“Building Community, Chinatown Style” book talk with Gordon Chin

Please join us on July 21st at 7pm for “Building Community, Chinatown Style” book talk with Gordon Chin at the CHSA Main Gallery. There will be presentations by Gordon Chin, Harry Chuck, and more to be announced! Refreshments will be served. This is a free event but RSVPs are required.

Book overview:

Over the last half century, San Francisco Chinatown has been a place where civic leadership has been nurtured, attracted and cultivated. Building Community, Chinatown Style tells the story of generations of young activist leaders who have transformed San Francisco Chinatown for the better, while also building developing themselves into important city-wide leaders. These budding activists set out to improve Chinatown in many ways to address many longstanding neighborhood and community issues. Along the way, they created major change and also changed public policy on housing, transportation, public space and culture.

While the overriding themes of this book are Chinatown and Leadership, this book will touch upon other themes that are important to me – Chinatown CDC, where I spent three and a half decades of my life, the larger Asian American Movement in this country, the leadership role that San Francisco has played in the Neighborhood and Community Development Movements nationally. And along the way, I share my thoughts about topics that many would not normally associate with community development, – earthquakes and natural disaster, politics, art and culture.

San Francisco Chinatown was also the birthplace of Chinese America. It was the only place Chinese could live, even a century after the first Chinese immigrants landed on American shores. It was the place where the first Chinese American institutions – social, economic, cultural, political – were formed.

This book offers insights into the issues and experiences that have not only transformed Chinatown, but which have helped to groom leadership beyond just the Chinese American community.

READ MORE at gordon-chin-chinatown.com

Photography by Frank Jang

Gordon Chin, nationally recognized community leader and activist, tells the compelling story of the rise of civic and community power in San Francisco’s Chinatown from the 1960s through the election of a Chinese American mayor in 2011. This grass roots community leadership has made San Francisco a model for community development across the country. Building Community, Chinatown Style offers an insider’s account of the community development activists and organizations that significantly shaped life in San Francisco and created long-lasting meaningful and positive social change.