Angelique Nehmzow

On a foggy evening in late April, San Francisco is running. 

Well, to be precise, on a foggy Wednesday evening in the Marina neighborhood, a stream of twenty- and thirty-year-olds are running on Chestnut Street—some cheering, some chatting—and what sounds like either Diplo or Major Lazer is pounding from someone’s speaker. It is the Year of our Lord 2025 and run clubs are in full bloom and the singles in run clubs wear all-black, which on this foggy Wednesday seems to be just about everyone, and it happens that, on this same evening, the seventh night of the 2025 San Francisco International Film Festival is about to begin.  

I am here because Angie and I are seeing happyend, Neo Sora’s debut fiction film, which had its world premiere last September at the 81st Venice International Film Festival and is getting two screenings at this year’s SFFILM. I suggested this particular movie for reasons I am recognizing only now, namely that happyend is set in near-future Tokyo with an all-Japanese cast, and Angie, who succinctly describes her multicultural background as “hard to keep track of,” happens to be half Japanese.   

When the stream of runners vanishes, I spot Angie in the distance walking toward me. She is coming from a yoga class, wearing her classic post-workout outfit: stretchy leggings, chunky cable-and-waffle-knit sweater, puffy jacket, and a beanie. Our plan, before we head to the theater, is to grab a bite at Las Mestizas, a low-key Yucatecan eatery that relocated from Bernal Heights to the Marina two years ago. This choice has symbolism as well—Victor, Angie’s husband, is Mexican and they visit the country often, further complicating Angie’s multicultural-background situation. 

“Hey!” I say and give her a hug. “You look very cozy and warm.”

“Oh my god, I know. It’s so chilly today.”

“Ready for food? I’m excited to try this place.”

“Let’s do it,” she says.     

I met Angie the day I moved to the US. It was August 23, 2011, my freshman year of college, my first time in the country, and my first time flying solo. Angie happened to be one of the rising sophomores who volunteered to wait at the Boston Logan airport and welcome MIT’s anxious international students like myself. We soon became friends—we lived in the same co-ed house on campus, we both wrote for the student newspaper, and we were both part of the school’s arts community. 

Even in a melting pot of cultures that were the international student circles we ran in, Angie stood out. Sort of Asian, sort of European, sort of American, sometimes all three, and other times none of the three. This all visibly and amusingly confused people whenever they asked where she was from, and Angie—to her credit—was good at cultivating the allure by simply being herself, saying only what was necessary and being okay with pregnant pauses that never quite delivered.  

Rightfully so, because her background is a study of its own. Angie was born to a Japanese mother and a German father in the early-nineties, pre-Giuliani New York, when Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and Mary J. Blige were ascending from the city and into the broader pop culture. Not that any of this bore much relevance to Angie because, only four years into her life, her family left America and moved to the United Kingdom, where London became her home for the next eleven years. She once showed me a video of her primary-school self, walking through the streets of London and pretending to be a news anchor—speaking with a pure English accent. 

“Did you like London?” I ask. 

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “During the years I was in primary school, I had a good group of friends and I was the right age at the right time for London’s pop culture, from the Spice Girls to Harry Potter. All in all, I have great memories of that period.”

That changed once Angie started secondary school at St. Paul’s, an all-girls school in Hammersmith, the western part of London. She didn’t find a core friend group at the school, a letdown that was further aggravated by the taxing commute: a daily one-hour trip with the Tube to the school and then a one-hour trip back from the school. She was only eleven, already commuting by herself. 

“Was that common for kids in London?”

“Definitely not,” Angie says. “But I was quite independent, and because I didn’t find a solid friend group in secondary school, my way of dealing with it was to be super academic. So, yeah, I would take the Tube to school—alone—and spend the train ride reading The Economist and New Scientist.”

“Wait. You were eleven, on the Tube by yourself, and reading The Economist?”

She laughs.

“Yes. Reading was always big in my family. When my brother and I were younger, the four of us would go on vacations, sit at dinner together, and just read. In silence.”

