Director of the Asian Pacific Community Outreach Program

Even as these resources became officially available to Asian immigrants, it was incredibly difficult to connect them with these services. Those who did go to the county for help struggled with language barriers.

Lily established outreach centers, called “Out Stations,” that would be placed in Asian neighborhoods to make the resources more easily available. They were placed at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association and the Chinese American Citizens Alliance in Chinatown, the Pioneer Center in Little Tokyo, and at a church in Koreatown, and were staffed with bilingual County workers. They provided resources to the community that explained the available social services, translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, and later Vietnamese. She convinced the County to hire more bilingual staff, especially Asian Americans; she also convinced the County to give all bilingual staff a $15 bonus a month.

Lily visited the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association with her assistant, Ginger Bernard, to personally explain the services to the community. When she walked into the building with Ginger, the people ushered her instead—assuming between the two, that the Asian woman was the assistant. Ginger quickly corrected them. 

Once inside, Lily gave a speech in Cantonese, which was not her first dialect as she grew up speaking Mandarin. She had been practicing for days with her Cantonese-speaking friend. As soon as she began speaking in Cantonese, the audience clapped, appreciative of her effort to reach out to them in their dialect. Their warmth encouraged her to continue similar approaches with the rest of the centers. She would enter their space, acknowledge her shortcomings in terms of language and culture, and then introduce the program. It was a roaring success.

During this time period, the Chinese American community feared government intervention in their lives. They were averse to change and maintained a self-sufficient community, but Lily wanted to bring governmental services to the community. Today, the Chinese American community is more accepting of government services but are now criticized and accused of exploiting “handouts.”

Lily recruited young volunteers to work at the “Teen Post” in Chinatown by promoting it at University of California Los Angeles Law School. When she spoke there, she brought a multitude of volunteers onboard—including a young Stewart Kwoh, who’d later become an educator, civil rights leader, and attorney. He went on to establish the Asian Pacific Legal Center, and Lily introduced Stewart to Cyrus Tang, who donated the current headquarters of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, a national organization. 

Asian immigration continued to increase during this time. After Saigon fell to the Communist army of North Vietnam in April 1975, in the world’s first televised war, there was a massive influx of Southeast Asian refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Over one hundred thousand refugees entered the U.S. Asian American social services were needed more than ever. When the first wave of refugees arrived at Camp Pendleton from South Vietnam, Lily was there, helping the government and other agencies integrate the refugees into the U.S.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services made the Asian Pacific Community Outreach Program a model for other counties to follow. 

Addressing Issues in the Community

Lily called for the first symposium on the status of Chinese Americans in 1971 at the University of Southern California. Lily managed to pull together a massive network of people from across the U.S. to gather in LA to discuss Chinese American affairs; the conference was titled, “Chinese in America: Present and Future.”

Topics discussed at the conference included major social problems faced by Chinese Americans, the political future of the Chinese in America, and relations with Chinatown. Lily opened the conference by outlining the greatest issues affecting Chinese Americans in the U.S. at the time. She spoke about the repercussions of linguistic barriers, children being forced to raise themselves due to parents working far from home, and the lack of mental health and medical care for the elderly. The conference also focused on the state of resources available to Asian Americans and how to make them more accessible.

Fight for Official Minority Status

 At the time, the Department of LA County Social Services named only three official minority groups: African American, Hispanic, and American Indian. API Americans were not included. 

Lily was determined to give minority status to the API community; they were already a literal minority, but lacked the official recognition by the government. Lily successfully worked with LA County to include API Americans as the fourth minority group.

Education

Though API Americans were now included as a minority group, the issue was complicated by affirmative action.

Affirmative action allowed many historically underrepresented groups and minorities, especially people of color, access to higher education. Though it applied to Asian Americans in the 1960s, Asian Americans became viewed as “overrepresented” at colleges in the 1980s and no longer received support through affirmative action. Some Asian Americans felt that affirmative action disadvantaged them, creating harder standards for them to meet for college acceptances than their white peers. California eventually outlawed affirmative action in public universities in 1996. This decision was later challenged by SCA-5 in 2012, a bill introduced by California State Senator Edward Hernandez in the California state legislature that would overturn the ban on affirmative action. 

Asian Americans fell on both sides of the issue. Some Asian American activists, who’d had experience building coalitions with Black and Latino organizers during the Civil Rights movement, supported affirmative action because it helped their Black and Latino community members. Many others, especially Asian American parents, were concerned affirmative action would disadvantage their children pursuing higher education. 

“We had to fight hard for the inclusion as a minority, but the situations do change,” Lily said. “They’re looking after their own interests, but they don’t recognize the past struggles. They think: forget about your guys’ past struggles, we just want equal treatment.” (The Transpacific Experiment)

Directorship of Services Planning and Resource Development

After her work in the Asian Pacific Community Outreach Program, Lily was promoted to the directorship of Services Planning and Resource Development under the LA County Department of Public Social Services (DPSS). Lily managed the planning and disbursements of federal funding from General Revenue Sharing, $70 million, to various social services. She now worked with the entire LA County population.  

She also helped spearhead the Community Resource Information Bank (CRIB) program, which was on the forefront of computerization. By moving paper files from large clunky cabinets into the streamlined process of computers, CRIB stored all the information of various agencies and services in an easily accessible way.

