Building Community and Keeping Traditions Alive at Alpine Rec Center

Growing up in Chinatown, Coco So, Angel City’s manager of community impact, was at Alpine Recreation Center almost every day. With her parents working long shifts at Big 3 Restaurant in Alhambra, it’s where she did her homework, where she learned to play basketball (courtesy of GPLA) and skateboard, and where she hung out with her friends before getting picked up by her grandparents. 

Just across the street from Castelar Elementary, Alpine is a gathering place for local kids, providing crucial after-school programming to families whose parents work long hours. The unassuming gym on the northeast end of the building is where the East Wind Foundation offers free martial arts and lion dancing instruction to local kids four days a week.

It was a full-circle moment for So when East Wind performed at the street fair before ACFC’s AANHPI Heritage Month game. The initial East Wind-Angel City connection was around the “Roar” patch, created by East Wind instructor Lauren Lam, but the relationship has continued, between the pregame performance—whose participants also got tickets to the game—and a class at Alpine a handful of ACFC supporters and front office staff attended in early May.

In making that connection, So was able to bring a piece of her upbringing into the work she does at Angel City, and in doing so, to strengthen the club’s roots in the LA community.

Chinatown’s history has been marked by displacement and exploitation—as well as survival, community resistance, and pride. 

The neighborhood now known as Chinatown, a roughly triangular area bounded by the 110 to the northwest, Broadway to the east, and Cesar Chavez Avenue to the southwest, was originally called “New Chinatown.” Old Chinatown, which straddled Alameda to the southeast of the current neighborhood, was largely demolished starting in 1933 to make room for Union Station.

Actually, Old Chinatown was the second Chinese neighborhood in the city: the city’s very first Chinese residents, mostly men from Guangdong Province who arrived in the 1850s to work on the railroads, moved into a 500-foot-long alley called Calle de los Negros. Just south of where the 110 is now, that was where most of LA’s Black, Indigenous, and Mexican residents lived at the time. A subject of fear and suspicion by white Angelenos from the beginning, in 1871, almost 20 Chinese men were killed and several buildings burned down in one of the largest acts of mass racist violence in American history.

Three years later, the city passed legislation to demolish the area “[in the hopes that] Chinatown [will] begin to disappear,” according to a Los Angeles Herald article from the era. The growing Chinese population expanded to the north and built a thriving community, including two churches, three temples, restaurants, doctors’ offices, groceries, a newspaper, a school, and even an informal local government, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association—at a time when a series of housing segregation laws dating to the 1860s prohibited Chinese residents both from owning land in LA and from living outside certain areas.

In 1926, voters approved the construction of Union Station, displacing the community once again. The so-called New Chinatown—the area still called Chinatown today—became the hub of the community following an effort by Peter Soohoo, Sr., an engineer and community leader, to pool funding to build a new commercial center (an aside: members of the Soohoo family are still involved in community work in Chinatown, including East Wind). Everything had to be paid for up front, because banks wouldn’t finance the project.

The community-backed project had competition in the form of China City, a Disneyland-like tourist attraction built nearby by white developers, where visitors could buy a rickshaw ride from a costumed worker and eat a “Chinaburger”—a burger topped with bean sprouts.

China City closed after 10 years, but New Chinatown—which, like China City, was designed in part to appeal to white tourists, but was also the hub of an actual residential community—thrived. Not long after its official opening in 1938, its central plaza was drawing tens of thousands of visitors weekly.

Starting in the 1970s, new immigrants from China and Taiwan increasingly settled in the San Gabriel Valley rather than Chinatown, first to Monterey Park, then to Alhambra and other nearby areas. So’s own family history mirrors that shift: her mom’s family moved from Guangdong in the 1980s, first to Chinatown, later to the SGV. As a result of that change, the Chinese community that remains in Chinatown is increasingly elderly and often low-income, and today, Chinatown grapples with some of the same issues facing ethnic enclaves across the country.

Gentrification—often presented in the guise of “revitalization”—threatens to push longtime residents out as new luxury apartments are planned and built, some containing no affordable units. An issue So says she’s passionate about is Chinatown’s status as a food desert. Ai Hoa, the neighborhood’s last remaining grocery store, closed in 2019. “Chinese elderly folks have to take the bus to the San Gabriel Valley to get the groceries that they need to cook food from their culture,” she says.

So being named Alpine Summer Day Camp Camper of the Year in 2007

But the cultural fabric of Chinatown is still alive, even as the locus of the Chinese community has shifted to the east.

So’s upbringing reflects the close-knit character of the neighborhood as a whole. “Growing up in Chinatown truly was special because it was such a small community that everybody knows everybody,” she says. “Or if you don't know them, then you know somebody who knows them.”

A self-described “park rat,” So wasn’t an active participant at East Wind—she’d sometimes attend their after-school sessions, but basketball was her sport—but a lot of her friends and family did. “My parents had no reservations about me being at the park till 10 p.m.,” she says, “because my uncle Wayne and my cousin Nicole were there.”

That cousin, Nicole Li, attended East Wind up until college, and is still active with the group as an adult.

Growing up in the SGV, Li had to take the bus with her grandmother on Fridays and Saturdays, then get a ride back with her cousin Wayne Li, an instructor at East Wind. “I was super into it,” she says. “Even my email address was ‘EastWindForever.’”

She first wanted to learn martial arts because, well, it’s cool. “I grew up watching kung fu movies,” she remembers, “and I saw Wayne doing the Chinese New Year parades, and I was like, ‘I want to do that!’”

But as she continued, Li also absorbed the lessons the foundation has focused on since its founding by Sifu Ron Quan in 1972. “It had a huge influence on my life,” she says. “I learned discipline, motivation, hard work. And as I got older, I tried to pass that on to the younger kids.”

East Wind practices on Friday and Saturday nights intentionally. “There’s gang activity around here,” says Li. “But being in East Wind, doing something meaningful to Chinese culture, you kind of steer away from that and get to a more positive role.”

That discipline is on full display at an East Wind class. Before class and during water breaks, kids laugh with their friends and check their phones, but when instruction starts, the group is laser focused. The evening starts with a warmup that many adults would consider a workout in its own right—a series of strength and mobility drills lasting almost an hour. Then they train a series of strikes and kicks, sometimes taking turns holding a pad for a partner to hit. Finally, they practice with the drums, cymbals, and lion costumes the group brought to BMO earlier this month.

As the unmistakable clatter of drumsticks hitting the wooden sides of the tánggǔ, or hall drum, sounded before Angel City faced Kansas City earlier this month, a crowd quickly gathered in Christmas Tree Lane. “As soon as you hear those drums—man, I grew up in that environment and I still get goosebumps when I hear that,” says So.

After a martial arts demonstration, the students paired up and donned four lion costumes, the brilliantly colored creatures bouncing their heads to the beat of the drum and batting their feathered eyelids to the crash of the cymbals.

“I wasn’t even watching the lion dancing,” says So. “I was watching the crowd reaction.”

Part of the lion dance tradition is for kids in the crowd to “feed” the lions. “Mr. Fong, one of the elders in East Wind, went around and gave out heads of lettuce and oranges,” remembers So. “I saw him check with kids in the front row, asking if they’d be cool with it, and they all loved it—all these little kids of different backgrounds being super excited to like, hand a head of lettuce to a person in a lion costume.

“To watch people see this celebration of culture? I like to break down events into things that take years off my life and things that add years to my life. That day added years to my life. It was beautiful.”