Candidates vie to be first Asian American on New York City Council
By Karen Matthews/AP
New York, as diverse as any city in the world, has had a black mayor and two Jewish mayors. Its City Council includes members from Jamaica and the Dominican Republic.
Yet no Asian American has ever served on the council or in any citywide office — a “shocking” situation, one candidate says, considering that nearly one in 10 New Yorkers is of Asian descent. But with new city term limits forcing incumbents from office in droves, 2001 offers the best opportunity yet for Asian Americans to break through.
“Friends of mine said, ‘Kwong, you’ve got to run. There’s term limits, there’s a wide open field,’” said Kwong Hui, a political novice who is one of three Chinese American candidates running for City Council in Manhattan’s First District. Another three Asian Americans are running in the 20th District in Flushing, Queens, and a few are running in other districts in Queens, the city’s most ethnically diverse borough.
John Liu has raised the most money of any Council candidate in any district — $131,370 as of his January filing with the city Campaign Finance Board — and is considered the front-runner in the 20th District. Liu said he’s shocked there’s never been an Asian American on the City Council, but adds, “we’ll rectify that.”
Asian Americans have yet to exercise political muscle. Many are immigrants and some are not registered voters. In the 1997 mayoral race, just 4 percent of the voters were Asian American, up from 2 percent in 1993.
Party affiliation is another factor. As the city is overwhelmingly Democratic, the race that really counts in most City Council districts is the Democratic primary. Asian Americans have traditionally not registered Democratic in as high numbers as other ethnic groups in New York, such as blacks, Latinos and Jews.
Margaret Fung, executive director of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said many Asians have registered as independents, not realizing they would be prevented from voting in primaries. “Every time we’ve sent out monitors for the primary elections there are always people who want to vote, but are told they can’t,” Fung said.
In other parts of the country Asians have been elected to office, even where there are not large blocs of Asian American voters. In 1996, Gary Locke, who is Chinese American, was elected governor of Washington state, where the Asian American population is 5.9 percent. Norman Mineta, a Japanese American who is President Bush’s secretary of transportation and served as secretary of commerce under President Clinton, was elected mayor of San Jose, Calif., in 1971, when there were relatively few Asian Americans in the area.
But in New York City, candidates must confront a tradition of ethnic voting that leads many to choose the name on the ballot that is most like their own.
“This is not a melting pot,” said Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf. “We say it is, but it’s not and people tend to vote for those who are like them, as opposed to those who are not like them.”
With Asian Americans not forming a majority of the voters in any New York City Council district, a successful Asian American candidate must win support across racial and ethnic lines. They will have an unusual opportunity this year: Thanks to voter-approved term limits, 35 of the 51 City Council members must resign this year, and there will be no incumbents running for those seats in November.
The First District, which includes Chinatown, would seem to be ideal for Asian American candidates — and three have stepped forward already. The district, which also includes largely white areas such as Tribeca, Soho and Battery Park City, was gerrymandered to be an Asian American district in 1991, but has been represented since by Kathryn Freed, a white tenants’ lawyer.
Margaret Chin ran against Freed in the Democratic primary in 1991 and 1993 and lost — even though Chin outspent Freed 2-to-1 in 1991. Chin, 47, is running again this year. The former teacher and college administrator is now deputy executive director of Asian Americans for Equality.
“I have a long track record and I feel very confident of getting support in Chinatown,” she said. A onetime member of the Maoist Communist Workers Party, Chin has remade herself into a Democratic Party stalwart. She has raised $61,555 for the run.
Rocky Chin, no relation to Margaret, has raised $94,617, the most of any of the three Chinese Americans running in the First District. Chin, 53, is on leave from his job as a lawyer for the Human Rights Commission. While he has never run for office himself, he has worked on the campaigns of former mayor David Dinkins and former presidential candidate Jesse Jackson.
Chin dismissed the suggestion that the three Chinese American candidates for the seat could split the Asian American vote, and help one of the three white candidates win the Democratic nomination and the race. “It kind of marginalizes the candidates,” he said. “You could say, ‘Oh, there’s five men and they’re all going to split the vote and the woman will win it.’ I frankly don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Hui, 34, is vice president for development at New York Studios, the company that is building a movie studio at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. A former official with the restaurant workers union, he has been active in organizing restaurant and garment workers. He has raised $30,395 for his campaign.
“I was concerned that as an Asian person, Chinese, can I connect with someone who’s not Chinese?” Hui asked. “And as of today, 95 percent of the people I’ve reached out to are not Chinese. And we make that connection.”
Still, ethnic politics can be a rough affair in the city.
In the 20th District, incumbent Julia Harrison angered many of her constituents when she complained to The New York Times in 1996 that Asian immigrants “were more like colonizers than immigrants. The money came first. The paupers followed, smuggled in and bilked by their own kind.” She called the changing ethnic makeup of Flushing “very discombobulating.”
Liu, now 34, was one of Harrison’s Democratic primary challengers in 1997.
“Quite frankly, ’97 was a mandatory dress rehearsal,” said Liu, an actuary at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, “because the incumbency advantage is something that can’t be ignored.”
Liu said Asian Americans, like previous immigrants, are on a “learning curve.”
“When you first immigrate to the United States ... it takes a while before you’re firmly established financially, educationally,” he said. “It takes a while before you reach the point in the curve where you start joining political institutions, and we are at that point now.” |
