Brenda Wong Aoki has stories to tell. If you ask her for one, she’ll likely rattle off five others along the way. She knows it, too, and proudly touts that she’s America’s first Asian American storyteller.

“This is according to the archives of the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, Tenn., so it’s a bona fide fact,” says Aoki, the prolific writer, performer and educator who has lived in San Francisco since 1974.

It is no surprise, then, that she plays the Storyteller in “Soul of the City,” which premieres on Saturday, Sept. 30, at the Presidio Theatre. An autobiographical multimedia work that tours through her family’s kaleidoscopic history, the 90-minute show serves as a modern parable about our seemingly fractured moment in San Francisco.

When the unnamed Storyteller finds herself lost and disillusioned about the city amid rising prejudice during a pandemic, she is confronted by a demon known as Mother, played by the poet devorah majors, whose original poems are featured in the show. As she hovers in a state in between life and death, she finds that recounting the memories, histories and myths of her life serve as a saving grace in an increasingly disconnected and polarized world.

It’s what Aoki came to believe when she was conceiving the work at the height of the COVID pandemic. At a time of rising anti-Asian violence, several of her friends had been assaulted, and Aoki and her husband, jazz composer Mark Izu, had been stalked in the streets, facing racist insults from a stranger.

当青木,迷茫和焦虑,是hospitalized for pneumonia in July 2021, she began questioning the soul of her city as it became increasingly unrecognizable to her. History, and the familiar stories it tells, she said, provided a light.

“Storytellers say there’s only a few stories, but there’s millions of storytellers, because humans just keep doing the same thing,” says Aoki, who is of Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and Scottish descent. “There’s just the same old stories over and over. If you Google ‘Chinatown Plague,’ what’ll come up is another time a hundred years ago when Chinese (people) were blamed for another plague.”

As the Storyteller recounts the true stories of Aoki’s family (the show features projected images of her relatives), the twin flames of discrimination and determination course through a sweeping history that travels from Australia to China to San Francisco. In the face of prejudice, the spirit that persists rests in the people who live to tell the tale, passing on their memories and lessons to the next generation.

“Memories turn into story, that turn into myth, that turn intowhy,” Mother tells the Storyteller at one point. Aoki has always understood this, spending most of her life learning as much as she could about her family’s stories.

“Once you become an American, you have amnesia of who you are. And then when you’re mixed-race, you’re forced to even have more amnesia because nobody will accept you,” says Aoki, who quickly emphasizes that “you still need to know who you are because your past tells you why you are where you’re standing at the moment.”

The same goes for a city. Amid popular narratives about the decline of San Francisco, the show is what director David Furumoto calls “a rallying cry” — a defiant call that the city’s living memory, its spirit and soul, persists.

“The resilience of this city is within the people within the various neighborhoods,” he says. “So what if the big department stores in downtown are not there anymore?”

Aoki wants the show to become a kind of “ritual” for San Francisco, with the audience itself serving as a living embodiment of the soul of the city. To that end, the production is welcoming theatergoers to come dressed in regalia that tells the story of who they are.

“It could be your ethnic regalia, it could be your gender regalia, it could be your street look,” Aoki says. “It could be whatever makes you feel like ‘I am somebody.’ ”

In a time of increasing uncertainty and chaos in the city and beyond — what Aoki calls a “chrysalis time” within our society — the community we find in each other and the stories we tell are essential.

“We’re doing the job we’ve done since humans have been on the planet,” she says. “We’re connecting heaven and earth, we’re gathering the people, and we’re passing chi all around. The storytellers are giving strategies for living. We’re remembering how we survived before and how we can do it again.”

Correction:An earlier version of the story misspelled the last name of devorah major.

Brandon Yu is a freelance writer.