnight fog.
Yesterday, a pretty German tourist with a disheveled look on her face walked into the cafe where I was having lunch. “Is there an Internet cafe here?” she asked. She’d been walking for half an hour without finding Web access anywhere.
“It’s crazy,” she said with exasperation. “Is this not center of hi-tech world?”
A man with a white beard, tie-dye shirt and turquoise beads started to cackle. “Nah, forget it lady,” he said. “It was mostly hype.”
Andrew Lam, psilobin@hotmail.com, is a short story writer and journalist.
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