Five Chinese-Americans are among the candidates
on the mayoral ballot in Tuesday’s election. Ed Lee, interim mayor; David Chiu, president of the Board of Supervisors; Phil Ting, San Francisco’s assessor-recorder; and Leland Yee, state senator, share their thoughts on the history and progress of the Chinese-American community in San Francisco.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANNIE TRITT FOR THE BAY CITIZEN

ED LEE

Interim San Francisco Mayor

In January, Ed Lee became an instant icon for San Francisco’s Chinese after the Board of Supervisors appointed him, the little-known city administrator, as interim mayor. He is the first Chinese-American to hold the city’s highest office.

“I went to over 150 Chinese New Year events,” Lee said, “and people attended in extraordinary numbers. Whether I was appointed or elected, it didn’t make a difference.”

Lee, 59, grew up in Seattle, one of six children of a restaurant owner with roots in the Taishan region of China. San Francisco had “laws on the books that prevented Chinese immigrants from voting, from owning property,” he said. “There were physical and social restrictions — and hurt — placed on coolies.”

He added that even his father “faced discrimination when we were growing up, getting cursed by his white customers.”

Lee began his career as a tenants' rights lawyer and came to political maturity steeped in the world of Chinatown nonprofits. His opponents now accuse some of those groups of illegally helping his campaign.

“None of the nonprofits should be involved in political dealings,” Lee said. “But if they’re drawn into it, it’s because of the political knives of candidates who want to make an association look bad.”

PHIL TING

San Francisco Assessor-Recorder

Phil Ting, 42, the city’s assessor-recorder, has brought a technical approach to the mayoral race. A self-described policy wonk with a degree from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, Ting has built his candidacy around Reset San Francisco, a social media platform for discussing government policy that has some 30,000 users.

“The 300 people who are making policy aren’t enough,” he said, adding that “we can leverage technology to include more voices without a huge amount of cost.”

Ting, the son of immigrants from Jiangsu Province, in eastern China, grew up in Los Angeles. He experienced a political awakening at Berkeley in the early 1990s, restarting dormant activist groups that had been initiated by Jean Quan, now the mayor of Oakland, and Floyd Huen, her husband.

Ting worked at the Asian Law Caucus before joining government. While the Asian community’s issues are “very much mainstream issues now,” he said, a poor population of Asian immigrants forms the city’s underbelly.

Those non-English-speaking immigrants “are limited in their opportunities in the United States, tend to be significantly lower income, and often elderly, and need rent control,” he said. “They’re the ones who need government most.”

DAVID CHIU

San Francisco Board of Supervisors President

David Chiu, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, sees himself as part of a new wave of Asian-American leaders that includes his fellow candidates Phil Ting and Jeff Adachi. Freed from the language constraints that limited the career choices of their parents, Chiu and others in his generation took up civil rights work and eventually ended up in San Francisco politics.

The son of a doctor, Chiu, 42, grew up in Boston and entered Harvard as a pre-med student. He changed his concentration to government in his second year after protesting a hate crime on another Boston campus.

“With a lot of immigration patterns, the first generation goes into occupations and professions that they could easily break into,” he said. “The second generation and their children, who are more assimilated, have more opportunities.”

Chiu came to San Francisco in 1996 to work as a staff attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, representing mostly Latino restaurant workers in the Mission.

“I represent a younger generation that grew up in an era when people of different backgrounds are comfortable interacting with each other,” Chiu said. “It’s reflective of a post-Obama era, where voters are finally able to look beyond the race of a candidate.”

LELAND YEE

State Senator

Leland Yee has been in the spotlight in the final weeks of the mayoral race for leveling a series of high-profile attacks against Ed Lee and Lee’s supporters. Yee, a state senator, has also been criticized as running a negative campaign.

Recently, a group of the mayor’s prominent supporters held a news conference to chastise Yee’s campaign after he released a 53-page satirical biography of Lee that included accusations that Lee’s supporters committed voter fraud and laundered money, allegations that Lee has distanced himself from.

But Yee, 63, the son of immigrants from the Taishan region who speaks Cantonese and who received his undergraduate degree from San Francisco State University, is unfazed. On the campaign trail he glides through Chinatown, the Richmond and the Excelsior with the familiarity of a veteran legislator who has a 21- year winning streak in local races.

“I’ve fought all my life to encourage the Chinese to vote,” he said. “These issues that I’ve raised are about the integrity of the Chinese vote.”

Yee said he had attracted criticism because he had not been willing to associate himself with “power brokers.”

“You’re not in one camp versus another,” he said. “The only camp you’re in is the people’s camp.”