Becoming mayor after years of fighting authority

Even before she was elected to Oakland's school board and City Council, Jean Quan saw herself fighting the system for those on the margins.

She'd organized Filipino farmworkers and translated in hospitals for Chinese families. In the 1960s, she and her future husband helped force UC Berkeley to create academic programs dealing with minorities' histories and cultures.

But after her swearing-in Monday as Oakland's mayor, Quan, 61, will find herself at the helm of the city hierarchy, an outsider who has become the top insider. The self-defined champion of neighborhoods and frequenter of civic gatherings must now show she has the heft to lead a large city with big problems.

When she talks about the challenge, Quan uses the refrains of a community organizer.

"One person can't do everything," she said. "We can change the city. We can change it together. This is a movement of neighborhood leaders. I'm going to continue to work to organize the city."

Her activist credentials would seem to be unquestioned. But Quan believes her history doesn't get enough respect.

"People know me as this nice, middle-aged, Asian American elected official," she said. "They have no idea of the kind of movements I worked on when I was younger and the kinds of changes that have happened."

Quan's story is intertwined with Chinese American history in California.

Her great-grandfather came to the United States around 1880. After he and his three sons lost everything in San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1906 earthquake and fire, they found refuge in a family association representing their clan on Eighth Street in Oakland, just six blocks from where City Hall now stands.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 severely curtailed the ability of Chinese to immigrate, much less become citizens, and men who were already here far outnumbered women. But the earthquake's aftermath provided an opportunity.

Family history

San Franciscans' birth records were destroyed in the great fire, so Quan's great-grandfather told authorities that his Chinese-born family's were among them - allowing them eventually to gain citizenship. But because of the exclusion act, each generation of Quan men was forced to return to China to marry. They had children there, then brought the sons to the United States when the boys were about 14.

Quan's father went to China in the late 1920s, found a wife and had two children.

When he returned to the United States, his family was blocked from coming with him. It was only after he served in the Army in World War II that he was able to become a U.S. citizen, and even then he couldn't get his children into the country.

His wife, May Wong, arrived without them in 1948. Jean was born the next year, when her mother was 44.

"I was a surprise," she said.

Mom widowed in Livermore

Quan says her family's struggle to win citizenship helps explain why she has taken a visible role on immigrant issues, such as in helping create a municipal identification card for Oakland residents.

"My family has been here for 100 years, but I was the first one in my family born in this country," she said.

After the war, Quan's father worked as a cook at the Hotel Leamington in downtown Oakland before the family moved to Livermore to start their own restaurant. He died when Quan was 5, forcing her mother to run the business alone.

The 18-hour days didn't leave much time for taking care of Jean. During school breaks, particularly the summer, May Wong sent her daughter to stay with relatives in San Francisco and Oakland's San Antonio district. Quan attended summer school twice at Oakland Technical High.

Her husband, Floyd Huen, 63, believes those visits with family helped her connect to her Chinese roots.

"They sent her here for culture," he said. "There's not much Chinese stuff in Livermore."

It also helped broaden her worldview. May Wong barely spoke English.

"She was straight out of the village," Huen said of Quan's mother. "She raised chickens and grew vegetables in the backyard. She was literally a Chinese peasant."

Quan agrees that her forays into cities shaped her thinking.

"It's why I was such an urban kid," she said.

Cal and activism