Chinatown GOES

The Brightline Podcast: Season 2, Episode 9

In this episode, we’ll explore the Chinatown Geography, Outdoors, Environment and Stewardship program, or Chinatown GOES. Through funding from the California State Parks Outdoor Equity Grants Program, San Francisco youth have the opportunity to learn about environmental justice mapping, air quality monitoring, governmental agencies and careers in the environmental sector.

Transcript:

Rose Hoang: And now back to Chinatown GOES, you learn about what type of environmental injustices are happening. You learn about air pollution, you learn about parks. And that will give you a sense of history, a sense of empowerment.

Aubrey: This is The Brightline Podcast from Brightline Defense. We explore environmental justice issues, or EJ issues, in the Bay Area and California, highlighting the work of community-based organizations, including our own. My name’s Aubrey, and today we’ll be going back to Chinatown, where Brightline has been working with the Chinatown Community Development Center, or CCDC, to help youth leaders learn about their environment.

Sarah Xu: Open space is limited in Chinatown for a variety of reasons.

Aubrey: This is Sarah Xu, she’s a Senior Policy Associate here at Brightline.

Sarah Xu: It’s very much rooted in a history of anti-Chinese and yellow peril sentiments in California and in San Francisco starting in the 1800s.

Aubrey: San Francisco’s Chinatown was first established back in 1848. Densely built Single Room Occupancy hotels, or SROS, sprung up to house the mostly single male contract laborers coming from China. The designation of a Chinese Quarter eventually limited where immigrants were allowed to live in the city. Other anti-Chinese property ordinances and red-lining enforced this segregation.

Sarah Xu: There were a lot of exclusionary practices in the city that really forced Chinese and other Asian immigrants to live within a couple blocks radius, which is the basis of our current Chinatown. 

Aubrey: Over 175 years of discrimination have led to a lot of environmental injustices in Chinatown, from issues around air quality to a lack of green space.

And Brightline and CCDC think that they know who's going to really be able to do something about it: young people. And it starts with a grant. 

Sarah Xu: The grant is called Chinatown G.O.E.S, which stands for Geography, Outdoors, Environment, and Stewardship and is a part of the California State Parks Outdoor Equity Grants program.

Aubrey: Chinatown G.O.E.S. is made up of two parts.

Sarah Xu: The first part, brings San Francisco youth leaders together to attend workshops hosted by Brightline and the second part is an intergenerational field trip. 

Aubrey: The grant funds six workshops over three years, which started back in September 2022. 

Sarah Xu: The six workshops are organized loosely around the topics of environmental justice mapping, air quality monitoring, land use policy and parks, environmental policy making and government agencies, careers in environmental. and helping students build narratives to communicate environmental issues.

Aubrey: The workshops are designed to give these students the language, and the confidence, to understand their built environment–  so that they can advocate for ways to improve it. One of the first workshops focused on a key tool: mapping. Here’s Sarah again.

Sarah Xu: this workshop was really developed as we were thinking about legislative districts in San Francisco and in California in general. Every ten years, right, the census is taken and we've gotta figure out the districts and different ways that we can break up a geographical space for the purposes of policy-making. 

Aubrey: Local, state, and federal agencies have their own maps that affect their policy decisions. But these maps often miss the reality of what it's like to live in a community like Chinatown which has a variety of public and environmental health concerns.

Sarah Xu: Even though Chinatown is one of the most linguistically isolated communities in the entire state it doesn't reach the threshold of being considered a disadvantaged community, which is a legal definition in the state.

So we presented a lot of different ways of mapping San Francisco to the students and had them tell us what they thought were wrong with the maps. What was missing, what are some other factors that these maps should've included if the goal of those maps were to identify disadvantaged communities. And then we asked the students to map their own communities. 

Aubrey: So the students gathered into groups of twos and threes, and started sketching out their community on paper. Unlike state and federal maps, the students focused on things they interacted with on a daily basis. 

Sarah Xu: a lot of the students were mapping their homes, their schools and the extracurricular activities they did in between such as, where they go and get snacks after school with their friends and their favorite boba shop.

Aubrey: But their maps also included things like homelessness, and pollution from high density traffic. Overall, the workshops helped students like Kiki and Tiffany connect their lived experiences with their built environments. 

Kiki: We learn about environmental justice and like how it works in a city. 

Tiffany: And we got to also like play with this like little simulation online and we can see like how air pollution travels around the atmosphere. So it was really interesting. 

Aubrey: The workshops are dealing with pretty technical topics, like air pollution. But Sarah's found that interactive modules like the one Tiffany mentioned help students connect science and policy to the history and everyday parts of living in Chinatown. Here's Kiki again. 

