California’s first two Chinese-American mayors emerge out of an ugly history of racism and oppression
Maria La Ranga and Lee Romney 22 January 2011
When San Francisco City Administrator Edwin Lee became interim mayor, the city got much more than just a low-key replacement for Gavin Newsom, who has taken his gelled hair and actress wife to Sacramento, where he is the new lieutenant-governor.
Lee is the first Asian-American mayor of this diverse city, where Asians account for nearly a third of the population and the scars of history run deep. Lee’s ascendancy, activists say, is a milestone that has been a long time coming.
Yet his success is not unique in the Bay Area. Although its Asian-American population is half as dense as San Francisco’s - 15 per cent compared with 31 per cent of the population - Oakland beat its flashier counterpart to the punch. Jean Quan, elected in November and inaugurated eight days before Lee, teasingly says she’s the real thing while her long-time friend is a “placeholder”.
“We’ve been giving San Francisco a bad time,” Quan explained.
Still, when Lee texted Quan that he was saving her a place at his swearing-in ceremony, her response was swift. She would never, she said, miss such a “moment of history”.
History united Lee and Quan long before they became the country’s most prominent Chinese-American mayors. Decades ago, they fought together against poverty, discrimination and fear, demons that have long plagued California’s Chinese immigrants.
At Lee’s swearing-in, a happy crowd packed the City Hall’s graceful beaux-arts rotunda, including elderly Chinese men and women with bright green “Ed Lee” stickers on worn lapels, young attorneys, activists, municipal workers hanging over railings two, three and four stories up.
Cheers rang out and cameras flashed as the frugal, funny and unassuming 58-year-old descended the grand staircase to take the oath of office last week. In the crowd was a proud who’s who of Asian-American accomplishment, northern California style.
They included a record four members of the board of supervisors, all recently elected; assessor-recorder Phil Ting; public defender Jeff Adachi; state Senator Leland Yee; and Chinatown power broker Rose Pak. Quan, the first Asian-American woman to lead a major US city, stood out, resplendent in bright red.
But threaded through the celebration was a deep vein of painful remembrance. Newsom reminded the crowd of a sober ceremony in the same spot 17 months earlier, when he announced that the city would apologise officially for its “very shameful past”.
The California gold rush and hopes for economic opportunity drew thousands of Chinese immigrants to California in the mid-1800s, with most landing in and around San Francisco. Home to the oldest Chinatown in the United States, the city became an incubator for a national wave of anti-Chinese sentiment.
Mayor Andrew Jackson Bryant demanded in 1876 that the board of supervisors appoint a commission on the “Chinese problem”. The city appealed to the US Congress and the president to restrict Chinese immigration. The supervisors imposed fees on Chinese laundries and passed laws against overcrowding that were enforced only in Chinatown. There were anti-Chinese riots and attacks on Chinese-owned businesses.
Then came the Chinese Exclusion Act, signed by US president Chester Arthur in 1882, which effectively halted Chinese immigration for a decade and denied citizenship to Chinese immigrants. By the turn of the century, the San Francisco Department of Public Health had shuttered all Chinese-owned businesses and quarantined and barricaded Chinatown.
In 1977, Ed Lee was a young law clerk with the Asian Law Caucus, studying at the University of California Berkeley’s Boalt Hall and helping organise tenants at Ping Yuen, a sprawling public housing project in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Ping Yuen’s elevators and hot water heaters regularly broke down. Burned-out light bulbs were not replaced. Security was lax. Complaints to the city housing authority fell on deaf ears. Then a young woman returning home from her garment district job was attacked.
The elevators weren’t working the night someone tried to rape Julia Wong, 17, on an upper floor of the complex. Her assailant threw her over the balcony, but she lived. So he dragged her back upstairs and threw her off again, which killed her, Lee said.
With Lee’s help, tenants waged the first-ever rent strike against the San Francisco Housing Authority. San Francisco’s new mayor remembers draping a banner over an upper balcony. After several months, the city agreed to upgrade the facilities.
The residents “came from China and Hong Kong, where the landlord was the ultimate law,” Lee said. “If you cross-eyed them, you were evicted... We tried to teach them to demand their rights.”
When Lee and Quan met as young activists, tenants’ rights were his forte, labour actions hers. In 1976, San Francisco’s International Hotel was targeted for demolition and both stepped up to organise for the low-income Filipinos who lived there.
