After a long day working as a chef in New York City, I return to my apartment and time-travel. I open my laptop and stream The Streets of San Francisco, a vintage cop show that lets me see the city through the eyes of my now-elderly father, who arrived there from Taiwan in 1975.
Shot mostly on location in the 1970s, when daily commuters hopped on and off cable cars and there were actual fishermen presiding at Fisherman’s Wharf, the show offers glimpses of San Francisco’s blue-collar roots and civic swagger from the colorful years before the devastating Moscone-Milk murders and the AIDS crisis. I also see the overwhelming, impenetrable city that my father confronted with equal parts courage and bewilderment.
Like a lot of Taiwanese men from his postwar generation, my father is a reluctant storyteller who shuts down conversations with a shrug. When pressed about his early days in this country, he speaks in bullet points: busing tables in Chinatown; scrambling for a safe place to live before my mother immigrated with the baby (me); learning piecemeal English; and constantly feeling terrified as he navigated the foreignness of it all.
This article appears in Issue 28 of Alta Journal.
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I’ve shown him a few clips from The Streets of San Francisco, hoping to get a laugh. “The city was really like that in those days,” he says in Mandarin (not laughing). “I just didn’t get to enjoy it.”
By the time my mother and I joined him from Taipei in 1978, my dad had progressed through a series of hourly-wage jobs and found a place for us in Daly City. I have memories of a drafty, damp apartment in a noisy building. Watching Sesame Street and The Electric Company helped the three of us practice our vocabularies. My dad discovered one of the Bay Area’s only all-country radio stations (KNEW, 910 on the AM dial) and sang along to twangy lyrics he definitely did not understand. I tried my first Castroville artichoke in that apartment—dunking each softly steamed leaf into an overzealous combo of salted butter and mayonnaise. My mother appeared horrified (“It looks like a poisonous weed,” she declared) as my father carefully trimmed and cut the artichoke’s heart and explained, “This is what Americans eat!”
Eventually, my father found work with a Chinese-owned general contracting and construction business and saved enough for the down payment on a small house near the airport in Millbrae. Back in 1980, Millbrae seemed like an odd choice, with its then–lack of diversity and inescapable noise from all-day-every-day jumbo jets. Today, given the town’s proximity to Silicon Valley and now-robust Asian population, my dad still marvels at this stroke of dumb luck.
That luck extends beyond property values and travel convenience. My folks may be in their late 70s, speak little to no English, and live on modest Social Security checks—but they both feel like they hit the lotto when it comes to Millbrae’s safe streets and friendly neighbors. I obsessively check Bay Area headlines from New York, and after seeing viral video clips of Asian seniors throughout San Francisco being attacked in recent years, I feel grateful that my parents are not in the city.
We spoke only Mandarin at home, but I learned English quickly, becoming my parents’ translator in the third grade. It never occurred to me that it might be unusual for a little kid to be so involved in the administrative minutiae of adult lives. I can still see the look on Mrs. Reddell’s face when I showed up at my own parent-teacher conference to interpret for my dad. I also remember the glares my parents got when they stumbled and mispronounced words in public.
I absorbed my parents’ frustrations and embarrassments as they wobbled timidly through interactions with impatient store clerks, DMV employees, bank tellers, auto mechanics. I was perpetually worried for them—watching people’s faces closely and listening intently, anxiously anticipating the moments when I would need to intervene with English or Mandarin.
By high school, I’d shape-shifted into a typical ’90s American teenager (with a terrible ’90s spiral perm). Back when the word intersectionality was mainly used to describe traffic and Sassy magazine was my lifestyle bible, total assimilation was my top goal: the way I sounded, the way I looked—all of it. Seeing my parents struggle with their otherness convinced me that the more I blended in, the safer I would be. Serving as the household interpreter and admin assistant became even more reflexive during this time. It felt good to understand grown-up stuff like taxes and the difference between a premium and a deductible while still indulging in dumb high school stuff like using entirely too much Manic Panic or sneaking out to warehouse raves in SoMa.
My parents made friends with other Taiwanese immigrants and even reconnected with classmates from back home who’d landed on the Peninsula. In the meantime, the number of Chinese restaurants and markets with Chinese-speaking staff increased rapidly in San Mateo County, helping my folks feel more connected. It seemed like they were getting the hang of working-class America.
Things feel very different today.
In the three decades since I left California for New York University, eventually settling full-time in New York, the Bay Area’s sociocultural tectonic plates have shifted dramatically. As my folks have aged against the Hunger Games backdrop of Big Tech–induced economic realities, their sense of stability has dissolved. The digital divide swiftly rendered them irrelevant in the mid-2000s, edging them out of the full-time workforce before they were financially ready for retirement. As everyone pivoted to a tech-fueled future, my parents, with their analog skills, remained stuck in the past.
The irony is not lost on me that our current digital-first, mobile-everything landscape was essentially created just a few miles south from where they live. All of those “frictionless” innovations have left my parents dependent and vulnerable in ways that make them feel embarrassed and resentful, often at the same time. They’re not online, they don’t communicate electronically, and they don’t know how to use an ATM. They barely know how to use the smartphones I bought them, and they’re afraid every link they receive was sent by a hacker.
To stay on top of appointments, log in to healthcare portals, and manage accounts, I’ve set up email addresses for them through my own primary Gmail, so everything goes straight to me—and then I go over everything they have with both of them in Mandarin on the phone. They both have health issues, and as those have grown more complex, my increased involvement in their medical care has given me a clumsy crash course in gerontology and Medicare Parts B, C, and D. Between the phone calls and trips back to the Bay, I’ve gotten to know the sweet and hardworking clinic staff at the Chinese Hospital Outpatient Center in Daly City, and I’ve Zoomed with my dad’s doctors from New York.
