Lunar New Year Reminds The City’s Asian Community To Do More

On special occasions like Lunar New Year, my Grandma Ee would sit me down to impart important life lessons — and good luck — for the coming year’s worth of moon orbits.

Moving from the village of Chakau in China’s Guongdong province to Songkhla, Thailand, when she was just 14 — on her own and without speaking the language — she eventually ran a soy sauce and fish sauce factory, becoming one of the rare female entrepreneurs of her day.

Her advice was simple: You are only as strong as your community. You must always support community members in need.  And you should start brewing small batches of soy sauce on our sunny deck because no one in America knows the good stuff.

I’m reminded of this grandmotherly wisdom every time I attend a political event in Chinatown, the Richmond, the Sunset, Japantown, or other centers of Asian pride.

Are we doing enough to support our community and each other?

The raw data says no.

A decade ago, Asian influence in The City was at its peak. In addition to San Francisco’s first Asian American mayor, Ed Lee, as many as five members of the 11-member Board of Supervisors were of Asian descent.

For a city where Asians make up 37% of the population — Chinese Americans alone account for more than one out of five — many in the community felt like we finally had seats at the table.  Better yet, those seats were proportional to our community presence.

This wasn’t limited just to municipal government. Phil Ting and David Chiu headed to Sacramento to represent The City in the state Assembly. The next generation of Asian American leaders were working in the offices of many elected officials.

How times have changed.

In 2024, Ting, facing term limits, won’t be running again. Chiu is now City Attorney — still an important position, no doubt — and Connie Chan is the lone Asian member of the Board of Supervisors.  

There’s a very real possibility, however, that our city government’s executive and legislative branches could have minimal Asian representation until at least 2028.

Is it pure coincidence that San Francisco’s decline in Asian representation coincided with the deaths of Chinatown’s political gatekeeper Rose Pak, in 2016 and Mayor Ed Lee in 2017?

To be fair, some point out that we’ve made other gains.

“15 years ago, only a handful of San Francisco candidates printed literature and mailers in Chinese, much less bothered to come up with a Chinese name,” said Jane Kim, San Francisco’s first Korean American elected official and a 2018 mayoral candidate from The City’s progressive wing. “Now, every campaign has literature and ads in Chinese and most hire Chinese bilingual staff. This demonstrates the impressive rise of Chinese and API political power.”

True, many in San Francisco’s political class will happily do a Chinatown press conference during election years or campaign times but otherwise seem quite okay with the status quo.

The problem is that election influence doesn’t necessarily translate into legislative, budgetary, and governing influence.

Even though we have five times the Asian population of the typical American city and the nation’s largest block of Chinese-speaking voters, if no one is there to speak for us, how will our voice be heard past election day?

This wasn’t an issue in 2011 when San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum faced an imminent risk of bankruptcy and permanent closure. In response, Asian leaders banded together to make sure we saved it.

Would that have been the outcome if there were minimal Asian representation at that time?

That’s why 2024’s March and November elections are an opportunity for the Asian community.  What if we united all Asians at the ballot box, including East and South Asians?  What if we didn’t treat all Asians as one monolithic group and instead recognized the unique voices and contributions from The City’s Filipino, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian populations?

To understand what could be accomplished, look at 2022’s successful Board of Education recall campaign driven by high numbers of signatures and votes from the Asian community.

“The first press conference held for the recall was in Chinatown and was specific to Chinese-American and Chinese media,” said Lily Ho, one of the recall organizers.

“I organized all of these people in Chinatown to attend the rally and found parents in the Chinatown community who were upset and had children in schools. Then there was a little bit of momentum already, and [we] were able to get the more established Chinese American and Asian American Democratic groups on board,” said Ho, now a candidate for San Francisco's Democratic County Central Committee.

Or take a look at how the California state legislature responded to the anti-Asian hate crisis by meaningfully supporting programs to reverse Pandemic-fueled violence trends.

Would all that outside funding for local groups have happened if we were underrepresented at the state level, too?

Skeptics may point out that you don’t have to be Chinese or Asian to support the community. The converse is also true:  Just because an elected or appointed leader has a specific ethnic background, doesn’t mean that their policies and programs necessarily advance the cause.

But for the Asian elder who is scared to walk outside in San Francisco for fear of attack or the Asian small business store owner who is repeatedly robbed in broad daylight seemingly without recourse, having Asian representation in the most visible levels of city government is a prerequisite to even feeling like we’re being heard.

This Lunar New Year, take a moment to celebrate, decorate, shop, eat, and spread good luck, good fortune, and good cheer.

But like my 91-year-old grandmother told me many moons ago, community isn’t just about having a feeling of fellowship that results from shared backgrounds, characteristics, or experiences.

Community is also about what you do to support each other.

We’ve got to do more.

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