Foreign Skies & Loose Ties

The acquaintances and one-off encounters — are often the bridges that make a city livable.

San Francisco International Airport, 7am: Addy, 50s, white

I sneak a quick glance at the queue at immigration, “short, won’t take long,” before firing a text to Addy.

“Not too many people, it seems. See you outside in 30?

Addy has been a lovely sub I met on my second tour in San Francisco. Even as a Professional Dominatrix and top, she taught me most of what I currently know about sharps and electro — steady hands, steady breath, and lots of tickles, albeit as aftercare, not during.

I breeze through immigration, luggage in hand, and step out into the peninsula’s cold dawn air. The first drag of nicotine hits like relief, visible smoke spiralling against the soft hue of the morning sky. Fatigue hums. Taipei still clings to my body clock — it’s 10pm somewhere inside me, though the world here is waking. I don’t have the luxury of finishing the cigarette. I took a long drag and stubbed it.

In the restroom mirror I look like a ghost mid-transition — lips dry, skin tight from recycled cabin air. I splash water on my face, press moisturiser into my cheeks, and doubt myself that my wingtips were balanced, yet again for the umpteenth time. Concealer, loose powder, then lipstick, all in the ritual, and the act of returning.

There in three, Addy’s message reads.

I inhale, gather my bags, and push through the sliding doors. Addy pulls into the pocket, holding a sign that says Goddess Ashley. We laugh, hug, the kind that feels like a reprieve after a long flight. She helps me with her luggage.

The goodest girl

“Millbrae Pancake House?” she asks, already knowing the routine we share. All the carbs and sugar for a jet-lagged domme.

The car eases onto the freeway, then into the familiar flat landscape of Millbrae. Outside, the sky turns the soft gold of early morning. Inside, I feel that familiar blend of exhaustion, but yet the familiarity of the cityscape and Addy’s friendship gives me a sense of relief that I’m home.

Millbrae Pancake House

Sorella, 1760 Polk Street, 7:30pm: Frank, 50s, white

They say the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco — which has sometimes been credited to Mark Twain, erroneously so, but not factually incorrect. It can get cold, foggy, damp, and windy in the summer, as the fog starts billowing from the Bay down into the streets of the city, and the temperature can plunge drastically from 25 degrees Celsius (75 degrees Fahrenheit) into a nippy 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit). Our human body is adept at adjusting to gradual temperature changes, but not when it drops quickly, especially when one travels from equatorial to temperate.

I starved off sleep the whole day; all I had left for the day was dinner with a new client, and hoping with some alcohol that would take me right through the first jet-lagged night. I was looking forward to bed.

It was a chilly evening as I stepped out of the hotel at Union Square. My breath felt cold as I pulled my leather jacket tighter over my body and boarded my Uber. Round the corner, I checked myself in the reflection of the window at Sorella — A brush of hair. A slight adjustment of my necklace. A small inhalation before the entrance. Inside, warmth and chatter. I flashed a smile at the gentleman by the nearest table who turned his head. I gestured to the waiter that I didn’t need a table as someone was waiting for me inside. “Ashley?” I smile, extend a hug to Frank instead of taking his handshake, both as a non-verbal confirmation and as warmth and hospitality.

As a Bay Area native, Sorella was recommended by Frank. Frank was a charming, venture capitalist based in Silicon Valley. He reached out to me because there was a quiet comfort in my writings and profile for his first time with a Professional Dominatrix. Over antipasti and a dry white, we peeled through the first layers of conversation: origins, travels, the unspoken logistics of this first meeting. People are like presents, I thought — you open one layer, then another, always wondering how deep the wrapping goes, and what surprises you’d find next.

During our secondi of pork chops, the conversation flowed to the GOP’s candidates for 2024 primaries, the polarization of society and how candidates were increasingly being pulled towards the fringes rather than meeting at the centre. “You are real smart,” Frank exclaimed. I replied that I read across a spectrum of publications for the differing viewpoints: Rubin Report, The Hill, and even Breitbart. He did not resonate with Breitbart and definitely not Steve Bannon. I laughed.

Sorella closed early, its tables clearing by half past nine. “Do you want to get more drinks?” Frank asked.

“Sure, why not?”

Taking his arm, we left Sorella and found a bar next door. I got a gin & tonic and he got a beer. After the next round, conversations softened. I told him I was thinking about visiting my ex-girlfriend in South Bay.

“Breakup sex?” he teased.

“Nope,” I said.

“Then why go?”

We both laughed — the question and answer folded into each other like fog over light.

After two drinks, we were ready to call it a night. Frank asked if he could send me back. I nodded. There was a certain sense of security in Frank, and in this city.

San Francisco, for all its fog and fractures, still held that strange promise: that under neon lights and foreign skies, you might momentarily feel at home.

Russian Hill

Nightshade, SOMA, 3pm: Phil, 30s Chinese

I dimmed the lights at Nightshade, dabbed my scent of perfume on my neck, wrists and thighs. The dungeon was quiet except for the low hum of my playlist, a steady rhythm that helped me slip into the mind space of work. My phone buzzed, a message from Phil, “Hi Goddess Ashley, I have just arrived.” I grabbed the dungeon keys, glanced once more at House protocols on my phone about bringing clients in before I opened the door to the main street. There he was — the only Asian man on the block, waiting by his car. I smiled, offered a brief hug, and thanked him for driving all the way into the city.

Under the wash of the neon dungeon lights, the world narrowed down to breath and movement. He kneeling on the floor; I circled him slowly, hand on his shoulder, stilettos clicking — the measured rhythm of control. We shared a moment of intimacy, a secret only known between a Dominatrix and her submissive.

Post session, I offered Phil a glass of water, he accepted it while exclaiming, “That was fun, thank you.” He hesitated by the sofa, as if waiting for permission to sit on the sofa. I smiled and responded that the session had ended. He asked if I had time; I nodded. Phil was from Beijing, though he’d grown up here since elementary school. Now in his thirties, a photographer. We talked — about his life, mine, the elasticity of identity when you leave one system and grow inside another.

He spoke begrudgingly about his traditional Asian family’s expectations for him growing up, the friction between trying to chart his own path growing up in America, and the many fights he had with his family. His parents took him to table tennis, arithmetic and violin classes, where all he wanted to do was to play basketball and watch MTV after school. “My parents tried to find me a job as a CFA after I graduated; but I wanted to do photography,” he laughed, though it sounded tired.

He met with huge resistance from his family a few years back when he brought back his then white girlfriend home for Lunar New Year. Resistance, disguised as Asian civility. “Can’t win them all,” he sighed.

I told him about Singapore. How Confucian values still thread through democracy, where individualism and liberty are met with doubt and distrust as non-Asian values, how conformity and social harmony are two sides of the same coin. The need to conform, I emphasized. I spoke about voluntaryism, as a response, or at least a rebellion towards Michael Foucault’s structure of power; and mine: this work, this life, being gay, this constant self-creation of a life across borders.

That day, we didn’t conclude with an answer to life. But sometimes, conversations like this, is resistance itself.

On the walk back to his car, the air was getting colder. Phil asked, “When will you be back in San Francisco?”

I smiled, pulling my jacket closer, “Sooner than you think.”

In foreign cities and dungeons, we negotiate belonging anew: who we are, the ties we seek, and which kind of skies we want to live under. The work of a travelling Dominatrix is, in the end, the work of choosing — people, ties, skies — until a temporary life begins to feel like a home.

*Other than Addy, names have been changed to protect their privacy.