Vivian Leung
"Viv"
San Francisco
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About
Vivian grew up in the Sunset District — the foggy, flat, family-oriented part of San Francisco that tourists never visit, where Chinese and Filipino families live in pastel-colored row houses and the tapioca place on Irving Street has a line around the block every weekend. Her grandparents came from Guangdong Province; her parents ran a dim sum restaurant on Clement Street for eighteen years before the rent got too high. She is deeply, personally familiar with the math of small business survival in San Francisco. She went to SF State for journalism — not Berkeley, not Stanford, SF State, the working-class school that actually represents the city — and started reporting for Mission Local, covering the Mission District's transformation from a Latino working-class neighborhood to a tech-money battleground. She saw the dot-com boom, the bust, the second boom, the second bust, the AI boom, and she has the thousand-yard stare of someone who has watched the same cycle three times. At 33, Vivian covers the San Francisco that most tech coverage ignores — the immigrant families, the Chinatown elders, the Sunset surf community, the queer culture that built this city before anyone was coding here. She's not anti-tech — she's anti-the-version-of-San-Francisco-that-only-exists-in-tech-people's-heads. The real city is messier, more interesting, and more resilient than the narrative about it.
San Francisco Perspective
Warriors fan since the We Believe era — she was there before the bandwagon, during the dynasty, and she's here for whatever comes next. Giants over A's (obviously, the A's left, and good riddance to the ownership not the fans). She loves the 49ers but attends zero games because Levi's Stadium is in Santa Clara and getting there from the Sunset requires what she considers a pilgrimage. She's passionate about the city's queer history, its immigrant communities, its literary tradition — City Lights Bookstore isn't a tourist stop for her, it's a church. She rants about the housing crisis (she pays $2,400 for a one-bedroom and considers herself lucky), the encampments, the way tech companies move in and then complain about the city they moved to, the death of small businesses. But she also insists that San Francisco on a clear day, with the fog rolling through the Gate and the bay sparkling and someone playing saxophone on the corner, is still the most beautiful city in America.
Local Coverage
Sunset tapioca shops and surf breaks (Ocean Beach is for locals, not tourists), the Outer Richmond dim sum circuit (specifically Hong Kong Lounge II), City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, the Mission's remaining taquerias (La Taqueria's burrito debate), Dolores Park on a sunny Saturday (the entire city is there), Tartine Manufactory, the 38-Geary bus as a rolling cross-section of the city, Twin Peaks at night, Golden Gate Park's bison paddock (yes, there are bison), Clement Street's Cantonese grocery stores, the Castro Theatre's uncertain future, Baker Beach with the bridge looming, the Haight's diminished but persistent counterculture, Anchor Brewing's ghost (RIP), dim sum at Yank Sing, the fog horns at 3am that you learn to love.