Teaching disaster safety in Chinatown

By some estimates, more than half the residents of San Francisco's Chinatown live in Single Room Occupancy buildings, or SROs. Whole families live in one-room apartments, sleeping in bunk beds. The rooms don’t have bathrooms or kitchens. Instead, tenants use communal facilities, or cook in their rooms on hot plates. The cramped conditions present fire and earthquake hazards. But educating the residents about disaster safety is complicated, because many are recent immigrants with limited English skills. A group of high school students from Chinatown is working around those challenges. With help from the Chinatown Community Development Center and a grant from the city, they’re teaching SRO tenants about fire and earthquake safety in Cantonese. Reporter Japhet Weeks joined them on a recent evening, and brings us this story. 

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JAPHET WEEKS: Dinner time can be dangerous in an SRO. Peanut oil. Open flames. Too many cooks in the kitchen. But not tonight. Lisa Zhou is standing over a spotlessly clean electric stove top frying a fragrant mix of garlic, ginger and chicken. We're in a community kitchen on the sixth floor of a uncharacteristically well-run SRO for senior citizen's in Nob Hill. The building is managed by the Chinatown Community Development center and most of the tenants here are Chinese immigrants.  

WEEKS: Has there ever been a fire here?

LISA ZHOU: No.

WEEKS: Do you think it's safe here? 

       ZHOU: Pretty safe.  

Still, the San Francisco fire department has singled out SROs for their lack of fire safety. They say six hundred and fifty SRO units have burned down since 1997. As a result, around one thousand residents have lost their homes.   

Judy Kuang is well aware of these dangers. She works for the Chinatown Community Development Center.  

 JUDY KUANG: In the past there were a lot of little fires going on in Chinatown because people cook, fire got caught and that kinds  of thing. So that becomes a really, it becomes a really major problem for the saftey of the community.  

Tonight's a school night. Kuang and five high school students are getting ready to lead a fire and earthquake safety workshop for the residents here.  

KUANG: Each building where we go do a workshop we also do a building safety checklist. Two of  them will go around to see what's the living condition of the building.

Last May, her students received a grant from the city to purchase and distribute disaster preparedness kits to SRO tenants in and around Chinatown. Two of the students here tonight live in SROs. And Kuang says their experience has been essential to making the program a success.  

KUANG: So from the two of the SRO people, we actually really utilize their knowledge and how to outreach to this population of  seniors and immigrant families. Scott is actually the one who did the bilingual brochure. Bill is the one who built the powerpoint. 

Before the workshop gets started, sixteen-year-old Scott Mo goes knocking door-to-door around the SRO to get more residents to participate. But it doesn't always work. 

WEEKS: Is it difficult? Is there someone there? 

SCOTT MO: Yeah. 

WEEKS: But they don't want to answer the door? 

MO: Yeah. They just ignore me. 

In the building's community room, 18-year-old Bill Yu, who also lives in an SRO, is talking to the group of nearly 40 seniors who did show up. Some are dressed in pajamas and slippers. A few are wearing those fleece vests with "SF" embroidered on them that are ubiquitous in Chinatown's tourist shops.  

Yu shows the seniors what's included in the emergency kit they'll receive when the workshop is over. He holds up a florescent green light stick. It's obviously something they have not seen before. He shows them how to start by snapping it. "Don't bite it," he jokes. The crowd giggles. 

Yu immigrated to the United States just three years ago from Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province in southern China. Like many recent immigrants to San Francisco, he moved into an SRO. At the moment, he's a senior at George Washington high school.  

 BILL YU: I will go to city college for two or three years, study and then transfer to the UC system.

The gangly teenager with a patch of fine stubble on his upper lip has turned what many would consider a tough transition into an opportunity to help out his community. He says living in an SRO has inspired him to make living conditions there better for other tenants. 

YU: There are lots of challenges, but also I've gained a lots of experience, live in SRO and how to serve in SRO.  

WEEKS: And by serve, you mean, serve the community? 

YU: Yes, serve the community. 

After the workshop is finished, the kitchens fire up again with the sound of food frying. The smell of sesame oil wafts through the halls. Lisa Zhou, who was cooking chicken before the workshop started, is headed back to her apartment. I ask her what she learned from the presentation.      

ZHOU: When there's a disaster I have to get under a table! 

"Anything else?" I ask. The rest, she tells me, she's heard it all before.

Maybe she's heard it before, but by the end of the evening it becomes clear that these workshops aren't just for the residents; they're helping create leadership roles for a whole new generation of young immigrants.

In San Francisco, for Crosscurrents, this is Japhet Weeks. 

Japhet Weeks is a student at the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.