Jean Quan was the first member of her extended family to be born in America, but it wasn’t until she got to the University of California Berkeley that she knew “why I had a sister who I had never seen”.
Like many Chinese immigrants in the Bay Area, Quan’s family had been split apart by the Chinese Exclusion Act. Her great-grandfathers had moved to California in the 1870s to build wine caves in Sonoma county and work on the railroads.
But because of the federal legislation, “they weren’t allowed to bring their families, weren’t allowed to naturalise”, Quan said recently.
When the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed all they had, her paternal great-grandfather and his three Chinese-born sons petitioned to remain in America. Because all records had been destroyed, they claimed citizenship, joining thousands of so-called “paper sons”.
Yet each generation of the early Quan family was forced by the exclusion act to return to China to marry. That’s what her father, George Quan, did in 1920, when he wed May Wong. He returned to California and earned his citizenship after fighting in the second world war. But he was able to bring only his wife to America. Because of the tight immigration restrictions, daughter Lai Oy and son Tai Jue were left behind.
“Thousands and thousands of Chinese-American families were split and suffered,” Quan said. The pain of that separation - along with the family’s sacrifices to support her older sister in China - helped turn her into an activist.
Quan, 61, was born a year after her mother arrived in the East Bay suburb of Livermore. She was taunted growing up: “Chung chung Chinaman” and “You’re a Jap!” Her father, who ran a Chinese restaurant, had died of lung cancer by the time she was five. Her mother worked long restaurant hours and took in piecework from a garment factory.
At Berkeley, Quan marched with Latino and Filipino farm workers. It was her future husband, Floyd Huen, who introduced her to the Asian-American Political Alliance and trained her focus on her own community. In 1969, the alliance joined other minority groups in successfully demanding ethnic studies programmes on campus. Quan was the first to teach a Berkeley class on Asian women.
In the late 1980s, Quan was working as the Service Employees International Union’s first Asian labour organiser. Lee sat on San Francisco’s Human Rights Commission. The friends joined forces to try to improve working conditions for janitors.
These days, “now that we’re both mayors”, Quan said, they can laugh together about their shared history.
And on some issues, she thinks, they’ll probably work together again. She’ll just “pick up the phone and say, ‘Ed, how do we fix this’?”
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A door closes on a shameful past
California’s first two Chinese-American mayors emerge out of an ugly history of racism and oppression
Maria La Ranga and Lee Romney
22 January 2011
When San Francisco City Administrator Edwin Lee became interim mayor, the city got much more than just a low-key replacement for Gavin Newsom, who has taken his gelled hair and actress wife to Sacramento, where he is the new lieutenant-governor.
Lee is the first Asian-American mayor of this diverse city, where Asians account for nearly a third of the population and the scars of history run deep. Lee’s ascendancy, activists say, is a milestone that has been a long time coming.
Yet his success is not unique in the Bay Area. Although its Asian-American population is half as dense as San Francisco’s - 15 per cent compared with 31 per cent of the population - Oakland beat its flashier counterpart to the punch. Jean Quan, elected in November and inaugurated eight days before Lee, teasingly says she’s the real thing while her long-time friend is a “placeholder”.
“We’ve been giving San Francisco a bad time,” Quan explained.
Still, when Lee texted Quan that he was saving her a place at his swearing-in ceremony, her response was swift. She would never, she said, miss such a “moment of history”.
History united Lee and Quan long before they became the country’s most prominent Chinese-American mayors. Decades ago, they fought together against poverty, discrimination and fear, demons that have long plagued California’s Chinese immigrants.
At Lee’s swearing-in, a happy crowd packed the City Hall’s graceful beaux-arts rotunda, including elderly Chinese men and women with bright green “Ed Lee” stickers on worn lapels, young attorneys, activists, municipal workers hanging over railings two, three and four stories up.
Cheers rang out and cameras flashed as the frugal, funny and unassuming 58-year-old descended the grand staircase to take the oath of office last week. In the crowd was a proud who’s who of Asian-American accomplishment, northern California style.
They included a record four members of the board of supervisors, all recently elected; assessor-recorder Phil Ting; public defender Jeff Adachi; state Senator Leland Yee; and Chinatown power broker Rose Pak. Quan, the first Asian-American woman to lead a major US city, stood out, resplendent in bright red.
But threaded through the celebration was a deep vein of painful remembrance. Newsom reminded the crowd of a sober ceremony in the same spot 17 months earlier, when he announced that the city would apologise officially for its “very shameful past”.
