Keeping house in hostile places

Of the many narratives describing parenthood in an embattled nation, which one is true?

Mural by Dave Young Kim

At what point should we give up and move on? Two weeks ago I was convinced that the San Francisco Bay Area had officially become unlivable and that it was time for my family and I to leave. The cost of living has gone up but our income has not. Our family has grown but our income has not. I was sitting in our kitchen contemplating these facts when I heard the unmistakable sounds of a mess brewing outside my door; I peeked and confirmed that a fight had indeed broken out on our street and was now blocking the sidewalk in front of our house.

The last time this happened people got heated and started waving guns in the air, so I moved our kids to the back bedroom and prayed prayers that were the liturgical equivalent of an eye roll—Lord, really, why?

People eventually got sick of fighting and went home. My kids fell asleep. I lay beside them in the dark and thought about all the stupid things I’ve witnessed in the Bay since the pandemic swept through the city and apparently unearthed all its latent hideousness. Grown men pulling knives out on the playground. People speeding carelessly through the city as if their months of isolation convinced them that they are truly alone, and that everyone else they see is as immaterial as a hologram.

Some of these behaviors are sheer ugliness and some are not. After preschool pickup I stood on the sidewalk with one of my children and saw a man I know on sight wandering down the middle of the street, clearly in a mental torment that he had already been experiencing at the start of the pandemic, now completely out of his mind. He ran towards us screaming, his fists pummeling the air.

I threw my child into the car and leapt into the driver’s seat, locking the door. I watched this man, whom I had previously spoken to on friendly terms, halt himself, and then move on, still flailing his arms, still crying out.

—

I’ve spent a good deal of time on my phone since that fight on my street, nursing resentments against my neighborhood, scrolling through real estate listings in cheaper, and what I imagine to be more sedate, parts of the country. This is how I’ve also ended up following news of the tariffs, and being confronted with the truth I’ve been trying to blunt for weeks now, which is that there is no island of safety to which I can neatly airlift my family.

My phone, which is a portal to the other realities I could potentially inhabit, is no longer enough to sustain the fantasy of an untroubled life elsewhere. Even on the internet, the physical fact of the world intrudes. On my social media feeds, the day’s headlines bubble up unbidden. The ways in which we are used to wielding our phones to reconfigure our reality are dwindling. Cheap internet shopping may go away. Entire apps may go away. The phones themselves may go away. I’m not deeply upset by this; on the list of concerns that this current presidential administration manages to elicit from me, changes to e-commerce and the social internet are among the least alarming. What my phone does concern me with is the reminder that there are few places of respite or fantasy left for me. The life I have is the life I have.

This truth keeps being reiterated. I try to think if there is somewhere else we should go, but even with my limited understanding of what is happening to the market, the dismantling of environmental protections, and the threat to our educational institutions, I can see that all the places that come to mind are only a step or two ahead of this wave of change that promises to make the world less hospitable than it already is. There is no distinct alternative to the reality we live in, so there is no point in picking up and leaving.

—

I thought about this as I ran through my neighborhood last night. I let the shadows defamiliarize the surrounding blocks into a maze of silhouettes and tried to figure out what I would think about this neighborhood if I could only look at it with a fresh pair of eyes.

There is so much I love about being here. One of my favorite things is the unruliness of the greenery; when I am lucky I happen across a building that seems to be in the process of being swallowed by foliage that has grown beyond what is seemly or civilized, and is slowly claiming the plot of land that we thought was exclusively devoted to human purposes. On my run this evening I was forced to duck multiple times, a testament to how well the wisteria arbors and jasmine vines are growing.

One of my friends was visiting the Bay from LA this weekend and texted me about this phenomenon:

“In SoCal no ones homes have jasmine shrubs.”

“Just ugly succulents of every kind”

I can also see the economic disparities of my neighborhood, a point of interest, a source of some of its character, and also a quality that makes me worry for its future. There is certainly new wealth, possibly tech money, that has made an appearance here in the form of million dollar craftsman homes painted in discreet colors and visibly expensive landscaping meant to pay homage to native plant life. There is also evidence of all the households that have managed to cling to their place here. I see a bungalow with cracked siding sharing a block with some of the gutted and remodeled craftsman homes. Its owner has affixed a strip of astroturf as reinforcement for one portion of the home, and its saturated green is vivid enough that even in the darkness, it is the one sight on the street that catches and holds my attention.

Some neighbors have left a stack of washed and folded baby clothing on the sidewalk for another parent to discover and claim. Other neighbors have placed a basket of groceries on the corner and taped a sign to it reading “free.” Someone else has cut a bundle of rosemary, tied it with twine, and left it on our doorstep. If I were new to this neighborhood I would see how it is both dilapidated and proliferating with beauty.

I struggle to explain to my children why their world currently looks the way it does. On the way home from school they were whimpering at the sight of garbage piled along the freeway, tents sheltering human beings on the sidewalk, and stretches of concrete uninterrupted by any green thing.

I sometimes run out of explanations. I’ve started checking out books from the library that I think can paint an honest, complex portrait of the world we have built, and leaving them around in case my oldest child is serious about finding answers. They have read through everything I’ve dropped in their path regarding environmental devastation, city planning, racism, and protest—short novels and nonfiction books alike.

Last night, after hearing my children stuff their books under their bed while murmuring emphatically “mama that book was very good,” I sat up and flipped through the books they were looking at. I found myself unexpectedly moved. When you consider all that our country has done, it is amazing that there is anything left on our continent at all.

This statement is not a diminishing of the nation’s sins but an acknowledgement of the staggering grace, the undeniable presence of God, that has made it possible for life to endure in a country where we have seemed determined to eradicate one another. This country enslaved people, and these people not only survived but emerged to bless our nation’s culture and learning in ways it did not deserve. Our country sent its citizens into internment camps and just this weekend, I met someone from a Japanese American church that reconstituted itself in the Bay after the internment of its members, returning to pray for the flourishing of a city that betrayed them. What are the chances that with all we have attempted in order to accrue power and destroy our enemies, we have still been the recipients of such redemptive generosities?

I am reading Genesis with some of the older children in my life, who are capable of looking at texts that my own children are still too young to comprehend, and talking to them about the idea of humanity being made in the image of God. In Genesis God is always creating, whether forming a physical world or breaking a path through an existential impasse. It occurs to me while I am reading the books I gave to my own children that these histories of brokenness are also stories of how people have overcome, which is to say they are evidence of how strongly the image of God is imprinted upon us and how consistently this truth is revealing itself. Even in sites of devastation the image of God begins to emerge, however faintly, as people decide to remain, to cultivate the circumstances they may not have chosen but inherited anyway.

—

We are here for the foreseeable future. At the moment, there are no real prospects for movement. I may keep exploring alternatives but in the meantime I am thinking about this idea, which I will try to explain to my children: along with the notion of humanity being made in the image of God, and therefore capable of acting according to his nature, the Scriptures also introduce the idea that a single landscape can mean two things at the same time. The endless wasteland can be a site of communion with the holy. The violent empire can be the nativity of a longed-for, long awaited Savior. There are always two realities competing with one another in your field of vision but one of them is deteriorating. The other is bursting forth, occupying the plot of land that we believed was devoted to human purposes, then overtaking it completely.