Street Scenes

[City Photoshoot]

I drove around the block today. Some of the graffiti from last time had been removed. Let's see how long that will last.

Meanwhile, my coworker Chris just told me someone tagged the Martin Luther King mural. Right over Mr King himself.

Working in Southeast San Diego has been culturally challenging. But one thing that really caught me off guard is the fact that everyone around me is aware of my presence, much more so than in La Jolla, or Carmel Valley, or elsewhere in San Diego. When I drive around holding a camera, people tend to notice from far away. They start talking to their friends. They stare, and keeping staring. I took a picture of a car with huge rims, but the lady in the car behind stared at me as if I had committed some violation of proper social conduct.

It is the severity of eye contact. It's a test. Here I am, sitting in a blue Volvo station wagon, wearing a button-up purple collared shirt, Chinese, and for they know, a near-complete foreigner. And I find them equally distant. A group of teenagers dressed in gangster clothes approaches the back side of my car. They stop walking. We have made contact, but the awareness of each others presence doesn't exactly diminish so quickly.

What can I do to close the gap, or overcome this huge sea of cultural and socioeconomic divide? How can I even make a presumption that it is possible that we can have a friendly conversation? How can I learn about their wants, their needs, their loves or their struggles?

For now, I can't say that I am fully comfortable in this part of town. I do have fears that someone might come up to me and nab my belongings. It doesn't feel safe.

And it's so odd. We do this thing called redevelopment. Yet for me, there remains this divide between myself and the people that I see on the streets, of which maps, in their failure to humanize, fail to describe.

Cyclists

Looking North on Euclid

Family Vehicle

"Discount Food Market" on Imperial