I was poor. I scrounged furniture off the street and clothes from thrift stores and housewares from rummage sales; we valued old things then, and aesthetically this method suited me. Most of what I owned was older than me, and I relished that; every object was an anchor to the past. I craved a sense of time, history, mortality, depth, texture that had been absent from my upbringing in a newly built suburban edge of the Bay Area with parents whose immigrant urban backgrounds left them with little sense of lineage, few stories, no heirlooms. My work as a writer was sometimes going to be about
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