The California gold rush and hopes for economic opportunity drew thousands of Chinese immigrants to California in the mid-1800s, with most landing in and around San Francisco. Home to the oldest Chinatown in the United States, the city became an incubator for a national wave of anti-Chinese sentiment.
Mayor Andrew Jackson Bryant demanded in 1876 that the board of supervisors appoint a commission on the “Chinese problem”. The city appealed to the US Congress and the president to restrict Chinese immigration. The supervisors imposed fees on Chinese laundries and passed laws against overcrowding that were enforced only in Chinatown. There were anti-Chinese riots and attacks on Chinese-owned businesses.
Then came the Chinese Exclusion Act, signed by US president Chester Arthur in 1882, which effectively halted Chinese immigration for a decade and denied citizenship to Chinese immigrants. By the turn of the century, the San Francisco Department of Public Health had shuttered all Chinese-owned businesses and quarantined and barricaded Chinatown.
In 1977, Ed Lee was a young law clerk with the Asian Law Caucus, studying at the University of California Berkeley’s Boalt Hall and helping organise tenants at Ping Yuen, a sprawling public housing project in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
Ping Yuen’s elevators and hot water heaters regularly broke down. Burned-out light bulbs were not replaced. Security was lax. Complaints to the city housing authority fell on deaf ears. Then a young woman returning home from her garment district job was attacked.
The elevators weren’t working the night someone tried to rape Julia Wong, 17, on an upper floor of the complex. Her assailant threw her over the balcony, but she lived. So he dragged her back upstairs and threw her off again, which killed her, Lee said.
With Lee’s help, tenants waged the first-ever rent strike against the San Francisco Housing Authority. San Francisco’s new mayor remembers draping a banner over an upper balcony. After several months, the city agreed to upgrade the facilities.
The residents “came from China and Hong Kong, where the landlord was the ultimate law,” Lee said. “If you cross-eyed them, you were evicted... We tried to teach them to demand their rights.”
When Lee and Quan met as young activists, tenants’ rights were his forte, labour actions hers. In 1976, San Francisco’s International Hotel was targeted for demolition and both stepped up to organise for the low-income Filipinos who lived there.
Jean Quan was the first member of her extended family to be born in America, but it wasn’t until she got to the University of California Berkeley that she knew “why I had a sister who I had never seen”.
Like many Chinese immigrants in the Bay Area, Quan’s family had been split apart by the Chinese Exclusion Act. Her great-grandfathers had moved to California in the 1870s to build wine caves in Sonoma county and work on the railroads.
But because of the federal legislation, “they weren’t allowed to bring their families, weren’t allowed to naturalise”, Quan said recently.
When the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed all they had, her paternal great-grandfather and his three Chinese-born sons petitioned to remain in America. Because all records had been destroyed, they claimed citizenship, joining thousands of so-called “paper sons”.
Yet each generation of the early Quan family was forced by the exclusion act to return to China to marry. That’s what her father, George Quan, did in 1920, when he wed May Wong. He returned to California and earned his citizenship after fighting in the second world war. But he was able to bring only his wife to America. Because of the tight immigration restrictions, daughter Lai Oy and son Tai Jue were left behind.
“Thousands and thousands of Chinese-American families were split and suffered,” Quan said. The pain of that separation - along with the family’s sacrifices to support her older sister in China - helped turn her into an activist.
Quan, 61, was born a year after her mother arrived in the East Bay suburb of Livermore. She was taunted growing up: “Chung chung Chinaman” and “You’re a Jap!” Her father, who ran a Chinese restaurant, had died of lung cancer by the time she was five. Her mother worked long restaurant hours and took in piecework from a garment factory.
At Berkeley, Quan marched with Latino and Filipino farm workers. It was her future husband, Floyd Huen, who introduced her to the Asian-American Political Alliance and trained her focus on her own community. In 1969, the alliance joined other minority groups in successfully demanding ethnic studies programmes on campus. Quan was the first to teach a Berkeley class on Asian women.
In the late 1980s, Quan was working as the Service Employees International Union’s first Asian labour organiser. Lee sat on San Francisco’s Human Rights Commission. The friends joined forces to try to improve working conditions for janitors.
These days, “now that we’re both mayors”, Quan said, they can laugh together about their shared history.
And on some issues, she thinks, they’ll probably work together again. She’ll just “pick up the phone and say, ‘Ed, how do we fix this’?”
McClatchy-Tribune
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