I intensified my “get shit done for Mom and Dad” travel in 2018. I had noticed that, like their finances, my parents’ social safety net had dwindled at an alarming pace. A significant number of their friends have returned to Taiwan or China, where assisted living is far cheaper and end-of-life conversations are conducted in their native tongue. Sadly, a few of their friends have suffered debilitating strokes; some have passed away.
Between their Chinese friends and their Chinese-speaking jobs and their Peninsula Chinese community, the “America” my parents have cultivated is a common immigrant phenomenon: Yes, they are both U.S. citizens on paper. They pay plenty of U.S. taxes and follow all the U.S. rules. Yet they’ve spent years living a subtitled existence with heads down, eyes forward, and mouths shut.
It’s a sticky truth for many of us who are foreign-born: Our parents struggled with the magnitude of their losses and changes, but we were raised in the States with nonstop encouragement and infinite possibilities. We find ourselves hopscotching between being fully Americanized and remaining rooted in the specifics of an immigrant household.
During the height of COVID, I helped out my folks by delegating to complete strangers on the internet. Stuck in New York during lockdown, I relied heavily on gig-worker platforms (shout-out Nicole C. from Taskrabbit!). But since 2020, my “get shit done” trips have become longer project-management marathons, and I’ve been fortunate to maintain (knock wood) a solid stream of freelance private-chef gigs and seasonal consulting work to accommodate my cross-country zigzagging.
Friends have comforted me over wine and tapas, offering pep talks and sympathetic renditions of “You can only do what you can do.” These are well-meaning people who love me, but many of them have profoundly different expectations around family. Several have siblings or other relatives who live in the same time zone as their parents. A lot of them have parents with very different career paths who planned for retirement; parents who purchased long-term-care policies; parents with extended American families who left them property, or money, or both; and other lineal puzzle pieces that add up to a sense of foundational security.
I am deeply aware that I am not the only one playing this violin. In 2021, according to an AARP report, there were roughly 38 million of us in just about the least sexy secret club in which to be a member: the invisible and exhausted labor force of family members managing nuanced levels of assistance for aging loved ones. The statistical and anecdotal evidence is pretty universal. The challenge of helping loved ones age in place transcends class, ethnicity, and the amount of Series B funding your startup received.
As a middle-aged woman exploring new career options and unabashedly pursuing new adventures, I’m realizing how volatile this moment of contemporary midlife can be. Just when I’m finally accessing the joy of being my age—embracing the self-actualization that felt so out of reach only a few years ago, before I “held space” for myself and practiced the “self-compassion” urged by therapists and podcast hosts—I find myself facing a fresh set of urgent unknowns. As it turns out, I cannot meditate or vision-board my way out of this one.
And to be clear, I don’t want to. I’m not interested in getting out of this. In many ways, this is my literal birthright. My father took such pride in his job as a civil engineer when he left Taiwan, but he could not find his way back to that career—or back to that sense of pride—in America. My mom studied audio communications at the college level and dreamed of being a broadcast journalist in Taipei. When I think about what my dad has endured and what my mom gave up, I can’t help but feel the weight of their choices. Now it’s my turn to sacrifice.
The next steps have become persistently obvious. I need to hit the Pause button on my own life and figure out how to provide consistent eldercare that prioritizes my parents’ dignity and sense of agency. I need to leave New York City (which also means leaving my spacious, rent-stabilized apartment). I need to return to the “hometown” I left right after high school, 30 years ago.
Starting from scratch in one of the most expensive cities in the country among AI prospectors and driverless cars sounds like the plot of a dystopian screenplay, not a serious midlife plan of action. The thought of uprooting my life feels daunting to the point of near paralysis, but the thought of my folks shuffling into their 80s with shrinking resources and zero in-home assistance feels worse.
When I start asking my folks about eldercare planning, it often feels like an impossible game of emotional chess.
“I’m perfectly OK to drive,” my dad tells me as I google his recent glaucoma diagnosis.
“We’re fine right here at home,” my mom insists, completely ignoring the fact that they’ve been cosplaying as middle-class homeowners for years, struggling with property taxes and the rising costs of San Mateo County.
Built in 1947, my parents’ run-down, split-level house has been in a state of decline for decades. There haven’t been any plumbing, electrical, or interior updates in that house since the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, before my spiral perm.
While selling their home seems inevitable, I have no clue whether it will net them enough to pay for a suitable new living situation, not to mention years of future care and medical expenses.
To help make sense of all the variables (and to cover legal bases I know nothing about), I recently found a Bay Area attorney who speaks Mandarin, specializes in elder law and real estate, and is licensed to practice in California, Hong Kong, and London. (Basically, she’s the perfect Asian daughter.) I’ve asked her to set up and explain medical directives and end-of-life documents for my parents—reminders that we are officially at that point and that I need to keep initiating squirmy conversations to prepare for the years ahead.
Meanwhile, I’ve been reacquainting myself with San Francisco and the Bay after so much time away. During frequent visits, I go on meandering walks throughout town, getting smacked in the face with memories from what feels like several lifetimes ago. In a parallel universe, I am still the nerd writing in her journal at the corner-wedge table in Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store (which, like so few things in the San Francisco of my memory, is actually still there).
Sometimes I skim S.F. job listings and short-term rentals. I’ve reconnected with West Coast friends. And I’ve added going through my closets and shelves to my after-work ritual. It feels good to organize “keep” and “donate” piles as I watch The Streets of San Francisco.•
Min Liao grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. In a past (analog) life, she was a print journalist in Seattle, Washington. She currently runs the culinary program for an organic farm and artist residency in upstate New York.
