1970... fifty one years ago.
I graduated from Galileo high school and began five years of college at San Francisco State college in the fall of 1970. I had enough credit to graduate from high school a semester earlier but I chose to stick around and graduate in the spring of 1970 instead. I graduated from high school with honors in art and was looking at a future as an artist. I couldn't afford to go to an art college. I also felt it was a waste of money to do so. My parents worked hard for their money. Going to SF State was relatively cheap. I remember my first semester was only $72. I took the bus. I didn't own a car. College was a shock for me suddenly finding myself outside of Chinatown. After school I would go to Chinatown just to walk around before going home.
I had a brief summer job taking college teachers around Chinatown and showing them what I did. I was involved in the Chinatown North Beach Youth Council addressing community issues as it pertained to the youth of the community.
Our family business, Fueng Wah Company, a curio shop in Chinatown my parents ran for twenty eight years came to a close. My father was sixty five years old and pretty much retired from there on. My mother was fifty six years old. We used to live in the store and moving to the house eight blocks up the hill in Nob Hill was a big change as well.
The decade of the seventies was not an easy decade. The Vietnam war raged. Images in the news of the maimed, injured and dead. Protests against the war. My mind was thrown into the events of the world. I cut high school to attend an anti war rally in Chinatown when the US invaded Cambodia and Laos by bombing it. Worries about me getting drafted into a racist war. I was an S-2 student deferment.
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