I was living in San Francisco when the pandemic happened, and, like many recent graduates, I decided to move back home with my parents in the San Gabriel Valley before the stay-at-home measures really took effect. When these measures started to lift, I noticed that a new bar and arcade had opened in town at the site of an old bowling alley. Curiosity got the best of me, and one night, my partner and I checked it out.
This place was massive — I mean ridiculously huge — which made us feel safe in those early trepidatious moments of post-shutdown life. It had numerous “living room pods,” set up with TVs, couches, coffee tables and gaming consoles, a full Japanese arcade, board games, a PC gaming room, private karaoke rooms, a full-scale bar and kitchen, pool tables, VR sets, a dance floor, mahjong tables, darts boards, giant projectors for live sporting events – the list goes on. I had never seen anything like it.
We were captivated. We began going every week, sometimes several times over the weekend, and we introduced it to our friends. We were soon on a first-name basis with the security guard, who shared his chaotic life stories. We knew all the bartenders, servers and staff members, and we genuinely cared about one another, inquiring where people had been if we hadn’t seen them for a week. At the height of this period, I was handed the master key for the arcade and given leave to play at my leisure. Without even knowing it at the time, I had become a regular at my own personal third place.
“Third places” have been a point of online conversation recently, with the focus of conversation mainly despairing at their loss. A third place is defined by Ray Oldenburg, in his 1989 seminal book, The Great Good Place, as a distinctive informal public gathering space that is neither work nor home. Oldenburg writes, “Daily life, in order to be relaxed and fulfilling, must find its balance in three realms of experience. One is domestic, a second is gainful or productive, and the third is inclusively sociable, offering both the basis of community and the celebration of it.”
A third place is … a distinctive informal public gathering space that is neither work nor home.
In the absence of an informal public life, “Americans are denied those means of relieving stress that serve other cultures so effectively.” But what happens if the cultures that third places once served are forced to homogenize and flattened out into standard American culture? Do they retain their sense of creating a third place, or does that get washed away with assimilation?
I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley and recently was reminded how much this community differs from the rest of California. A friend had come down from the Central Coast to visit. As we drove from Alhambra to Monterey Park, he commented on all the Chinese characters he saw on the signs of shops, with some plazas not having any letters in English at all. Since I’d grown up here, those signs didn’t even register in my mind anymore — they were just there, as they always had been.
Growing up Asian American in a dominantly Asian neighborhood in California is a unifying but also an extremely narrow-minded experience. Los Angeles County is home to more Asian Americans than any other county in the United States, with an Asian population of over 1.4 million, and 13 out of 14 Asian-majority suburbs in LA are found in the San Gabriel Valley.
Children here feel like they are part of the ethnic majority. They get used to the privileges and confidence inherent in a majority mentality — but just head 20 miles in any direction, and that bubble will burst very quickly. We were universally accepted in townships full of other Asian people who looked like us, and our existence was never questioned. Fuel this with the posturing of the model minority myth, and it’s easy to see how hubris could, and often did, take hold of our egos.
Our lives lack the fundamental forms of play and group experiences that are necessary for a healthy relationship between the individual and the larger society.
Oldenburg defines the United States as the only country in the world that has successfully created a suburban nation, a “collective effort to live a private life” that aims for comfort in well-stocked homes and freedom from the uncomfortable interaction and obligations of citizenship. But this lifestyle also creates an “exaggerated self-consciousness of individuals” and frays the threads of interconnectivity within communities. Our lives lack the fundamental forms of play and group experiences that are necessary for a healthy relationship between the individual and the larger society. Third places act as levelers — a venue of complete inclusivity regardless of social ranking, age or ethnicity. Without levelers, our social circles typically remain confined to those of our same social rank, resulting in a pigeonhole effect, not just of worldview but also of empathy, compassion and love for all humankind.
Our town park sits between the city hall and the public library. It’s a small space with a children’s playground, a gazebo and a little town square. Every day at sunset, a group of older Asian residents convene at the square to dance, sometimes with as many as 30 or 40 people. When I first saw their synchronous dancing, I was bewildered. How did they all know the dance moves? Was this an organized town event? Why hadn’t I heard of this?
I later discovered they were square dancing, specifically Chinese square dancing, a form of dance and exercise rooted in ancient and modern Chinese history. Anyone who’s interested is welcome and encouraged to join, regardless of age, race, gender or social rank, and the dance is choreographed to be repetitive and easy to learn. The dancers organize themselves into ranks, and the newcomers start at the back, following along by watching the more advanced dancers in front of them. You are free to come and go as you please, and the dances are performed daily at sunrise and sunset. This was never an organized or publicized town event; it was a grassroots community gathering, and the only way to know about what was going on was to walk up to the group and join in.
The Asian immigrants who moved to California early on established this town with their own comfort in mind, opening shops that catered specifically to their needs. They recreated a world where they felt comfortable, with stores indicative of their motherland, carrying items that would never be found at Ralph’s or Albertsons or Walmart. Traditions and habits lived on and carried through into their newfound land. Despite the change in landscape, the need for a third place remained unchanged — so, again, they set out to recreate it.
People are quick to poke fun at people who are regulars at any establishment, teasing them as if they don’t have anywhere else to go. But this response makes it clear to me that we’ve forgotten how to be dedicated to a singular society, frequenting an establishment so often that we become woven into the fabric of its social tapestry. The heart of a community lies in its people. The easy secret to joining a new community is simply showing up — making yourself at home the same place, at the same time, again and again and again. Oldenburg writes, “The group needs some assurance that the new face is going to become a familiar one. This kind of trust grows with each visit. Mainly, one simply keeps reappearing and tries not to be obnoxious.”
Our beloved bar and arcade has since shuttered its doors, announcing the need for a yearlong closure for cleaning and maintenance. More than anything, this establishment showed me the promise of community and led me on the path towards forming my own distinctive, informal public life. I hope that it reopens, but there’s no guarantee that this once great, good place will ever be what it used to be. And so, my hunt for a new third place will continue.
