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In 1990, a 13-year-old girl had recently arrived in San Francisco from Taiwan with her mother and younger brother. Her American classmates struggled to pronounce her Chinese name, 诗敏 (Si Man), so her family began looking for an English one.
She found it on television: CBS reporter and anchor Connie Chung, seated at the center of the family TV screen, was speaking in a calm, confident tone that spared no one — not even Donald Trump, then a New York real estate celebrity.
Inspired by the renowned Chinese American journalist, the girl chose the name she felt was most “worthy” to carry: Connie.
Today, Connie Chan is a San Francisco supervisor running to represent California’s 11th U.S. House of Representatives District, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s seat.
More than three decades after Connie Chung became the first Asian American and only the second woman to co-anchor a major network evening newscast in 1993, Connie Chan is seeking another first: to become the first Asian American to represent San Francisco in the U.S. House, nearly 170 years after Chinese immigrants first arrived in the city.
At a Chinatown fundraiser in August, Pelosi, who endorsed Chan, said it would be “so long overdue.”
Chinese Americans are San Francisco’s largest minority and every public-office candidate is vying for their votes. Chan’s candidacy is possible thanks partly to the work of earlier generations who believed Chinese Americans deserved a seat at the table of power. Their efforts built a more diverse and politically powerful electorate over time, which in turn grew less likely to unite behind a single candidate. A Chinese name on the ballot might still stir enthusiasm, but an empowered electorate is also looking beyond ethnic identity to where candidates stand on issues.
‘Daughter of Chinatown’
There was scant room between the tables upstairs at the Far East Cafe, Chinatown’s last remaining banquet hall. It was early spring and the room was fuller than usual. Plates of walnut shrimp arrived at more than 50 round tables, where guests sang along with the Cantonese band between bites.
Onstage, Chan, in a beige suit, faced the crowd that had just welcomed her as the “daughter of Chinatown.”
She began by naming the people she came to thank: merchants, family association leaders, tenant leaders, Chinese-language media editors and elected officials past and present.
Then she turned to the reason they had gathered: Why had San Francisco never sent a Chinese American representative to Congress? “Is now the time for it?” she asked in Cantonese.
“It’s indeed the time,” she said. The room erupted in applause.
When they first arrived in San Francisco, Chan, her mother and younger brother spent a year squeezed into her aunt and uncle’s one-bedroom apartment.
She watched the adults in the family rebuild their life from the ground up: Chan recalled her aunt, once a Cantonese opera singer in Hong Kong, working hard as a dim sum waitress. With a steamer strapped to her waist and a tray of dim sum on top, she would move from table to table, calling out dishes and serving customers.
It wasn’t the America Chan had imagined, she told the Public Press.
Even as they struggled, her family began to gain a foothold. Her mother took English and computer classes at City College of San Francisco, which helped her land a job at Chinese Hospital, and the family eventually rented their own apartment.
It’s an experience many immigrants to San Francisco can relate to, like Wanxin Ma, a 55-year-old hotel worker. “I also went through a lot of hardship to be able to live here,” she told the Public Press in Cantonese.
“She is also an immigrant who experienced living in Chinatown,” Ma said.
Ma began her life in Chinatown in a room smaller than 100 square feet, sharing a bathroom and kitchen with other residents. So she recognizes some of her own experience in Chan’s story.
Ma has also seen Chan show up for Ma’s union, UNITE HERE Local 2, and support its initiatives as a city supervisor. Her confidence in Chan grew when a friend in another union told her its members supported Chan in the House race.
Chan’s support for working-class families like her own is central to her campaign. She has the backing of many labor groups, including the S.F. Building and Construction Trades Council, United Educators of San Francisco and S.F. Labor Council.
Her opponent, state Sen. Scott Wiener, has raised more money than Chan and is leading in the polls. But in the June primary, in which she finished second, Chan drew her strongest support from precincts across the city with large Chinese American populations.
‘No Magic Candidates’
Despite this support, not all Chinese American voters are uniting behind Chan. Her experience as a Chinese immigrant might resonate with some voters, but it is only one of many experiences within the community.
Brian Quan is backing Wiener. A leader in the Sierra Club San Francisco Bay Chapter and former president of the Chinese American Democratic Club, Quan does not see his shared ethnic identity with Chan as the sole reason to support her.
“We have like fourth- and fifth- and even sixth-generation Chinese Americans here in the city,” Quan said. “I think that complexity is hard to capture in a single person.”
“There’s no magic candidate anymore,” he added.
For Quan, there are differences in what draws Chinese Americans into politics. His parents, for example, became politically involved in the 1970s out of frustration with the “bamboo ceiling,” the racial barriers that limited their professional advancement. His own involvement, he said, was driven less by racial barriers he personally encountered than by issues such as housing scarcity and concern for the environment.
He said Wiener “aligns with me on more of the issues.”
Wiener, a former city supervisor, has support from other prominent Chinese American officials. Nancy Tung, chair of the San Francisco Democratic Party, and David Chiu, the city attorney, endorsed him and appeared alongside him at Asian American Pacific Islander community events and Cantonese-language town halls.
Josephine Zhao, who chairs the Chinese American Democratic Club, said she also aligns more politically with Wiener. But she and the club ultimately backed Chan.
The key issue affecting their choice to support Chan is the future of the Upper Great Highway.
