Connie Chan says she “never thought about politics growing up.” Now, she is a month away from beginning her second term on the Board of Supervisors
Chan said her mother, Irene Tam, whom she frequently cites as her biggest inspiration, discouraged her from even paying attention to government affairs, let alone making it her living.“I just sort of never look back,” Chan told The Examiner.
But for most of her life, Chan said, she never envisioned she would be in the middle of these types of critical citywide choices. In 1989, when Chan was 13, her mother, seeking a stable and democratic environment in which to raise her kids, moved the family to San Francisco, where her sister had taken root. They arrived in San Francisco’s Chinatown without many resources and with few connections.
For the rest of her life — until she died in 2021, shortly after Chan was sworn into office — Chan’s mother was a social worker in Chinatown. Tam mainly worked at the nonprofit On Lok, where she helped many Chinese-speaking seniors and families acclimate to America. Robyn Burke, Chan’s legislative aide, said visits to Chinatown inevitably lead to strangers approaching Chan to say they either knew her mother or she helped their family in some way.
After graduating from Galileo High School and UC Davis, Chan said the first steps of her professional journey involved bouncing around to different odd jobs, working the latest and earliest of shifts. She was a waitress at TGI Friday’s, a Starbucks barista, a shelf-stocker at KB Toys in Hayward and a baker at Cafe Roma in Davis.
Malcolm Yeung Marjan Philhour San Francisco Election 2024 Election
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