When she turned fifteen, the London chapter came to a close. The family once again relocated, this time to Hong Kong, and Angie enrolled at the German Swiss International School. She lived in Hong Kong until college.

“Was that hard?”

“No,” she answers, “I was very excited to move to Hong Kong. I think because I was so academic in secondary school and didn’t quite find my place, Hong Kong to me felt like a fresh start. I felt like I had the opportunity to start over.”

“Really? Was it a good place to be a teenager?”

“Oh, Hong Kong was a great place to be a teenager. Super safe, and for me personally, it was the first place where I felt I could really be part of the nightlife.”

How so, I ask.

“I mean,” she says, “in London, I couldn’t get anywhere because of my baby face. But in Asia, I was suddenly the norm.”

After Hong Kong, Angie gave the US another chance to establish itself as her home when she moved to Boston for college. The second round, however, also lasted only four years. She graduated, then did a short stint in Singapore, where her dad was based, and then moved to London—again—to start a new job. The setup seemed promising but then the company she joined asked her to relocate across the ocean and work from the San Francisco office. 

It was not her plan and San Francisco was never in the picture, but things fell into place once she got here. She connected with Victor and they started dating. She found her groove professionally as well, growing from operations to data to software engineering. This was round three of the US trying to seduce Angie and it seems to have worked, because San Francisco has been her home for almost a decade now.

The tricky thing about having such a rich tapestry of cultural identities is that at some point it becomes impossible to weave in additional threads without unraveling others. In Angie’s case, the thread of Japanese identity was the one she intentionally started letting go of, in part because she never lived in Japan and in part because she consciously, through dating Victor, began weaving Mexico and its culture into the tapestry. 

“What do you think about the Japanese identity now?” I ask.

“It’s an exotic identity to have,” she says, “but it’s very diluted in my case. To be honest, I never felt like I could invoke it as my identity. As a kid, I venerated Japan, but that started to get tempered during my visits to the country as an adult. There’s a lot of properness and protocol in Japanese culture that I am not accustomed to and that can feel very foreign to me.”

“Right, I imagine it becomes hard to find those cultural anchors.”

“For sure,” she says and pauses. “But I definitely question sometimes if I made the right choice by rejecting the identity as I settled into my life in the US and in California.”

At 8:30 p.m. we leave Las Mestizas and walk over to the packed Marina Theatre. Inside, the atmosphere is unmistakably that of a film festival—a controlled chaos of film fans murmuring, texting, and rubbernecking, all as means of figuring out if the director, Neo Sora, will make an appearance and do a Q&A. 

He does not, but his stellar fiction feature debut makes up for it. Set in a slightly-dystopian, near-future Tokyo, happyend follows a group of teenagers who are about to graduate high school. There’s a lot going on in their lives: illegal raves, draconian surveillance system at the school, subcutaneous xenophobia that lurks across the city, constant reminders of a looming earthquake, and, most poignantly, a cherished era of their lives coming to an end. At its core, happyend is about the inevitability of change and it portrays this bittersweet motif elegantly, with fresh humor and without unnecessary exposition. It shows Japan in all its normalcy and status quo, thereby making the characters and their stories unequivocally relatable. 

When we leave the theater, some two hours later, Chestnut Street is quiet. Spears of mist are gliding in and out of the street light glow, intercepted only now and then by a Waymo ghosting by, barely audible over the howl of the city’s fog horns. 

“What did you think?” I ask Angie. 

“Oh, I loved it.”

“Me too,” I say. “You know what I liked the most? The earthquake alert they kept getting at the most inconvenient moments. What was it in Japanese again? It was very melodic.” 

“Jishin?”

“Oh yes, yes,” I say, all excited. “That was it. G-sheen. G-sheen.” 

We make our way to Angie’s car as the late-night fog engulfs us, and it occurs to me only then how unsettlingly coincidental it was to talk about earthquake alerts in Japan while walking through a San Francisco neighborhood that happened to be ravaged by one just three decades ago. 