Chan was the first city supervisor to oppose the measure voters passed two years ago to turn the coastal roadway into a permanent park, now called Sunset Dunes. Wiener supported it. The conversion of the highway sparked a backlash in the Sunset district, where about half the population is Asian American, and helped fuel the recall of the district supervisor who proposed it, Joel Engardio.
For the Chinese American Democratic Club, Zhao said that Wiener’s support of the park instead of the neighborhood highway outweighed any previous alignment with him. Zhao said she and the club had backed Wiener in his 2016 state Senate race against Jane Kim, who is Korean American. While Zhao personally still has a soft spot for Wiener; she helped design a Chinese-language campaign poster for him, in the past. But she noticed that club members who had regarded Wiener as an ally had felt blindsided by his support for the park, believing he had failed to take their concerns into account.
In contrast, this year, Chan has backed a ballot measure to reopen the highway to cars on weekdays.
Zhao did not rate Chan highly on other issues she considers important to Chinese Americans’ upward mobility, including police staffing and access to quality education. Neither candidate was a perfect choice, she said, but her club’s members preferred Chan. “One might cut you many times but each cut is shallow,” Zhao said in Cantonese, explaining their endorsement, “versus someone who stabs you once and leaves you badly wounded.”
Chan has acknowledged that her views and experiences may resonate with only part of the community whose members differ in language, generation and immigration history.
“We are very different,” she said in a 2022 Cantonese interview on Sing Tao TV’s YouTube channel. “It would be impossible to have our elected officials, especially Chinese elected officials, represent all our Chinese community.”
But for Chan, that was a reason to elect more Chinese American representatives, not to expect one person to speak for everyone. “We should think about how to have more Chinese American elected officials representing the different ideas and political views in our community,” she added.
An Evolution of Chinese American Political Dreams
Electing more Chinese American representatives would mean sustaining and evolving a path into public office that earlier generations spent decades building.
For much of San Francisco’s Chinese American history, that path was largely closed. Housing discrimination confined many residents to Chinatown. Federal law barred many Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens, while some who had entered using false identities as “paper sons” lived in fear of discovery.
Those barriers extended into everyday working life, keeping Chinese immigrants in low-paying jobs. Retired Judge Lillian Sing recalled that in the 1960s, “if you go to restaurants, you don’t see any Chinese as waiters; you see Chinese as busboys.”
Sing belonged to a generation determined to challenge those limits. During the 1950s-60s civil rights movement, Asian Americans in San Francisco learned from and joined Black activists and organized protests, rallies and strikes to advocate for their rights. They wanted to see Chinese Americans leading businesses, appearing on television and holding public office.
Because winning elections remained difficult, community leaders began cultivating political allies who could help more Chinese Americans get appointed or hired in San Francisco.
Across political ideologies, they shared a goal: to secure a place for Chinese Americans in institutions that had shut them out for decades.
By the 1990s, Chinese American residents of San Francisco were expanding their presence across the city. They became an even more important constituency when elections for the Board of Supervisors returned to being district-based in 2000. Campaigns now needed to address the Chinese electorate in multiple neighborhoods to win their support.
But this more empowered electorate was no longer as unified. According to Doug Chan, past president of the Chinese Historical Society of America, the community had, in a sense, become a victim of its success. Its growing political reach now encompassed a constituency with varying ideas about how San Francisco should be run.
Asian American political representation in the city reached a high point in the mid-2010s. Ed Lee became San Francisco’s still only Chinese American mayor and five of the 11 members of the Board of Supervisors were Asian American.
Those gains, however, did not guarantee a place for the next generation. As Asian American supervisors left office, other Asian Americans did not always succeed them. Chan won election in 2020 to represent the Richmond district on the city’s west side, and from 2022 to 2024 she was the board’s only Asian American.
To former state Assemblymember Phil Ting, part of the problem is in weakening political networks, including the political clubs serving Chinese Americans that for decades connected politicians to San Francisco’s Chinese community.
Ting also observed that the civil rights-era push for a more representative government that had motivated his generation no longer seemed to inspire younger Chinese Americans to seek office.
“I notice in the generation after me, there’s less interest in identity politics,” he said. In a way, he suggests that the gains of previous Chinese American leaders changed the way younger people experienced San Francisco. “Part of it is, perhaps, they didn’t face as much racial discrimination, or if they did, they don’t look at the remedies of racial discrimination in identity politics.”
The success of competitive Chinese American candidates in earlier decades, Ting said, put the Chinese American community on the map for all politicians and campaigns.
“When you raise the bar, that means people are looking for ways to be helpful to the Chinese American community, whether it’s delivering on legislation, delivering money or different kinds of resources,” he said. Today, most campaigns in San Francisco hire Chinese staffers and distribute Chinese-language campaign materials. Wiener, for example, goes by a carefully chosen Chinese name, 威善高, combining characters that means strength, kindness and tall.
But Ting said with fewer Asian American representatives, this attention fades. “People still show up, but it’s not clear to me who’s really gonna, who’s really delivering for the community.”
For Rev. Norman Fong, former executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center, the struggles that drew his generation into politics persist.
He sees the injustices that brought him to march through the streets in the 1960s resurfacing. The Trump administration is tightening immigration rules and rolling back rights he spent his life fighting to secure.
In Chan, he sees someone who benefited from the opportunities his generation fought for and who could carry that work forward.
“Connie understands that history. She’s experienced some of it,” Fong said, adding that if she wins, “she will be a live person with those issues, making it real.”
