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SF

SF 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 beaten because he was a zebra (that is what the black kids called him). At the time, I was four years old and Michael was seven. Although my mother did not allow me to leave our block, we sneaked out anyway. He showed me the ropes, the ins and outs of ghetto life. He showed me how things worked in the hood--the dangerous people to stay away from, like drug dealers, how to get around safely from one neighborhood to another, and the neighborhoods to stay away from. We also played house, dolls, hide and go seek-all the childhood games-while at the same time managing to learn and adapt to this no-nonsense environment. A boy my age lived in the apartment across from us. His mother was a whore and a crack head that rarely ever watched her kid. One day my mother finally said something to her about it. She went into her house and ran out with a hammer. She attacked my mother as I watched in horror, screaming for help. Finally, my dad came out and pulled the woman off my mother. My mother was bleeding from a gash in her head. She had to have a couple of stitches. When I was five years old, my grandmother was very sick with Alzheimer's disease. My family and I moved to LB so that my mother could care for my grandmother. We brought Michael with us so he could have a better quality of life. We moved to an upper class neighborhood in the presidential estates on Washington Avenue. I attended Elementary and there was, to my knowledge, only one black child in the entire school. It was a big change for me because at the school I attended in San Francisco, I was one of the few white kids. I had never seen so many white people in my entire life until I moved here. was so different from San Francisco. The major difference was lack of cultural diversity. For that reason, I think I had a little of what they call culture shock One might have enjoyed the change, but not I. I was somewhat scared--it was all so different. Everything I had learned growing up in San Francisco was no longer needed here in, a town of 14,000 people. Yet I have not forgotten what I learned. It is very valuable knowledge. I feel as though I have a more culturally sensitive understanding of people and their ethnicity. In addition, I am a better person, having experienced the hardships of the hoods of San Francisco. Bibliography:

Word Count: 794