“I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.”
Yesterday, on 12/7/12, I was in San Francisco on my way to a lounge for a @Jetset Times happy hour event. I don’t venture out to The City too often and don’t have a smart phone so I wasn’t completely sure how the Muni transit system worked. I got to the general location of the bus stop and asked someone if I was headed in the right direction.
She said that I had actually reached the right point, took out her phone, and confirmed that the 2 Bus was arriving in four minutes. We started making small chat in the meantime.
My initial assumptions of her were incorrect. She was wearing a backpack and a North Face jacket and looked young, so I thought she was an undergraduate student from University of San Francisco or San Francisco State University, from Cal, or graduate student at UCSF.
Her name is Christina, and she’s 23 years old. She was getting off work and was headed home on the same bus. She had moved to San Francisco upon graduating from Indiana University, in which she studied business. She’s worked in the Bay Area (first Fremont, now San Francisco) for the past 1.5 years. She had a job offer coming right out of college and took it.
She was born in Lousiana. I asked her how her parents of Taiwanese descent managed to choose a Southern state. She questions them all the time as it was a shock for her to see so many Asians in the Bay Area, but explained that they had moved there for work and settled down there.
She has a younger sibling also attending Indiana University. She speaks a bit of Mandarin and could understand a wince of Taiwanese. She’s also looking for a new place to work and is willing to move anywhere – she seemed very flexible with change, having grown up in the South, attended school in the Midwest, and working in the West.
Christina is an interesting individual and I’m glad I asked her for directions. Not only was she helpful and educated me a bit on the transit system in The City, we ended up having a pleasant conversation at the bus stop and on the bus!
Christina has been met, but I still wonder… how many people have I looked at all my life and never seen?
Andy Cheng 