FoundSF

"I was there..."

by Romalyn Schmaltz, 2025

I’ve written so many tributes, obituaries, eulogies, and farewells, but I never thought I’d be writing one for the man who sat next to me as I wrote most of them. I don’t know how to process this yet, as he was very tight-lipped about his health with me of late and it’s been a shock, but writing the following helped and I hope it helps friends of James, too. This one is far more personal than professional.

James Cha and Romalyn Schmaltz on Telegraph Hill, 2012.

Photo: Edwin Heaven

There’s one photo among the thousands of James Cha and me in the scant decade we lived together on Telegraph Hill that stands out in part because it heralded all the others to come. In it, we linger like magnets two feet apart from one another on the crest of Kearney Street’s Peter Macchiarini steps, dwarfed by George Long’s Victorian where we’d just shared our first real conversations about art and North Beach over introversion-melting joints and forever-coffee. The paparazzo who took it without our knowledge, neighbor Edwin Heaven, couldn’t have known what was being said, but we were in that moment discussing how we wanted to team up in art producing with an emphasis on a strictly platonic jam—and soon, dammit. In the photo, a fire hydrant slouches between us as if to keep our jets comfortably cool, but then there’s that ONE WAY sign hovering high above our heads, signaling that we might not have a whole lot of choice in the direction things are heading. It was 2012.

Within months he’d moved into the Skycabin, my place on the Greenwich Steps, both of us having left our respective partners. When enough of the dust settled, we embarked on what would be years of the creative collaboration that defined much of our lives together, ultimately co-owning and operating two North Beach art galleries from 2014 until 2019.

Our shared vision was to elevate and amplify the North Beach art scene and give it another home for exhibitions and events, and we exalted in the moments where that felt exactly like what we were doing: providing another living room for the “North Beach State of Mind,” as JC would often call it (I always called him “Hak Shin” in private and usually referred to him as “JC” in public, so calling him by his American first name “James” feels foreign and formal).

all photos courtesy Romalyn Schmaltz

The man was a tall, willowy walking factory of creative ideas and wild shit he wanted to try in film and plastic arts—a true and total dreamer. Early on, he showed me a book his mother had given him in his youth of how to illustrate the sky. “Because,” as she told him, “your head is always in the clouds.” In addition to his having studied fine arts at UC-Berkeley and the Academy of Art University (where I was a teacher when we met), he was a computer-graphics artist and has contributed mightily to the visual landscape of North Beach. Even the large-scale family photos that have lined the façade of the Caffè Trieste, where James worked for much of the last decade, were his labor of love, a visual poem to what we always called our “Daycare Center of the Universe.” He was always treated as family by the Giottas and considered both Ida and Fady Zoubi—and all the staff—among his closest friends.

A regular since the 1970s, James called the Caffè Trieste his second home from when he left his stint in Silicon Valley (where he endured 12 years in tech to support his family) around 2008 until he moved to upstate New York in 2023-24 following a major health event. For many of those years, he was on hand daily at the Trieste’s Annex for a pound of beans or an ounce of dry anecdote, a quick digital doodle or a cigarette and an Africano. While he hasn’t been to the Trieste in two years, his absence will be felt painfully afresh now by hundreds of regulars who knew and loved him over the five decades he was its lanky, long-haired fixture. Famously quiet until his dry lightning humor struck, James was a sneaker wave in all the best ways and it was a privilege to know him so intimately for so long. I carry even more stories than I have photographs. They come now in floods with all these tears.

James Hak Shin Cha was born as the fourth of five children on August 31, 1953 in Busan, South Korea to a young family fleeing the Korean War at its climax. After 3 years as refugees in Hawaii, the Cha family was able to settle in San Francisco when James was 12, along with his siblings John, Elizabeth, Theresa, and Bernadette. He grew up on sleepy, tony Lake St. near the Presidio (where he was “bone-cold for six years straight”) and attended St. Ignacius Catholic High School before enrolling in a post-Vietnam U.S. Army (the fatigue pants that were his fashion hallmark years later were all Vietnam era-issue) to benefit from the GI Bill at art school.

