I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, went to school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and, upon graduation, migrated to San Francisco, California. There I lived for five years and then migrated to the East Bay where I’ve lived ever since.
When I was working in downtown San Francisco, I often saw a punk Chinese-American bicycle messenger, complete with tattoos and a colorful Mohawk. A young woman, no less.
The late, great Herb Caen, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, was fascinated with the bicycle messengers, who had their own subculture. Caen frequently reported on the exploits of his favorite bicycle messenger, which made their way into “The Oniomancer.”
I myself saw a convocation of bicycle messengers outside of a fancy grocery store at a little park behind the Embarcadero Center, a huge office complex built by the Rockefellers and resembling Rockefeller Square in New York City.
So all that detail was brewing in my head. I knew I had a story to tell, but what?
Turns out Tom knew an artist, a kind of down-and-out guy, who had a knack for finding valuable things. Without a metal detector. He would just walk down the city street and—lo!—there would be a diamond brooch at his feet. I’m serious.
After I learned about his amazing gift, I began to find things myself. A fourteen-gold charm of a Chinese ship in San Francisco’s Chinatown. A sterling silver Mercedes Benz car key-ring on Broadway. Really.
I began to research this little-known talent and came across the answer in the Encyclopedia of Occultism: Oniomancer. The talented person is called an Oniomancer.
I knew I had my story, then.
A word about Chinese-Americans (in this troubled time): We’ve had many delightful Chinese-American acquaintances in San Francisco and many delightful neighbors in the East Bay.
But like families of every race and ethnicity (Tom is an eighth Cherokee Indian, I’m a Croatian American), Chinese-American families have their own problems. Around the corner from our apartment on Telegraph Hill lived a traditional Chinese family. At night, we would hear Mom and Dad screaming at the kids and (ahem) beating the crap out of them.
I wondered what sort of serious rebellion the Chinese-American bicycle messenger Girl with the Pink Hair must have gone through.
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