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110 Profile: Vivian Chang Bridging Cultures Vivian Chang is the Executive Director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network in Oakland, California. She was interviewed in August 2002. I am a second-generation child of Taiwanese parents. I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. My grandmother survived by sewing clothes, and was widowed at a very young age. She made it on her own sheer power, and I draw a lot of my strength from her and from my great-grandmother and from my mother—all very, very strong women in their perspective on life and instinct to survive. I spent most of my growing up in the outer suburbs of the Bay Area, actually in a very White community. My parents moved out there because of the public school system. But that meant that in a lot of ways we were living more out of our means than other people who lived around us. What it also meant was that I felt kind of severed from my own community when I was growing up. As soon as I could, at age eighteen, I moved away from the suburbs and cut my teeth doing some student activism work at the University of California, Berkeley, and that’s really where my eyes opened to a lot of different things. One of them was community work and community organizing. One particular event really shaped me deeply at that time. I had gone as part of a student-of-color group to the first Environmental People of Color Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., in 1992. It was the first time I saw different communities, organized communities, coming together at that level, multi-racially. I think that was the first time that I really understood at a gut level what community organizing was. After school I worked for a few years in the Bay Area and then went to southern California, where I spent five years as an organizer with AGENDA [Action for Grassroots Economic and Neighborhood Development] and the Los Angeles Metropolitan Alliance. It was hard for me to be separated from my family, and that was a big reason why I moved back. I spend a lot of time Profile:Vivian Chang   111 with my family. I go back to my parents’ house, where my grandmother also lives, maybe once a week, to spend the day or a couple days with them. I also spend as much time as I can trying to get away into the mountains or to ride my bike. A bike is a great way to travel. I really cut my teeth doing community organizing at an organization called the Asian Women Immigrant Advocates. It’s an organization based in Oakland that does community-based organizing, worker organizing. It was organizing of Asian immigrant women workers, predominantly in the garment industry and the restaurant industry and hotel industry. At that time, the organization was engaged in a campaign targeting garment manufacturers. Due to the crazy laws in this country that are not by accident, garment manufacturers hold no liability for the working conditions and the pay and wage per hour conditions of their contractors. Most of the garment work in this country is done by contracting out labor. And so it was a campaign that targeted a particular manufacturer called Jessica McClintock to hold her liable. Completely illegal by labor law standards, but because we weren’t a union, we were able to target her and boycott her and counter-organize against her. And that was kind of where I got my first formative experience, both in campaigns and in organizing. The executive director at that time I definitely considered to be one of my mentors. Her name was Young Shin. I still think of her when I think about what a great leadership style means. I went from there to spending five years with AGENDA and the Los Angeles Metropolitan Alliance, primarily organizing African-American and Latino communities in different parts of L.A. Until the day that I left, five years later, I still felt that the learning curve was just like a forty-five degree angle. I would say in terms of the crafting of what I really learned—those five years were incredibly formative for me in learning about the art, but also the discipline of community organizing. I think in some ways my work in Los Angeles completely burnt me out in a physical way. Hours were crazy. But...

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