After his Army discharge, James dove headlong into art, often with his older sister Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who was madly amassing graduate degrees in Fine Art, Film, and Comparative Literature at UC-Berkeley. Their bold collaborations took them to South Korea and New York City, where Theresa eventually settled in the emerging avant-garde art scene. His hundreds of stories of Theresa evince their incredible bond as siblings and art peers, and when she was brutally murdered in 1982 in New York just after the publication of her first novel, Dictée, James’ world forever changed and he was plunged into black vengeance for years – until he found Buddhism. It was among the first stories he would tell me to my utter horror, and continuing her vision became his lifelong œuvre through such projects as a screenplay titled White Dust from Mongolia and innumerable other artistic iterations—long after his years-long quest for her justice had concluded. A man inspired by many creative vectors, Theresa’s story was the one James would always return to, the lack of closure at times a deep source of haunting longing and regret but also vibrant and infinite inspiration.

That was James—such passion for what and who he loved. And he loved nothing so much as his kids Jason, Melissa, and Jenna, all of whom I was fortunate to know over the years. Lionhearted Jason is still living in San Francisco, while filmmaker Melissa’s family (James just became a grandfather this year to Julian) lives in Scotland, and Jenna and her husband Lonnie are a celebrated comic-book artist/writer team in Montreal. In our last conversation, James enthused about being a grandparent in a way that made me believe this was a new, long chapter in his incredible life.

Another paramount passion he shared with me back in 2013 was his decades-long devotion to the Nichiren Buddhism he’d been fervently practicing since Theresa’s death. While with James, I learned their gongyo and the various chants that make up their daily liturgy, and joined him and his community at their temple in SF. When he designed my Coit Tower tattoo in 2013, I asked him to include Nichiren Buddhism’s principal chant, “nam myoho renge kyo,” in a banner around the Tower. Roughly translated, it means, “I take refuge in the immutable mystic law of complete interconnectedness.”

His practice allowed him to overcome severe grief, raise a family, and offer comfort to countless others. The first book he ever gave me was Unlocking the Mysteries of Birth and Death—a book I witnessed him give dozens of friends and North Beach curmudgeon-buddies over the years—offered precisely as I was overcoming a wildly painful period when we met. I know folks often balked at the perceived preachiness of his sharing the spirituality that saved him, but it was the highest and bravest way for this soft-spoken introvert to show love for his neighbor and hope for his community. Folks who knew him cursorily might be surprised that his faith once took him to New York City to join thousands of fellow Buddhists in a massive human pyramid of hope, but James was pure testament to faith overcoming obstacles.

Back on Planet North Beach, James was able to illustrate the mystic in his Buddhism-based art, landing big with a solo show at the Emerald Tablet gallery in 2013. The exhibition’s name derived from an esoteric concept of Buddhist interconnectedness, Three-Thousand Realms in a Single Moment. This was when we started seeing otherworldly planets and galaxies everywhere in his San Francisco large-scale cityscapes. All that “trippy James Cha space art” was really a visual expression of his Buddhism: We are the universe and vice-versa, both the person and the planets, the past and future, all in eternal cycles of creation, destruction, and rebirth.

"Once a person is born that person must die... Therefore one should not be grieved and alarmed by a person's death; I know it to be so and teach others to do likewise" said Nichiren. That’s exactly what James Cha would remind us all today—or rather, is still reminding us, because he’s still with us.

That’s incredibly soothing, and I thank him for the wisdom that will perhaps allow me to overcome the regrets I have about our relationship, on my part namely that I was a heavy, highly social drinker while he was an introvert deeply, personally opposed to alcohol. It was at the crux of much of our strife, and I’m turning to his own Buddhist wisdom to keep the guilt of not stopping sooner from consuming me. I’m beyond grateful that his years of trying to help me finally paid off when I quit in 2023, and I did stop in time for us to have a friendship unencumbered by booze.

But what I wouldn’t give to have been the person I’m becoming—one absent the stranglehold of addiction—when we were together, or for us to have years of sober friendship now. He was right. About a lot of things. And while he’s very likely celebrating not being James Cha per se anymore, reintegrating into the infinite and all, mingling his stardust with Theresa’s and his mother’s, and beginning a new chapter in the expression of his grandson Julian, I know he will long be remembered for the extraordinary singularity he as James Hak Shin Cha brought to into our North Beach family's fortunate realm—if only for what seems now like far too brief a moment. I know his village will keep his irreplaceable memory and North Beach State of Mind very much alive.