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PW: So from there, where did you go?

KY: Oh, so then I lucked out and I was told, I still knew people at San Francisco General's family practice program, and they let me know that there was a... it was not a postdoc, it was some position. The guy wanted to leave to become a carpenter, so they needed someone to take up the second half of this. It was like a postdoc or some kind of position, so I did that. I wasn't very good at that either, because I'm not an academic kind of person. But from there, I heard that there was a job opening at South of Market Health Center, in the South of Market area, where I had done my rotation. I had done a rotation there as a medical student, and it was a great community clinic. And I met a friend, I didn't really want to work full time, and this friend, she was just finishing her residency, she didn't want to work full time. We went in as two women proposing that we split it. And they bought it; they went for it. I'm surprised because that means double the benefits, right? But they went for it. We beat out a guy, but they took the two women, and we each eventually ended up being seventy percent time or more. But it was a really interesting clinic, and it was a great place to have a job. Patients went to San Francisco General, we had community health workers, a really diverse staff. So I was there for my four years. The others worked there many years longer. I left because I got, I had to deal with my anxiety. I felt terrible if I did a bad circumcision or if I missed a diagnosis, but there were all sorts of things that just, I was never, I just wasn't that confident, I was just insecure. I had no confidence. And the anxiety was, I thought, "I don't like this."

And Reagan became President. So what that meant was they kicked everyone off of Medicaid. You could only get Medicaid, Medi-Cal, if you were, if you had SSI, if you were disabled, or if you had dependent children. So I saw all those guys, all these guys who were underemployed or whatever, they got kicked off of Medi-Cal, and so we had more patients. And then all these guys came to San Francisco from the middle of the country, they had to do "workfare" in order to collect general assistance benefits, you had to work. But they didn't want to work, they didn't want to sweep streets, whatever. So that's a lot of, "Oh, I have this headache, I have this headache." They basically were just trying to get out of work. But I had many great patients that really needed the medical care but it wasn't a great time, Reagan. Reagan wasn't a good time. So a friend of mine from East Oakland, he did this. He did that, he was a silkscreen artist, he did those two. And this is a loaner, but I don't know where he is to give it back to him. So he did photo silkscreen and he was great. I'd go over there and he'd give me tools and he'd say, "Here, have these pencils," or, "Try this," or stuff. He somehow, his girlfriend had to move from Oakland to take over her father's house in Queens. So he decided to go back, and he said, "Oh, you could go to New York and you could take classes at The Art Students League." I said, another lightbulb, right? So I quit my job. I worked four years, four years, yeah, and I quit my job and I moved to New York.

PW: This is the early '80s?

KY: Must have been '84. And took classes at The Art Students League. And yeah, that was... I had another boyfriend by then.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.