I was so excited to recently find these old photos from my house in San Francisco. If you’ve read Good Chinese Wife, you may recall some of these rooms. They were where I spent the last two years of my first marriage. This was the house on Newhall Street.
Our house looked like the taller of these, but was down one block.
Here are my father and me in the living room three months before Jake was born. This is also the same living room where Mama, Baba, “Cai” and I watched TV every night. The windows are the same ones I looked out the day I left Cai.
The day of Jake’s bris with my mom and grandmother. This is the blue nightgown I wore during manyue, the Chinese tradition of post-partum confinement.
And here’s Jake at five months old, also in the living room.
This is the kitchen where I left my note to Cai. And where Mama and Baba cooked every day the ten months they lived with us.
And the dining area of the kitchen where we ate each day. My first Mother’s Day fiasco happened at this table, as did my post-partum meals of fish head soup.
Upstairs we have the guest room where Japanese Father stayed!
After seeing these photos again some fifteen years after I left, I still miss the house but am relieved I made the decision to flee.
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