Mayor Lee Leads Growing Asian-American Clout
Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen
The Asian Law Caucus was a fledgling civil rights organization when Edwin M. Lee began there as a law clerk more than three decades ago.
Working out of two dingy rooms above a garment shop in Chinatown, Mr. Lee and a handful of lawyers defended poor immigrants whose concerns included the threat of deportation and restaurant owners who refused to pay their wages.
Now the Asian Law Caucus is putting the final touches on its new 9,000-square-foot office with floor-to-ceiling windows near the foot of the Transamerica Pyramid. Mr. Lee, the group’s most famous alumnus, is settling into a new office as well.
Mr. Lee’s rise to become the city’s first Asian-American mayor — an interim appointment last week that followed Gavin Newsom’s election as lieutenant governor — mirrors the 40-year arc of a handful of community organizations that sprang up in the 1970s to represent the Bay Area’s growing Asian population. Those groups now wield considerable political clout.
Until these organizations emerged, “the Chinese community didn’t have that engaged, political grass roots that could mobilize,” said Jason McDaniel, a professor of political science at San Francisco State University. “It’s easy to see that all coming to fruition now.”
Today, nonprofit organizations like the Chinatown Community Development Center have set up “a pipeline of young Asian activists,” said Randy Shaw, the executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, which operates many of the city’s low-income housing units. “They’re trained as organizers and then they go out into the world,” he said. “This is the future.”
While some local Asian-American politicians, like State Senator Leland Yee, followed a different path, many among the current generation of elected officials started out as community organizers.
The recently elected Supervisor Jane Kim, who is of Korean descent, and David Chiu, the Chinese-American president of the Board of Supervisors, both worked at the Chinatown Community Development Center.
Another Chinese-American supervisor, Eric Mar, who like Mr. Chiu was elected in 2008, worked as a law clerk in the 1980s under Mr. Lee at the Asian Law Caucus.
In Oakland, the politics of the recently elected Mayor Jean Quan were shaped during her many years as a student at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1982, Ms. Quan, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, planned Bay Area-wide demonstrations with Mr. Lee, then a staff lawyer at the caucus, to protest the killing of Vincent Chin, a Chinese man who was beaten to death in Detroit.
“You don’t have a lot of Chinese leaders coming out of small-business backgrounds, nor are they the sons and daughters of elected officials,” said Henry Der, the former executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action. “It was the activism during the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s that created opportunities for appointments that opened the doors.”
A confluence of factors propelled the rise of Asian-American community organizations as a political force, according to observers.
Part of it is demographic. The local Asian population, particularly Chinese, has surged in recent years, with an influx of immigrants coming from both Hong Kong and the mainland. The immigrants have brought with them Cantonese and Mandarin dialects that have slowly swept aside the Taishanese heard in Chinatown for a century before their arrival.
By 2009, about one-third of San Francisco County’s population was Asian, including 21 percent Chinese.
These immigrants, often poor and elderly, were organized by leaders like Gordon Chin, the head of the Community Development Center, into increasingly potent forces that lobbied for health services, public safety and better housing conditions.
Organizers like Mr. Chin and Rose Pak, the influential consultant for the Chinese Chamber of Commerce who helped engineer Mr. Lee’s appointment as mayor, also forged alliances with business interests and the political establishment that would prove critical.
“People who come from activist backgrounds generally don’t have political power, and they needed money,” said Ling-Chi Wang, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “But they formed fascinating coalitions.”
During the 1980s real estate boom, for instance, Chinatown leaders, many of whom were veterans of progressive social movements, became worried about commercial development encroaching from the south. They struck a deal with John L. Molinari, the former pro-business president of the Board of Supervisors and an ally of then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein, guaranteeing the preservation of Grant Avenue, which has become the spine of Chinatown.
In 1989, Ms. Pak tapped into her Chinese business connections to raise significant campaign contributions for the progressive Art Agnos, who was Mr. Molinari’s opponent in the mayoral race. Mr. Agnos won and appointed Mr. Lee, by then the managing attorney at the Asian Law Caucus, to his first government job.
Over the next 20 years, Mr. Lee transformed into a career public servant, receiving appointments from Mayors Willie L. Brown Jr. and Gavin Newsom, both of whom maintained close relationships with Ms. Pak and Mr. Chin.
Mr. Lee was born in 1952 in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle, to parents who emigrated from Guangdong Province in China in the 1930s. His father served in the Korean War and died when Mr. Lee was 15. His mother raised her children while working as a seamstress.
Mr. Lee received a full scholarship to Bowdoin College and moved to the Bay Area in 1975 to enroll in law school at the University of California, Berkeley.
He began at the Asian Law Caucus in his second semester and immediately began working on housing issues that after three years led to San Francisco’s first organized rent strike in 1978.
“Decades ago, I was about as anti-establishment as one could be,” Mr. Lee said after his swearing-in Tuesday in the City Hall rotunda. “But today, like you, I’m trying to make the establishment work for all San Franciscans.”
William R. Tamayo, who worked at the Asian Law Caucus as a staff attorney and is now a lawyer for the federal government, recalled giving up part of his $600-a-month salary to support Mr. Lee, who had put off taking the bar exam to lead the rent strike even though the caucus could not afford to pay him.
People who worked with Mr. Lee said he had become known not only for his work ethic and self-sacrifice but also for an understated manner that won him the trust of immigrants throughout Chinatown.
Mr. Lee understood both Cantonese and Taishanese, the dialect spoken by many immigrants, his colleagues said.
Mr. Lee left nonprofit work in 1989, when Mayor Agnos offered him an advisory position in his administration.
In his inaugural remarks, Mr. Lee spoke not of his two decades in government but of his formative years, as he acknowledged some of the people who shaped his worldview and then elevated him to the top.
"As a Chinese-American, I am well aware of my community’s long and troubled and proud history in this city," Mr. Lee told the crowd. “The San Francisco of old was directly involved in racism and neglect. The San Francisco that I fought as an attorney began to change.”
“And now today, Rose,” he said, casting a smile at his friend Ms. Pak. “Our struggle is here, and it is succeeding.”