𐫱

When I see Angie almost a month later on an early Saturday morning, San Francisco is running again—this time for the Bay to Breakers race. Monochromatic black outfits are faux pas today; instead, it’s all about over-the-top neon costumes in this beloved annual race, which has been an emblem of San Francisco’s quirky culture since it was introduced in the early nineties to lift the city’s spirits in the wake of the 1906 earthquake. The repeated appearance of earthquakes as imagery is not lost on me. 

We meet at her place in the south Mission and head toward the Bernal Heights Hill. Angie likes coming here, often as a way to spend time with her thoughts and appreciate the gorgeous panoramic view of the city. I too have been here many times before but never in the morning, in the early hours when everything at Bernal feels livelier. The sun is warmer, the vegetation sharper, the colors brighter. 

We pass a group of people studiously observing pine and eucalyptus trees by the trail. Angie points to the thick interlocked canopies and tells me to focus my eyes on the gaps between the branches, the bright-blue negative spaces formed by the canopies against the backdrop of the morning sky. I do so, still unsure of the goal behind this collective arboreal exercise. And then, silhouettes of two Great Horned Owls appear in my peripheral vision.

“Wow,” I say. “Had no idea these existed here. Coyotes were the only animals I ever associated with Bernal.”

A decade ago, I couldn’t have imagined that either of us would be living in San Francisco and admiring owls on a Saturday morning. Some of Angie’s interests were far more adventurous than mine and therefore better suited for California, but both of us shared an appreciation for the dense, urban, buzzing lifestyle that comes with metropolitan cities. For me, surprisingly, California felt like home from the start and I realized that I appreciated the magnificence and magic of California’s slower, softer pace. I always assumed Angie liked living in San Francisco but I never asked how intentional this choice was. 

“You know,” I say, “I often wonder why I was attracted to San Francisco because, on paper, much of it didn’t make sense for my hobbies and interests. But I think over time I realized there were aspects of me that actually fit the Californian culture and that, on some level, I had also changed by living in California and in San Francisco. Do you feel that way?”

“I think I changed,” Angie says. “Or, maybe, I adapted to SF. Like, I became a software engineer and got into kite surfing, which wouldn’t have happened if I ended up living somewhere else. I’ve also become much more of a day person living here. Socializing in SF is different compared to cities I’ve lived in before; so much happens outdoors and there is much more emphasis on doing activities, festivals, and sports.”

“Would you say it was a good change?” 

“Yes, I would say so,” she answers. “I try to appreciate what’s best about wherever I am. What I have grown to love about California is that there is always something to discover, no matter how long I have been here. Having a car really helped with this, being able to drive and access so many beautiful places. I don’t think you get that level of access in other places. Professionally, living in San Francisco gave me flexibility to grow my career in a way that wouldn’t have been easy elsewhere. When I finished the coding bootcamp several years ago, I didn’t struggle to break into software engineering. Startups were welcoming of my atypical background.”

"Can I ask you something? After you did the coding bootcamp, did you notice people treating you differently in SF’s tech social circles? This might just be my own assumption, maybe even a bias, but if I feel like, when you're an engineer and you're hanging out in tech circles, it sometimes feels like there's a different way people relate to each other, maybe because there’s this implicit understanding that opportunities abound for this subset of professional circles.”

“That was actually one of the reasons I made the switch,” Angie says. “I wanted more opportunities. I also think engineers are often expected to take on a lot of responsibility and just figure things out. That comes with a lot of flexibility; if you’re not excited about one thing, there’s usually room to pivot to something else. Again, part of the flexibility comes simply from the nature of the startup scene, but I do think even within that context, engineers get even more flexibility.”

Certainly professional flexibility has something to do with it but, on its own, flexibility doesn’t mean much if you don’t know what to make of it. What made Angie successful in this environment is her tenacity, her ability to weather—and sometimes even intentionally create—seismic shifts that regularly upend her lifestyle. It’s why she can move from place to place and “adjust,” and why she was able to shapeshift from an operator to an analyst and then to a software engineer within a measly span of ten years.