Soon after her work in Los Angeles gained publicity, Lily received an appointment from President Jimmy Carter to the National Council on Adult Education. Lily took the oath of office in Washington D.C in October 1979. .

Because many immigrants struggled with the English language barrier, Lily proposed a federally funded English as a Second Language (ESL) program be made available to all immigrants. The federal government later adopted Lily’s proposal as federal law. Now, ESL is available to all new immigrants in adult schools.

Administrator of Children and Family Services

Lily’s role encompassed the placement of children with families—whether through foster care or through adoption. Her purview extended to all the families in LA County, and she focused on recruiting foster parents from the API community.

Lily was determined to provide the children a good home. In the current system, children’s wellbeing and prioritization of biological parents are often interchanged as synonyms—an idea that Lily supported.

“It’s best to keep a child with their natural parents if we can,” she said. “That way, they can still have some ties to their family roots.”

 Asian families view children as an extension of themselves—they are strict and controlling by Western standards because they believe this is the proper way to protect children. 

White House Conference on Families

Because of her work traveling through Southern California working with academics, community leaders, and local politicians, LA County Supervisor Yvonne Burke nominated Lily to coordinate the Western White House Conference on Families in 1980 under President Carter. The White House Conference on Families was meant to “shape government policies in ways that will support the family as an institution and the basis of society.”

.The conference included single parents, gay and lesbian families, and others, making it more inclusive and realistic about the changes to American society. Lily invited Dorothy Chandler, then-publisher of the Los Angeles Times, to be on the conference advisory committee. 

Lily was so excited. “This was the first and last time Dorothy Chandler was an advisor for any organization,” she said. “I made it so that she was more important than she already was.” 

Work on Women’s Rights

Lily has always been a women’s rights activist in her work. Having been inspired during her childhood by her mother, Lily had always looked for ways to better the lives of other women. After her work in the Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA) as a founding board member, Lily helped found the Organization of Chinese American Women (OCAW), an offshoot of OCA, in 1977.

Many needs of Chinese American women, as women of color, were overlooked under the umbrella category of Chinese Americans. This led to organizations focused on both race and gender identity to highlight and fight issues that are forgotten when only considering race. Lily’s involvement in OCAW highlighted the complex identity she held as both a Chinese American and as a woman. She was the third national president of OCAW from 1982-1983, following Elaine Chao and Julia Bloch.

Lily also played a role in challenging veterans’ preference. This is a policy that gives advantages to veterans of the armed services who served in combat positions when applying for government positions. During that time, only men could serve in combat positions. 

“I could not have served in the military,” Lily pointed out. “Why would the government prioritize people for things that others couldn’t do? Besides, this option is largely available to men and not so to all women.”

Lily experienced this disparity as a top candidate for the position of Executive Director of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission in 1978. She withdrew her application when she discovered another candidate was a veteran, because it bumped her down to the second spot instead of first. She argued that her inability and her lack of chance to serve in the military shouldn’t be held against her. Although Lily felt that veterans’ preference should exist to an extent, she preferred that employment be granted on the basis of merit rather than status as a veteran. 

Add Supervisor Edelman’s letter to Lily about veterans’ preference

Lily’s protest made national headlines. Roughly two decades later, while the issue of veterans’ preference was still unresolved, Lily would become more directly involved in the fight for equal treatment of women in the armed forces. In 1995, U.S. Secretary of Defense Bill Perry appointed Lily to the Department of Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. She was raring to go, as this appointment gave Lily the opportunity to be more directly involved in civil service reform, particularly the issue of the rights of women in the military. Lily fought for the equal opportunity for women in the armed forces to engage in combat, which was necessary for military personnel to receive the full benefit conferred by general veterans’ benefits. Ultimately, Lily helped lay the foundation for the 2016 decision to finally allow women in the armed forces to engage in combat.

Redress Campaign: Working with the Japanese American Community

Lily and OCA founder Mr. K. L. Wang joined the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) redress campaign in the 1970s. It was a decade-long fight that called for justice for the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII by the U.S. government. Japanese Americans sought reparations in the amount of $25,000 per internee, a formal apology by Congress acknowledging their wrongdoing, and money to establish an educational trust fund.

Lily and JACL lobbied President Richard Nixon to repeat the 1950 Emergency Act. Conclusively, the 1950 Emergency Act allowed the President of the United States and Congress the authority to construct internment camps in the event of war with China. 

The suspicion of the Japanese Americans reminded Lily of the treatment of Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans during the decades following the Chinese Exclusion Act. Minorities needed to stand in solidarity,  justice for one group could mean justice and gaining rights for others. Eventually, President Reagan signed the Japanese Reparations Bill in 1988 to compensate. 

During her time working with the redress campaign, Lily saw the unity and cohesion in the Japanese American community firsthand. The Japanese American community of LA was able to establish their own museum, the Japanese American National Museum, in Little Tokyo

Meanwhile, the Chinese American Museum is located in the historic Garnier building in downtown LA, in what used to be LA’s Chinatown before city officials evicted the Chinese residents and demolished the community to build Union Station and the Hollywood freeway in the 1930s. The current ownership of the Garnier building—a former cultural hub for the Chinese American community in LA—is not the Chinese American Museum. The Chinese American community’s home in LA is spread out across multiple places.