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For as long as Oakland has been a city, Chinatown has been an important downtown neighborhood and cultural hub for the city’s Asian immigrant population. And for nearly 50 years, Asian Health Services—founded in 1974 to provide healthcare for many of the area’s low-income immigrants—has been a community pillar.
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Illustration by Bea Hayward
On Oct. 25, a one-block stretch of Alice Street between 9th and 10th streets was renamed Sherry Hirota Way to honor the organization’s impact on community health and the woman who helped to lead it for almost half a century.
The granddaughter of Japanese immigrants who came to the U.S. in 1908, Hirota was a community organizer when she began working at the clinic in 1976. At the time, Asian Health Services was a one-room space with nine staff. Hirota became the organization’s CEO just two years later.
Today, Asian Health Services employs roughly 500 people and, according to a recent press release, serves 50,000 patients annually in Alameda County with medical, dental, and behavioral health care, in multiple languages that include Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Korean, Khmer, Mien, Lao, Mongolian, Karen, Burmese, and Karenni.
As a neighborhood advocate, Hirota has made her mark on the city in other ways, too. She and others formed community coalitions that organized against local budget cuts after the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 and helped push Oakland officials to install pedestrian traffic signals in Chinatown after a number of fatal traffic collisions involving elderly pedestrians.
Hirota plans to retire by the end of this year. We spoke with her about how Chinatown has changed over the years, the history of Asian Health Services, and the role the organization still plays in the neighborhood. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What does it mean now to have a street named in your honor?
I don’t feel it’s really about me. It’s [about] the way Asian Health Services has approached everything, from language access to pedestrian safety to anti-Asian hate. And I think if that’s the inspiration that gets preserved in a street sign – it happens to be in my name – but really it reflects the work of all the really incredible staff that have been part of Asian Health Services. It’s important to commemorate a generational movement that began with community members and students in the ‘60s and ‘70s who sought to see a better life and give back to the community.
Can you talk about that history? What was your life like at the time?
I came out of the ‘60s, and I was at San Francisco State, which had an active student body engaged in politics of the day: the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, and the need for Ethnic Studies. With that background, I was committed to being an organizer. Many students out of the ’60s not only created ethnic studies on campuses around the country but decided that it was important to come back and bring their skill sets into the community.
Asian Health Services came out of what was called East Bay Asians for Community Action. It was all volunteers — students and residents who were concerned about improving not only health care but the lives of people in Chinatown. [They] became aware that residents in Chinatown were seeing the doctor at about half the rate of the general public. Language was the major barrier, as well as the affordability of health care. So they got together, had health fairs, and eventually started a free clinic that was operating part-time.
I was a patient who went to the clinic to get care for my son, who needed to get into school and get immunizations. I enrolled in October 1975, and I fell in love with the clinic.
What was Chinatown like during this time, when Asian Health Services first opened, and how has that changed?
The community was probably mostly Chinese and elder Filipinos who had worked as farm workers and in the canneries. They were living in SROs. The community then changed. The Asian population doubled every 10 years from the ‘70s — it was 3% of the population in 1970 around when I joined the organization, and it’s currently about 33% of the county of Alameda.
As the population grew, it also became extremely diverse, with Koreans and a Vietnamese influx after the Vietnam War. Now [there are] Cambodian and Mongolian and Thai and other Asian groups. As each wave came into the community, Asian Health Services had the challenge of figuring out how to expand its language capability. We would work to do policy change so that the county, state, and federal governments would become more aware of these needs and changes.
The idea that Asian Health Services came out of the activist movement really served us well. We modeled what advocacy should mean for a population that was either silenced or invisible when it came to health policy.
In 1978, Proposition 13 threatened funding for community-based organizations, including Asian Health Services. Can you describe how that played out?
[Patients] showed up at the Board of Supervisors, talking about what it meant to have no language access and how concerned they were that the county of Alameda might cut the funding to Asian Health Services.
There were a lot of stereotypes, especially in the late ’70s when the community was really small, that Asians are kind of shy and don’t speak up. There was a rally and march down East 14th, talking about, “We’re immigrants, but we also pay taxes, and we deserve quality health services.” Patients came to Highland Hospital en mass, saying, “This is what we will face if Asian Health Services is closed, we’ll be standing in line and there won’t be anyone to speak and communicate with us.”
A coalition was created between the Asian, disabled, Hispanic, and African American communities, and labor. Everybody joined forces, and it was everybody except the sheriffs who turned out, who said, “We are all important and we stand by each other because we are a social network of community-based organizations.” That taught us a lot about what solidarity means in the era of trying to do things to improve our community.
You were also involved in a pedestrian safety campaign, beginning in 2002. What led to that?
Many of our community members and patients were getting injured on the streets right below the clinic. One of our board member’s father got killed on the corner of Webster and 8th Street. The Chinatown community and some of our intersections had the highest rate of injuries from vehicle and pedestrian collisions in the entire city of Oakland. We got young people to document how it was impossible to cross Webster during the amount of time the signals allowed, and for the seniors, it put them at risk.
In the end, we were able to move the city to install the first scramble system (all-way stoplights that allow pedestrians to safely cross an intersection from all directions at once). That has been a total success and a model nationally.
Flash forward to today, and there is the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of anti-Asian hate. How have these things impacted the services at Asian Health Services, its patients, and staff?
We were scapegoated, but in a certain way, we were also ignored when it came to the amount of response (to COVID-19) that needed to happen in our community.
This coincided with this rise in anti-Asian hate. Our community and our patients would report people being pushed onto the BART tracks or somebody ramming their car into the little markets in Chinatown. So it was a very scary time, and we’ve been rebuilding our way back.
And where do you see things now?
We’re really on guard. We have new victim support services that are in the mental health realm. Providing a system that helps both case management and helping them heal, helping them report, helping them cope, is important.
We’re doing an interesting project, working with the African American community, with West Oakland Health Center, bringing the patient experience and community experience from both and trying to bridge some of the cultural and day-to-day tensions and having a place to meet, a place to understand, and be very supportive.
We feel it’s really important to go beyond the slogans of solidarity and build grassroots community-based opportunities to provide a vision going forward. Those are the things that I think will help us heal.
What are some of the changes you’ve seen in Chinatown over the last few years?
I think that the area is very similar to all the challenges that we’re seeing in Oakland. The pandemic has made people afraid, and go indoors. It was a ghost town for months.
But I think the price we paid as a community is still something that we have to tackle head-on. We have to come out. We have to all show some leadership because people have gotten stuck in their homes and people have gotten more divided and scared. We need to step forward and show that we can embrace all of our communities, and embrace our culture and our diversity.
The community calls Asian Health Services the “Dragon Head,” meaning that Asian Health Services is always there to respond to the needs of the community and fight for language access, or fight for immigrant rights, or fight against anti-Asian attacks. It’s really based on the patients being involved in the organization, but also the staff, who are not just health providers — they’re ambassadors and advocates for the community’s needs.
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