There is a place in SF’s Chinatown that has a funny name. It’s tucked away in a nook between Waverly place and Hang Ah street, and hundreds of people pass by it every day without ever knowing it’s there. In many ways, the playground’s anonymity suits it well. It has no desire to be known, and it doesn’t seem to care too much about the world outside. This hidden oasis of the Chinese community has become one of my favorite places in San Francisco.

A steep set of stairs at the back of the playground leads up to a volleyball court on the left and a single tennis court on the right. I come here to play tennis because it’s the only court near me that has lights in downtown San Francisco. Old brick apartment buildings envelop the court on three sides, their walls lined by poles hung with drying clothes. When I play here, the sounds of the racquet striking the ball travel through the air and intertwine with the symphony of Chinatown life seeping through the windows — a song practiced on the piano, a CCTV news broadcast, the hiss that signals the birth of a stir fry. Most of the time, the neighboring volleyball court is also clamoring with players shouting in Cantonese. Sometimes a chef from the restaurant next door will walk out onto the sidewalk, cigarette in mouth, and stare blankly at the action in front of him. He’s probably seen this a million times already.

One Saturday afternoon late last year I came to the playground alone to work on my serves. On the volleyball court stood a troupe of brightly garbed teens, some wearing segments of a lion costume and others striking up a rhythm on the drums to hypnotize the beast into a dance. Not long after I got started, a little boy not over 10 years old with a bowl cut and a toothy smile casually made his way onto the court and started chasing after tennis balls, imposing himself as my de facto ball boy. I allowed this proceed for some time before asking him if he’d rather take my other racquet and play instead. He did, and assured me that he had learned how to play during summer camp, though I wasn’t too surprised when he had trouble hitting the ball across the net. He certainly was though. “I was wayyy better during camp,” he told me. At least half of my balls disappeared in the 30 minutes that we played, as every few swings of the boy’s racquet would send the ball sailing past the high fences, each loss immediately followed by a sincerely distressed “NOOOOOOO” from the culprit.

Then it dawned on me that it was rather strange for a small child to be hanging out with a complete stranger for this amount of time. Where were this kid’s parents? He explained that he was actually here with his older brother, who was on the other side of the playground in a game of basketball with a bunch of other Chinese kids. To prove it, he put his face up against the fence and shouted “HEY I’m here playing tennis!” Oh, and his parents weren’t here, he said, but they let him and his brother ride the bus unaccompanied to come hang out with the other kids in the neighborhood.

What I see here, distilled into the monkey bars and slides, flowing through the sandbox and wall-to-wall murals, is the essence of a community. In the broad sense of the word we use today, community describes everything from an online forum to “the tech scene”, while our playground protagonist adheres to the old-fashioned interpretation of a real, tangible locale where fleshy humans interact with one another on the basis of shared cultures and the simple fact that a lot of these people just happen to live in close proximity to each other. It struck me that I hadn’t seen many places like this in San Francisco before. Perhaps a common gathering spot like Dolores Park might compare, but most of the time there groups of people ignore other groups, and I’d conjecture that nobody really goes there to love thy neighbor, but rather because it’s a thing to do for bored folks in their 20s and 30s who decide to spend their Saturday afternoon laying out on the grass whilst sipping chardonnay. One could argue that Willie “Woo Woo” Wong Playground is similarly just a gathering spot for members of the Chinatown community and they wouldn’t be wrong. The biggest difference I see is that W^4P is a place where people go to live their lives, while Dolores is a place people go to take a break from theirs.