It’s grit that comes from a toughness—one which started at a young age. Inspired by her dad’s lifestyle, Angie wanted to get her scuba diving license as early as possible—we’re talking pre-tween years—but knew her mom would never allow it. Her dad, on the other hand, whom Angie describes as her “partner in adventure,” was more lenient and therefore a lever which young Angie knew she could pull. 

“So,” she says, “I went in secret to my dad and asked if I could get the license in Dubai, when he was there on a business trip. My brother and I tagged along and I got my license there. The times I was taking lessons, I left my brother playing on the beach alone, and he was only six.”

She laughs and shrugs.

“Different times.”

Angie was so petite when she started diving that she had to be given small oxygen tanks, which she used up very quickly.

“What would happen then?” I ask, to some extent in disbelief.

“I would just go up to my dad and share air with him,” she says nonchalantly. “Ironically, now I’m extremely good at conserving air when diving.”

Angie doesn’t scuba dive these days as often as she used to, but her adventurous spirit never died. It instead carried over to love of other sports: snowboarding, paragliding, kitesurfing, one-wheeling, and—what is perhaps the most long-standing one after scuba diving—climbing. A popular pastime in the West these days, climbing is an activity that Angie has been doing for almost two decades, way before the mainstream caught onto it.

“It feels like a puzzle,” she says. “That’s why I love it. You have to figure out what advantages your body has, how to use those advantages effectively, and which techniques you need to not tire yourself out. Plus, it’s both a physical and a social sport.”

“Now I have to ask: what are your physical advantages?”

“Well,” she adds, “for one, I’m small, so I can grip small handholds on the wall. I can also fold easily.”

“Fair enough,” I say. “I’m guessing you also need to have a strong upper body to boulder effectively?”

“No. It’s a misconception that you need to pull up your body weight.”

“Really?”

“I mean, I can’t do a pull up,” she says. “Never stopped me from climbing.”

From Bernal Heights, we make our way over to Dogpatch Boulders, a bouldering gym where Angie often goes with one of her climbing buddies. The crowd at this gym is interesting. Most people are here with friends but a nontrivial number are bouldering alone, earphones in and with their own thoughts. A surprisingly laidback atmosphere suffuses the entire space, and it occurs to me it’s because, at any given moment, most people are not actively climbing. Instead, they are analyzing the walls and the holds and the inclines, sussing out what they need to do with their bodies on the next climb. It’s, in an endearing way, a very nerdy sport. 

Angie warms up and shows me the first climb she wants to do. The routes, loosely defined by the colorful handholds, are designated with the letter V and a number. These are known as bouldering V-grades, Angie explains, which designate how difficult the climb is. She tells me they are not always objective—sometimes, Angie can easily climb a V4 or a V5 but struggle with a V3.

“Is the difficulty in figuring out how you need to adapt your body to a particular route?”

“Sometimes it’s that,” she says. “But for some of these, it’s also just unclear what you even need to do, irrespective of the body type. This is why it’s helpful to watch others do the same route; sometimes other people have better spatial intuition.” 

I spend the next hour observing the implicit social contracts between the climbers. The earphones-in folks for the most part do not engage with anyone, a clause that serves to explicitly deflect anyone’s feedback, suggestion, or even praise. Others seem to operate on more relaxed stipulations. They watch—like Angie described—how fellow climbers do the same routes; sometimes they say nothing, sometimes they nod, and other times they compliment one another. At one point, while three guys are watching her climb, Angie conquers a visibly tricky route. When she lets go of the handholds and drops back on the floor, she makes brief eye contact with the guys, who give her a subtle nod.

“Interesting dynamics,” I say. 

“Yeah,” she adds and laughs. “Today is a bit unusual for me too. I am not one to strike up conversations easily when climbing, which is why I am always climbing with a friend.” 