Kiki: Our community is just going through all these hardships and still, just having the will to fight everything through, is very powerful to me. That's what I learned.

Aubrey: That narrative of resilience is just one way that students are starting to think about their community. They’ll get to explore and fine tune this in coming workshops.

Sarah Xu: We're planning on our last workshop to be about environmental narratives and really pushing the students to be able to talk about the information that they've learned and really explicitly ask them to tie it to their own personal experiences and how would they talk about the environment that they lived in. 

Aubrey: Kiki is already planning to share what she's learned about the impacts of issues like air pollution with the rest of her community.

Kiki: My mission, what I wanna get out from Chinatown G.O.E.S is delivering these, knowledge that like, I think is very vital to people, especially living in a very, very polluted and like densely populated, especially for low income community, for them to know that this is what’s happening. 

Aubrey: The workshops are only part of what Chinatown G.O.E.S. is all about. The youth leaders from the workshops also help run intergenerational field trips that include families and senior citizens living in SRO's. It's all made possible by CCDC's team of youth organizers. 

Rose Hoang: My name is Rose Hoang. I'm a youth organizer for Chinatown Community Development Center. I am constantly working with the youth. My role– and I have like 10 youth staring at me right now. Do, do you need to go in? I'm sorry, imma let him in. Go, go ahead…

Aubrey: Rose and the other youth organizers run a range of programs for young people in and around San Francisco's Chinatown. And as you can hear, she spends a lot of her time thinking about how to best support kids and teens in the neighborhood. Rose also helps run the Chinatown GOES field trips.

Last fall, Rose, and the CCDC youth organizers led a community trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. 

Rose Hoang: The energy is, it's 7:00 AM it's very early and we are all packing into this bus, full bus, like 50 of us in this charter bus. Not a single chair empty.

Aubrey: The plan was to visit the aquarium, and then have lunch at a nearby park. 

Rose Hoang: We start going, and then I'm like, my eyes are closed. I'm ready to sleep. It's way too early, but they ask for the aux cord and we have a microphone that we bring, and then they start karaoke. They just start singing. 7:00 AM! I'm like, oh my God, what is going on? I was in shock that they had so much energy. We have seniors and kids and families singing in the morning with no one else awake, but they were awake and lively.

Aubrey: Trips like this give community members and youth leaders a chance to expand their feeling of belonging beyond the borders of Chinatown. 

Rose Hoang: We get to Monterey and we just let the families like go, go wild. Honestly, I think they have so much fun just because most of them have never been to Monterey before, and it's just an experience like just to go all the way to Monterey and get to see like jellyfish and sea otters and just all these exciting things. And I had a blast.

Aubrey: After the aquarium, everyone got back on the bus, and they headed over to a park for lunch.

Rose Hoang: It's called Dennis The Menace Park. I was a little worried because it's just a park. For me, I'm like, oh, I wonder if they would get bored. But all you need is the outdoors, like you just need a park. That was two hours out there.

Aubrey: Rose often wonders if she'll hear complaints after a trip like this, but she's noticed that it's often the simplest moments that receive the best feedback.

Rose Hoang: “Oh, maybe we should have kept them at Monterey longer. Maybe we should have shortened the park part. It seemed like they were bored.” But the feedback, he's always like, yeah, the families' had fun. They loved it. There's nothing else to say.

Aubrey: The trips are a lot of fun. But they also serve an important purpose. It hasn’t always been easy for people living in Chinatown to access green space. The hope is that by providing transportation, education, and opportunity, these trips can help empower youth and others to explore beyond Chinatown, so they can understand their own community better.

Rose Hoang: And now back to Chinatown G.O.E.S., you learn about what type of environmental injustices are happening. You learn about air pollution, you learn about parks, and you learn about all these things. And that will give you a sense of history, a sense of empowerment. There's just such a need for youth to feel like leaders in this community and I think to learn about what's happening to your environment. Like what are the issues, what is the policy? Who are the stakeholders? And learning those things helps youth feel empowered and I think that giving them that backing and knowledge really brings it back to home to them, to show them that, yeah, this is my home, this is what I know about my community in Chinatown.

Aubrey: This episode was written and produced by me, Aubrey Calaway and our assistant producer Will Entwisle. Original music by Maya Glicksman Thank you to Eddie Ahn and Cecilia Mejia, and to the staff of Chinatown Community Development Center and the Trust for Public Land for their leadership and pursuit of equity in parks and open spaces. Lastly, thanks to Sarah Xu, Rose Hoang, and Kiki and Tiffany for sharing their stories. This podcast is funded by the Environmental Justice Small Grants from the California EPA.

For more information about Brightline, you can visit our website at BrightlineDefense.org or on social media @brightlinedefense. You can also find a transcript of this episode on our Medium Blog.

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