I’d been reading Stay True, Hua Hsu’s memoir of late ‘90s Bay Area youth culture and friendship. It vividly captures that era in the Bay. Riding around in beat up Nissans and Hondas listening to mix tapes. Wanting to make art and sometimes actually making art. Stumbling towards political activism. A dense hybridity of backgrounds rubbing up against each other. Crews of close friends hollowing out space in the world together. I miss that constant whir of creative closeness, when every new discovery of music or film or writing was passed around like a holy grail.
So when I found myself driving a borrowed old Honda Civic through a rainstorm to a mall to see a movie with my son, Winston, and nephew Mischa (visiting from Paris), listening to esoteric jams on KALX, Cal Berkeley’s radio station, I felt transported back in time. But it wasn’t the passive nostalgia of looking at old photos, amazed at how baggy my khakis were in 1997. It was much weirder, and cooler.
My son is eight years old, my nephew not quite seven, much younger than I was in the 1990s. It was a trip back to the way of experiencing the world, pre-internet. Winston and Mischa sat looking out the window, wide eyes tucked beneath flat-brim A’s and Warriors hats, enveloped in music and the promise of raw shared experience together.
Growing up in San Francisco, in the 90s, I didn’t go to the mall much. The 24 bus stopped in front of our house (and connected with the 48, which stopped in front of our house in the ‘80s). The bus connected me to the full cross-section of SF neighborhoods and destinations, record stores, pizza, movies, weirdos, tacos, hills, The Haight, The ‘Stro, The Mission, The Stick, The ‘Mo.
There was a few months when my brother and I would hit Stonestown Mall, but we weren’t sure what to do. We’d confirm Eddie Bauer clothing would never fit us, then get slushy mall nachos and wonder if other people were having more fun. We didn’t have enough money to buy much. I had to save up for a long time to get my one pair of Guess jeans. There were guys walking around with Guess overalls and better brands of hair gel, but they looked wack and lonely. In 5th grade, I bought some Drakkar Noir perfume cause our uber-popular neighbor up the street had, then returned it a week later when I realized it was absurd.
That was the early ‘90s, the era of Peak Mall. What we strode into from the rain was halfway Ghost Mall. A food court with a forlorn Sbarro’s, a crowd of misfits milling about the tables. This place was much more interesting. A place where my childhood and the post-Covid retail economy collided.
It felt like a public library that had added a few concessions. It was dimly lit, populated mostly by older folks, only a few self-conscious crews of adolescents. We hustled to our movie, Migration (Mike White script, strong recommend!) and got lost in five ducks’ attempt to migrate to Jamaica and escape a knife-wielding, hipster Chef. Mischa asked early on, in a moment of peril, “are they gonna die?” The first movie I took Winston to, a year ago, he walked out, terrified, after ten minutes. So Winston surprised me when he calmly responded, “they’re not gonna die. All movies have villains, but they don’t win.”
Upon exiting, I was eager to discuss the movie with them, perhaps while eating pizza, or tacos, as Hua Hsu writes about in STAY TRUE, and I did a lot in my youth. It wasn’t the dense urban streetscape of San Francisco, but this halfway dead mall was the perfect training ground. My joy and job was to teach these two young humans how to hang out. Maybe even how to be young artists: both open to the world and precisely critical of its flaws.
I had a low-screen childhood, and we were encouraged—nay, summoned—to actively interrogate what we watched. We could only watch TV commercials with the sound on if we guessed what product the commercial was selling before it was explicitly revealed. The conscious critique was all in service of maintaining an active and original imagination. For us, the focus was less on what you could critique, and more on what you could create.
This was different than the approach it seems Hsu had growing up in Cupertino. He describes a stagey defining of oneself by what one liked and didn’t like in pop culture. It wasn’t until he started attending Cal Berkeley that he started taking the bus, and engaging more directly with street culture. (Hsu was also dealing with the complexities of being a first-generation kid. His parent’s came to the U.S. from Taiwan in the ‘70s. He writes incisively about race and class and Asian-American identity, his parents chafing at mainland Chinese immigrants in the ‘90s, his realization that the Mien kids he tutors in Richmond might have more in common with their Black classmates than him, a nerdy college student from Cupertino).
I wasn’t going to bring all this up to my two little homies though. I wanted to ask them what they thought of the seemingly hungover and hapless duck named Uncle Dan (voiced by Danny DeVito), or Keegan Michael-Key’s effervescent Delroy, the uncaged parrot who leads them to his homeland in Jamaica.
But instead we wandered into what looked like an abandoned store. We couldn’t tell what it used to sell though. It had furniture, but it all looked fake. While we guessed, an unerringly kind man with a tucked in blue polo shirt and a Healdsburg ballcap appeared and asked if the boys would like to solve a clue. We were, it turns out, in an Escape Room. He pointed to a photo that served as a clue and unsuccessfully suppressed a smile when they blew out the fake candles that unlocked a box that produced a key. They had solved a clue, and this made him happy. His name was Kent. He was an attorney, until he became the owner-operator and designer of two Escape Room experiences. The transition between the passive consumption of the make believe world of movies and the active one of escape rooms was perfect.
After solving several more clues, we emerge back into the mall, and find our snack spot. A coffee shop attended by Miriam, talking a grandma through a complex coffee order in Spanish. When it’s our turn, Mischa chooses the familiar: a French crepe. It even has a small tricolor French flag on the package. I have to break it down: “Oh Mischa, that’s a sad, corrupted version of a delicious treat you can eat fresh everyday where you live.” Miriam, giggling, agrees. It’s an impossibly thin tortilla looking thing with a smearing of a Nutella-like substance. It’s the perfect encapsulation of American hyper-capitalism. Borrow, debase, scale, and serve. We steer him towards a fresh Pan Dulce.
We settle into a table, and they eat their snacks and split a bottle of Sunny D (somehow this ‘90s stalwart has survived). A trio of teenage boys ambles in and orders coffees, completely unsure what they want, delighted to flirt with Miriam at the register. I wonder how they define themselves against all that they see. I enlist Winston and Mischa in some people watching, the close observation that is at the heart of good art. They are more interested in hearing about why Sunny D is fake orange juice.
It’s shocking how similarly teenagers dress the way we did in high school. The ‘90s look is back in style again. Nostalgia is big business. Millenial/Gen X parents are easy targets, outfitting our children in onesies with our favorite ‘90s band logos splashed across the front. Do we look ridiculous to the next generation? Still proclaiming our identities as we push a stroller and nurse an organic pastry? Or do we just blend into the generalized slew of old people over thirty?
We finish our snacks and find an abandoned Santa photo staging area with oversize fake presents. Winston and Mischa climb all over it. Nobody seems to mind. The joy of halfway Ghost Mall, a bit like the open lot across the street from our house on Potrero Hill in the ‘80s.
We hit the small arcade, and are mesmerized watching two Chinese-American boys wack large buttons in a blur of speed and rhythm on a game I’ve never seen. The boys’ hands are wrapped up, they are sweating profusely. It looks Olympic. The manager says there’s only four machines of that game in the U.S., and the boys had come from San Jose to play that afternoon.
We play Pop-A-Shot, and in the back, a free game of Pac Man, which quickly bores Winston and Mischa. It’s getting late. We run through the rain back out to the car. And drive as the day slides towards the early dusk of late December. We don’t get to eat pizza, but their minds are chewing on everything they saw. I turn up the volume on an Indian electronic jam pouring out of the radio on KALX. They stare out the window, and then both fall asleep. They’re still kids. There’s years for us to be young and creative together.
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A less academic version of hua hsu is Emil deandreis. Same local eye for 90s franciscana