The classes I teach include American Politics, Race and Politics, Political Theory, Introduction to Community Organizing, and Social Justice Movements.

As a member of the Foothill-De Anza Faculty Association Executive Council I co-founded our union’s student internship program and helped guide this project towards numerous local and statewide victories, including wins to raise the minimum wage, fund affordable housing, and empower students through structural reforms and electoral victories.

I have also extended my work statewide with the Faculty Association for the California Community Colleges (FACCC). There I chair FACCC’s BIPOC committee and previously led the FACCC Student Engagement Taskforce, was treasurer of the FACCC Political Action Committee, and chaired the FACCC PAC Faculty Trustee Task Force.

I served several terms as the Secretary and Membership Chair of the Asian Pacific Islander Trustee and Administrator Association (APITA).

Other statewide work includes founding and directing the California Campus Camp, a statewide civic engagement and community organizing training program for community college students, faculty and staff.

My ethic of service and philosophy of grassroots and democratic political empowerment has its origins in my youth and formative years. My early childhood in the deep south of the early 1960s was an experience of profound racism. My immigrant family had no local connections and the long history of U.S. immigration laws explicitly excluding people of Chinese heritage contributed to the racial isolation and ostracism I and my family experienced. I was one of just three children of color at my elementary school, the other two being my brothers. When my family later moved to Southern California, life at school improved, even as my family of origin fell apart. I was yearning for a very different world, but as a young person I did not know how to make that happen.

Following high school, in 1977 I attended Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota as a William Carleton Scholar, along with a very generous package of financial support. At Carleton for the first time in my life I was immersed in a culture of social justice organizing where I began to understand how to transform social problems into opportunities for community improvement.

I met my political mentor Paul Wellstone, who later went on to become a progressive United States Senator. He pioneered a model of grassroots leadership development now known as The Wellstone Triangle— a combination of grassroots community organizing, progressive public policy, and electoral organizing focussed not just on winning elections, but also on building the capacity of regular people to advocate for themselves. In 2001, I was a Senate Fellow in Paul’s DC Senate Office. Three years later, after Paul’s sudden and tragic death along with his wife and daughter, I was first elected to the Peralta Board.

Somewhere along the way, while eventually earning Ph.D. and JD degrees from the UC Berkeley School of Law, I also worked for the People’s Law Office, the National Center for Youth Law, the Asian Law Caucus, and the Marin Fair Housing Center.

I’ve been a Bay-Area resident for 40+ years, and now live in a co-housing community in Berkeley with my wife Jude and our daughter Dana. Our son Corey recently completed his master’s degree in Music at Cal State Los Angeles.