By 3:50 p.m. last Friday, Jeff Cheng already had everything set up, soft lo-fi music playing through a speaker as he sat by his computer and waited for people to trickle in.
For the next hour, the 40-year-old librarian became the DJ for a crowd of six neighborhood residents who’d gathered in the program room at the San Francisco Public Library’s Excelsior branch for the karaoke night hosted on every second Friday of the month.
Ishamael arrived first, in a dark green polo shirt and matching pants, left hand settled into his pocket and right hand holding the microphone. He requested America’s “Tin Man;” the remastered version, with lyrics. By the chorus, feet were tapping, bodies swaying, people mouthing the words under their breath. He went on to sing two more songs that evening.
Anna So, the owner of Zabb Thai, a Thai restaurant next door to the library, returned to karaoke night after an April trip to Italy. She decided to close her restaurant for an hour and drop by.
So started off her night with “Let It Be” by the Beatles, a classic she hadn’t performed before. But then she moved onto the familiar.
“This is a love song,” she told the crowd before singing Teresa Teng’s “Moon Represents My Heart,” a slow love song that’s also a Mandarin Chinese classic.
So also sang a cheeky Thai song that had the room laughing.
“She just thought he was handsome,” She explained the singer’s way of flirting with a man who’s taken. “‘Oh, I didn’t know you had a girlfriend. Sorry, sorry, I didn’t know.’”
Leo followed, with Matt Monroe’s “Born Free,” his deep voice echoing in the room. Lisa, one of the younger faces that evening, sang Sublime’s “Badfish,” a reggae rock song. Lisa said she found her way to the program through the Glen Park branch before making the trip to the Excelsior library.
Outside the sliding glass door, children wandered by and peered in. In the main library, readers turned pages, largely unbothered by the music sifting through the door.
Cheng’s job was simple: All he needed was to queue up the songs participants ordered from YouTube, and hit play.
Cheng knows his regulars well. Leo always cycles through the same three songs, and if he runs out, he simply starts over. Ishamael never sings without lyrics on the screen, and always wants background vocals in the track. So loves mixes of Thai, Mandarin and English.
Some other regulars, Cheng said, love to sing exclusively in Spanish.
Tucked in a quiet corner of the already quiet library, the room becomes the loudest room in the building on karaoke night. That, Cheng said, is exactly the point.
“It’s a little different, because people have always known libraries to be, like, a quiet space where you study,” Cheng said. “I wanted to really venture outside of what we do at the library.”
Cheng grew up in San Francisco’s Portola neighborhood, and had worked as a pharmacy technician, but decided to leave the job which, he said, was depressing.
“I found it a little sad,” he said. “With some of the people that you build relationships with — the diseases kind of get the best of them.”
So he got a master’s degree in library and information science at San Jose State University and started working at the public library in 2019.
In 2022, Cheng got a promotion in the library system and became a librarian at the Excelsior branch. He doesn’t want to take full credit for starting the karaoke program that now exists in the Sunset and Glen Park branches.
The idea came out of a weekly check-in and brainstorm session with his former branch manager. The two were trying to come up with ways to bring people back to the library after the COVID-19 pandemic, trying to “think outside the box.”
“We tried to … I don’t want to say reinvent the wheel,” Cheng said. “But we like to bring something different to the neighborhood, just to spruce it up a little bit.”
When the hour of karaoke was up, the room quietly transformed. Chairs were rearranged into a circle, and an alphabet carpet was rolled out across the floor, ready for the next day’s children’s story time.
Cheng is hoping that next month some of the other regulars will return, and that more people will join in.
“We try to make it super-welcoming,” Cheng said. “If people want to just sit back and watch others, they are more than welcome to.”
“It’s a rewarding job. I really do enjoy what I do. You build community,” Cheng added. “That’s honestly part of what this program is about. We get to bring people of different backgrounds together and they just share space.”