By Abraham (Tiger) Song
I’ve lived in the International District since I was 7 years old, right next to the Panama Hotel Tea House, a Japanese hotel/coffee shop owned by a local named Jan. Being Chinese American, I was in love with Japanese culture growing up as it was introduced in my high school at Garfield High. The Japanese Tea shop had a glass mirror that showed the basement, which included luggage from Japanese Americans back during World War II. Under Executive Order 9066, many Japanese Americans were incarcerated and sent to camps. They put their luggage there, only to leave them forever, because many did not come back and claim them. It became a historical site where you could sit and get coffee with Miu-Miu, the cat-owner that stays inside as well; a stray Jan picked up.
There is a saying in Japan that even the stone will get warm if you sit on it for three years. It means that something will change after a while, or the way I understood it, I think it means there is a constant state of change in our lives instead of it being inertia or neutral at all times. Ever since I moved to Chinatown in 2005 at the age of seven, it seemed more pristine to me probably because I was younger. Now it’s great that we got community garbage pickup and a safety patrol going around weekly. But something changed. The streets were more rampant with drug use and violence, that was for sure.
Did things change? I went over and visited the Chinatown Community Center, also known as the CCC, recently and still saw kids playing, just less kids. Back in my day, there were sleepovers at the CCC, and all sorts of events being hosted. The basketball court and ping-pong room was always full; people were playing all kinds of card games and trading them. It was live action: The pranks, the countless items stolen, the property broken by kids fighting, throwing chairs at each other.
Those things made us kids. As kids, we grow up with teachers. I grew up with multiple teachers but one that was particularly relevant is my friend who I will call my teacher who also lives in Chinatown. Teacher X was what the other kids called him because he was one big bully growing up, dominating all the other kids in Chinatown. Stealing things, he was even a part of the Beacon Hill gang.
It was clear to me as it was written in a Murakami novel once — that once the dust settles, what is underneath reveals itself and the years of insecurity finally reveal itself in another form, drug use. My teacher gave me my first blunt at age 13. I was high as a kite. He wasn’t my actual teacher, just a big brother in a way. He lived downstairs at Nihonmachi Terrace, while I lived in the third-floor apartment.
They say the devil picks out the best ones to go after, and I think of that often when I think of historical massacres — at Tiananmen Square, they went after college students, and the Khmer Rouge they went after intellectuals and anyone with glasses.
I think the devil was perhaps after us in the beginning, ensnaring our footsteps under the influence of drugs. For me, it was marijuana at first, but then, things got worse and it turned to methamphetamine. Teacher X has a little brother; we’re going to call him Owen, and Owen is now an accountant. I would classify us as all kids who grew up in Chinatown. Or, as I call it, Chinatown Boyz with a “z.”
Owen never got in trouble, while my teacher and I did. But when my teacher and I got in trouble, my teacher taught me to never blame anyone else and take it up on your own. He was the type of kid who wouldn’t blame another person after he got caught doing something.
One day I remember I was sitting with my teacher at the park and I told him I didn’t want him to be in a gang anymore and if it meant fighting him to get him out, that’s what I had to do. Somehow, I wanted the best for him. He laughed and told me, “Once you’re in, you’re in.”
Those words still might ring true today. Chinatown, or the ID, has been historically reported to have one of the highest crime rates in all of America. With a deadly shooting this early in 2026, my neighborhood doesn’t feel the same anymore. But what exactly are we in anyways? Are we in it together? Because drugs seem to have the power to take the life out of someone like my teacher, rob them blind, and leave them at rock bottom.
Housing wouldn’t stop it either. Moving the homeless to a house is the first step, but then they’re living in apartments with drug-dealers two doors next to theirs. Unfortunately, my teacher went homeless a few times. Owen managed to find him and reinstitute him back into society — getting him clean, new clothes, etc., but now he’s back in jail again. I often pray for my teacher because he took the punishment I deserved for trying new drugs. The curiosity was supposed to kill me, not him.
What exactly was my community doing for my teacher after he grew up? He became a shadow ghost and his room became his enemy. Who was next? For some kids, they grow up to be accountants who lived in Chinatown, but for others like my teacher, they’re stopped by obstacles that were circumstances that couldn’t be helped. I don’t know if I’m completely out of it either. I’m only half a year clean.
But I’m thankful to my teacher for giving me a premonition, a fear of sorts, when I see him on drugs. That’s how I was able to honestly quit, to see how badly it had got him. I have fear for my future too. But hope. Hope in living a life without drugs. But fear, that it’s right around the corner. Who is here to help us? Help them?
