stephanie yang

i’m sitting in a new café that opened up 8 weeks ago around the corner from my house and i’m so appreciating the beauty of working and living in a small community. there’s three of us customers here, 2 of us on our fancy new macbooks – ok, ok, the woman next to me is actually working on an airmac – perhaps i do have a twinge of jealousy for such a fancy toy – but i digress. at the counter is a self-professed retired pacifican who is voraciously appreciating his breakfast at 11am in the morning. he says he moved here from san francisco 15 years ago and he has no intention of leaving. i feel the same way even though it has only been 2 years since i merged my life into this town.

we are all talking with the owner about her plans, her vision for this new café and she just shared her ideas for daily food specials – and how can you go wrong with a menu that includes tamales, tacos, stew and coconut veggie curry? yum! perhaps soon down the road she will be expanding their hours to be a wine bar at night. i’m hooked.

so this all gets me to thinking – what does it mean to build community, to be a part of community, to belong? these are questions that have been spinning around in my head for years and answers are slowly beginning to emerge. i spent over a week last month in taiwan, visiting my grandma, trying to grasp a tangible understanding of where i belong…as her grand-daughter, as a taiwanese-american who can’t speak her ancestral language. do i belong? and yet, there i was, eating, breathing, sitting, sleeping in a home i have been taking up space in since i was three years old. and then, one morning, listening to the rain tumble fiercely over the city, i realized that it’s not about whether or not i belong, it’s about how i am choosing to belong.

so i take that knowing into the broader reaches of this question and begin to unravel the ways in which i can choose to be in community with others. sitting in this café this morning i am choosing to be a visible part of a small community based on residence and geography simply by being present. i am pushing aside my tendencies to languish in the outskirts of belonging and step into shared space – not because we all have similar ethnic histories or even similar ideas about sex, but because we all choose to inhabit the quieter section of this town that somehow manifests an aura of mystique, invisibility and of the “other” to my world that still resides in the more prominent parts of the bay.

building community therefore is about being present. it is about the simple act of showing up. it is about giving and sharing my time, my smile, my ideas, my resources, my access with others. it is about choosing to be in a space where the cycle of giving and receiving moves through our collective body as life affirming breath. in the many spaces then that i find myself wanting to build community – with 2nd generation taiwanese americans, with queer folks of color artists and filmmakers, with my neighbors in this quiet town, with my family – i choose therefore to be present and always remember to breathe.