so i was going to wait until i heard back, but seeing as it’s been more than a month and i think it’s reasonable to assume my application won’t be selected out of 20,000 applications to represent all millennials ever, i might as well post the thing i wrote here so the sweat and tears i poured into writing an EXACTLY 500 word long capsule of myself don’t go completely wasted. if you’re curious, this was a response to this job posting, and i wrote it the week before i moved back to the bay.
My name is Niuniu Teo. I grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from Stanford in 2016. I’m currently earning a Master’s in China Studies from Peking University. In a week, I’ll board a plane to San Francisco, marking the end of an 18-month stay in Beijing. In the spirit of leaving pieces of oneself in other places, I thought it was a good time to read Joan Didion.
What is the best thing you’ve read this week?
“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past,” Joan Didion writes in the opening pages of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Her words seem to channel something essential, sub-surface and glimmering about the place. Helpless under her spell, I can only nod along. No one remembers, I repeat.
Joan remembers, though. She remembers swimming in the Sacramento and the American, “the same rivers we had swum for a century.” She remembers running her brother’s boxer dog over the fields her great-great grandfather had planted. My great-great grandfather made tofu somewhere in southern China during the Qing Dynasty and spoke a dialect my mother understood as a child, but can’t speak anymore.
“Many people,” Joan continues, “have been to Los Angeles or to San Francisco…and they naturally tend to believe that they have in fact been to California. They have not been, and they probably never will be, for it is a longer and in many ways a more difficult trip than they might want to undertake, one of those trips on which the destination flickers chimerically on the horizon, ever receding, ever diminishing.” She pauses, for dramatic effect. “I happen to know about that trip because I come from California.”
I also come from California. But my parents came from Singapore and Beijing by plane, not canvas-covered wagon. And it did take me awhile to drive to Coachella in my dusty red Prius, and the road was flat and vanishing under the fading sun, but that doesn’t count, Joan in my head tells me. We have swum these rivers for a century.
If that is the case, I am part of the silent they, who did not swim those rivers, and may never know the real California. To her, the Bay Area probably lost all its California-ness sometime between the closing of the apple orchards and the opening of the restaurant that wraps sushi in tortillas. But to me, claiming the “real” California sounds a bit like mythologizing a piece of land so it appears to belong more to one group of people than another.
But then again, maybe all she was trying to say was how much she loved California, how much harder and better and deeper she loved it compared with her friends who flew in from New York and took pictures of Big Sur, and how she is now mourning the places and people and pieces of herself as they become part of the discarded past. I wonder if there will come a day when I, too, insist on my version of California so others know there was once a place they no longer remember, full of people who are no longer around. No one remembers the one-story Craftsman house, I’ll say. Desert plants in the rock garden, covered cars in the cul-de-sac. My mother in the yard shifting the gardenias to shield them from the blinding sun that bounces off the stucco walls and makes your skin itch under your jeans.
hog maw 