#Why Asian Americans like me are the rising new parental power

Chinese people in the United States, especially first- and second-generation immigrants, have historically paid little attention to politics because Chinese culture does not encourage civic engagement. We are either too busy making money to support our families or we think the games that politicians play do not affect us. 

To be honest, I was like that, too. But the pandemic has made me realize that the decisions made by local elected officials do affect our actual lives!

During 18 months of online classes, my son was completely unengaged in school and wasted his time all day, every day, playing video games. But San Francisco Board of Education members Gabriela López, Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga did not recognize or try to fix the problem — instead they focused on renaming schools.

Then they ignored protests from the Asian American community and canceled the merit-based admissions system at Lowell HS. Adding fuel to the fire, Collins blatantly discriminated against Asians with her racist tweets. “Many” Asian Americans “use white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead,’ ” she wrote, and added, “Being a house n—-r is still being a n—-r.”

Felt discrimination

All of this made me and many Asian American parents extremely angry! These board members put politics above education, harming our children! We needed to recall them ASAP.

Chinese in America, no matter how long we’ve lived here, have all seen and felt discrimination to some extent. We are the “perpetual foreigners.” To discriminate is human nature while “tolerance/biting our tongue” is a virtue in Chinese culture. But continued tolerance of discrimination leads to our community’s needs being ignored. We have to learn to speak up in this democratic society and tell others, especially politicians, that our community has needs and demands. 

San Francisco has one of the highest concentrations of Chinese, about 26% of the population. If we all vote, then we can certainly influence the outcome of any election. And Tuesday’s election results show that our community heard this call. We DID vote and achieved a landslide victory!

The main reason the San Francisco Chinese community got engaged for this recall election is because the topic is education, which is of paramount importance in the Chinese culture. Apart from gaining some personal freedom, most adults immigrate to America for our children. The school board decides everything related to our children’s education, which affects their future competitiveness in school and in the workplace.

How can we as parents not care?

From the beginning of this recall movement a year ago, many Chinese American parents got involved to collect signatures. More than 80,000 were gathered. After the election was scheduled, a group of us formed the Chinese/API Voter Outreach Taskforce in mid-December to sign up new voters and later remind them to vote. 

New voters

Over a period of just six weeks, our task force was able to sign up 560 new voters, 418 new citizen voters and 142 noncitizen parents who are eligible to vote in San Francisco school-board elections.

While doing community outreach in the past two months, our task force was able to engage and encourage longtime immigrants, those who have been in the United States for decades but never bothered to register to vote. We started slow, but by Election Day, we were inundated with people wanting to know how and where to vote.

It’s exhilarating to see the engagement of our Chinese American community. I hope this portends a new chapter in Chinese American political activism on the American stage.

Ann Hsu is a former Silicon Valley executive and entrepreneur, a PTA president and an organizer of the Chinese/API Voter Outreach Task Force.