Your Voices: Bridging the cultural gap for seniors in the Chinatown-International District

To walk through the Chinatown-International District with Nora Chan is to see it with fresh eyes, and to hear it with fresh ears.

This unassuming grandmother of five seems to know just about everyone in the CID.

“You know, like the Cake House, they do volunteer work for me too,” she says.

For some three decades, Chan has used her deep connections here to help senior CID residents who often speak little English and lack the resources they need, like food and other essentials.

After all, eleven buildings house about a thousand seniors in the CID.

Fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin and English, Chan started the volunteer organization Seniors in Action to fill the void some 30 years ago, when she was middle-aged.

“Now I’m 76. At that time, I’m only 40-something,” Chan said. “So, I always call them seniors and then they say, ‘What are you, then?’”

In some ways, Chan is well suited to this. Her late husband, a nuclear physicist-turned-chiropractor, treated the achy backs of those living in this community — often free of charge.

Chan earned a college degree but stayed home to raise four children, two of whom are chiropractors too.

Now with Seniors in Action, she uses her skills as a bridge between cultures — necessary work, she says, that she cannot do alone.

Chan knows that she won’t be here forever, so she has given her four children strict instructions on what to do with whatever money she has left to make sure her legacy of giving outlives herself.

“I told my children, you know, when I die, everything belongs to the community.”

A community that is better because she has devoted herself to it.

©2022 Cox Media Group