As Younger Asians Earn Degrees, Their Elders Look Back At Lost Opportunities

San Francisco CA

08 December, 2021

6:33 AM

Description

By Yujie Zhou, Mission Local December 7, 2021 This is Mission Local's second article on the senior Chinese immigrants we meet in the Alabama Street food line. Click here to read the first one. Sixty years ago, as an elementary student in Guangxi China, Bill Zhen climbed a 15-foot tree – and fell out. "I kept feeling that, before I fell, my soul was sort of out of my body, floating in the air, and looking down at the principal and students on the playground," he said on a recent San Francisco morning as he waited at the Alabama Street food line. It is his strongest memory of being a student – and one of his last. Zhen was one of a whole generation of Chinese students whose educations were prematurely curtailed during Mao's Cultural Revolution. Some 1.2 million immigrated to the United States and 43,000 reside in San Francisco (a twentieth of San Francisco's population) where their children have thrived. But behind many an Asian excelling in school is a parent or grandparent whose education stopped short. To read the full article, click here. Mission Local covers San Francisco from the vantage point of the Mission, a neighborhood with all of the promise and problems of a major city. You can support Mission Local here.