Susan Blumberg-Kason

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The house on Newhall Street

January 21, 2015 By Susan Blumberg-Kason Leave a Comment

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.

Newhall Street Outside

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.

Living room

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.

Four generations

And here’s Jake at five months old, also in the living room.

Jake and me

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.

Kitchen

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.

Eat in kitchen

Upstairs we have the guest room where Japanese Father stayed!

Guest room

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.

Filed Under: Featured Tagged With: Good Chinese Wife, Memoirs, Raising Multi-Cultural Kids

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