Watching Angie solve these physical puzzles conjures an image of someone who is unequivocally an explorer, an adventurer who yearns for thrill and motion. Yet, to those who know her well, a duality persists. If you take Angie and drop her into an environment in which she can do nothing but exist, she will still find a way to thrive. Her creativity, which had been cultivated by life in London and Hong Kong, and her keen ability to reason through her likes and dislikes are what make Angie a great observer of life—especially when it comes to art.  

It was Angie who I was with in Boston when I saw a live ballet performance for the first time. It was Angie who I was with in London when I saw the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibition. And it was Angie who I was with when SFMOMA reopened after the COVID-19 pandemic, when it seemed like it would never open again. She would likely disagree with the label, but she is, in a way, a casual art historian—one not by training and not through theory but one by exposure and through practice. From ballet and fashion to film and photography, Angie has a deep appreciation for many branches of art, and she often can articulate their place and importance in the context of art history. 

I ask her about this while she is packing up at the gym. She tells me that her adventurous, sporty side has been in the spotlight ever since moving to San Francisco, but that recently her creative spark reignited. She started sewing, something that happened simply because she was at the right place at the right time with the right friend.  

“I was out with a friend at a club one night for another friend’s event,” she tells me, “and neither of us were really in the mood for clubbing. Suddenly, this friend just turns to me and says, ‘I think I’m just going to go home and do some sewing.’ I had already been thinking, even before that night, that I needed to find a creative outlet again, so when she said that, I just asked if I could tag along and if she could show me how to do it.”

It was a club night gone mild. The friend showed Angie how to sew, Angie bought the same sewing machine her friend had, and she started practicing. In doing so, she discovered that sewing and climbing shared something. Both were activities that felt like a puzzle to solve. 

“How hard is it?” I ask. 

“Surprisingly easy,” she answers. “I mean, I haven’t had major disasters yet.”

“And was this something you wanted to learn even before your friend mentioned it?”

“I don’t know that I spent a lot of time thinking I needed to learn sewing explicitly, but it felt like something I would enjoy. I have always appreciated both fashion and style, and I’m used to being around fashion-conscious people.”

“As in, people in your life are into fashion?”

“My mom really is,” Angie says. “I remember, when I was a kid, she had all these beautiful suits that she would wear to work, and I think she was proud of being able to switch into work mode when she wore them. I think she finds it weird how casually I dress here in San Francisco.”

After bouldering, we make our way back to her place to do some sewing. Angie wanted me to bring a t-shirt that needed hemming, so I brought a Uniqlo t-shirt with a print of Eevee, the Pokémon, which I had wanted fixed for some time now. When we get there, Angie sets up the sewing machine in the dining room and explains the order of operations. 

We will first figure out the final length we want, then measure how much we need to cut from the shirt’s bottom to achieve this length—and there is more math involved here because a tiny length of the shirt needs to be “rolled in” for hemming, which is why we can’t cut the entire difference—then measure again before we cut (Angie abides by measuring twice, cutting once), then we cut, then we roll in the tiny length of the shirt and hold it with pins so that we know exactly where the line of stitching needs to be. 

We do all this and then begin stitching with the machine, a task that can go either very slowly or very quickly depending on the person’s mastery of the craft and comfort with the speed pedal. I, obviously, have no mastery of the craft and the speed pedal, after my first try, sends my heart rate into the stratosphere. I tell Angie she needs to finish the rest of the process. 

Which she does, funneling the raw untethered edges of the shirt with her fingers through the tight space between the presser foot and the needle plate, letting the needle stitch the edges with a steady pace as they come through, and gently straightening the hemmed part of the shirt as it comes through on the other side, all sewn up and complete. It’s an integration that is mesmerizing to watch.

“Even after all these years in the go-with-the-flow California,” I say, “you are still so organized and structured.”

Angie laughs.

“Yes, but,” she adds, “I now also appreciate how much joy something unplanned and unexpected can bring you.”