by Romalyn Schmaltz
I’ve written so many tributes, obituaries, eulogies, and farewells for North Beach’s dearly departed— dozens in The Semaphore alone—but I never dreamed I’d now be writing one for the man who sat next to me in our Sky Cabin home on the lower slope of the Greenwich Steps as I wrote most of them.
When North Beach artist James Cha and I fused our creative and domestic lives in 2013, our shared vision was to elevate and amplify the North Beach art scene and give it another home for exhibitions and events. We did so, opening two galleries: I Heart North Beach on Green Street and The North Beach Bauhaus on Columbus Avenue. We exalted in those moments—feeling like we were providing another living room for the “North Beach State of Mind,” as he would often call it.
The man was a willowy walking factory of creative ideas 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,” she told him, “your head is always in the clouds.” In addition to studying fine arts at UC-Berkeley and the Academy of Art University, James was a computer-graphics artist and contributed mightily to the visual landscape of North Beach. Even the large-scale family photos that have lined the façade of the Caffe 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 Zoubiandall—and all the staff—among his closest friends.
A regular since the 1970s, James called the Caffe Trieste his second home from 2008, when he left his stint in Silicon Valley (where he endured 12 years in tech to support his family) until 2023-2024 when he moved to upstate New York following a major health event. For many of those years, he was on hand daily at the Trieste Annex for a pound of beans or an ounce of dry anecdote, a quick digital doodle or a cigarette and an Africano. Although he hadn’t been to the Trieste in two years, his lanky, long-haired absence will be felt painfully fresh now by hundreds of regulars who knew and loved him. Famously quiet until his dry lightning humor struck, James was a sneaker wave in all the best ways. It was a privilege to know him so intimately for so long.
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 three years as refugees in Hawaii and James was 12, the Cha family was able to settle in San Francisco along with his siblings, John, Elizabeth, Theresa, and Bernadette. He grew up on sleepy tony Lake Street near the Presidio and attended St. Ignatius Catholic High School before enrolling in a post-Vietnam U.S. Army 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 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 about Theresa evince their incredible bond as siblings and art peers. When she was brutally murdered in 1982 in New York just after the publication of her first novel Dictée, James’ world forever changed. He was plunged into black vengeance for years—until he found Buddhism. Long after his yearslong quest for her justice concluded, he continued her vision. It became his lifelong oeuvre through such projects as a screenplay titled White Dust from Mongolia and innumerable other artistic iterations. A man inspired by many creative vectors, Theresa’s story was the one to which James would always return, the lack of closure at times a deep source of haunting, longing, and regret, but also a vibrant and infinite inspiration.
That was James—such passion for what and whom 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. Filmmaker Melissa’s family—James became a grandfather last 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 the beginning of 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. 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. When we die, then, we’re not gone—rather, we are now everywhere, infinitely infused in the lives of those who go on beyond us in this mortal coil.
That’s incredibly soothing. 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.
James Cha lived from August 31, 1953, until November 22, 2025, leaving behind his children Jason, Melissa, and Jenna; his grandson Julian; his siblings Elizabeth, John, Bernadette, and their children. He was preceded in death by his sister Theresa. A memorial for him will be held in North Beach in spring 2026. And it’s worth noting that one of his frequent dreams, as a well-known introvert no less, was to form and film a conga line of North Beach folks winding through Washington Square Park to Paul Simon’s “Late in the Evening.” So let’s see what we can do to make that dream a reality. THD will announce when this happens.
