Corrosion of Culture?

          Rebecca Solnit's Hollow City presents to us a perspective of San Francisco that shows that it has suffered from gentrification, experiencing a corrosion of its unique culture that inspired the Beat poets and other progressive individuals in the 60’s. As a result of this phenomenon, yuppies now inhabit the city that was once friendly and welcoming to many impoverished lifestyles decades ago. Similar to what our friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti critiques about the city, new inflated real-estate prices have driven out aspiring artists and replaced them with privileged, white families with no generational connection to the city’s history. Without the status as an underdog-friendly setting, San Francisco’s culture has recently transformed into a monogamous one, practically eradicating multiculturalism. Slowly, San Francisco, "mutating from a blue-collar port city of manual labor and material goods to a white-collar center of finance,” abandons the welcoming, natural characteristic of St. Francis, whom the city is named after (33).
         Maxine Hung Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey offers a perspective of San Francisco that seems much more credible to me because it is one from the inside out, as opposed to Solnit’s outside in perspective. In this work, Solnit's Wittman Ah-Singh, struggling to find an identity that encompasses both his Chinese and American-ness, manages to find identity in San Francisco’s literary culture. Through his immersion with the city, Wittman comes to understand that identity, particularly his (because of his hybridity), cannot necessarily be reduced to represent one idea. This book shows that although San Francisco’s old culture may be fading, there are many remnants of it that can be used not only to identify and indulge one’s self with, but also to advance old concepts of culture to create new ones.