Solnit's "Hollow City" explores San Francisco as a space in serious peril. First, Solnit claims that the city, marked with political dissent, art, and multiculturalism, is directly challenged by the internet market. Along with this postmodernist economy, gentrification is depleting the rich multi-culturism that has enriched the city with diversity, creativity, and community. What has characterized the city as subversive and diverse is being depleted by the new dot-com culture, which fuels homogenous corporations and the white middle and upper classes to push people of color, artists, and family owned and operated stores out of the city.
In "Tripmaster Monkey" San Francisco is also a space defined by multi-culturism, haunted by Anglo-Saxon colonialization and racism, and comprised of middle-class values as well as a strong counterculture. Kingston's protagonist, Whittman Ah Sing, is surrounded by the city's complex history and environment, as he struggles with his own Chinese American identity amid stereotypes and the city's legacy of manifest destiny and historical racism. Both texts engage in critical dialogues with San Francisco as a site of multiculturalism, threatened by a homogenous Anglo-Saxon narrative.
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