Board Member Spotlight: Ted Dang

“[W]e had an obligation to give back to our community.” 

EBALDC recently sat down with our co-founder and board member, Ted Dang, to learn more about his background and the origins of the founding of EBALDC. Below is Part 1 of our conversation with Ted, focused on his background. The second installment will focus on the origins of EBALDC, the organization. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

What is your connection to Oakland Chinatown?

[B]orn and raised in Oakland, I grew up in Chinatown in the 1950s and 60s on Jefferson Street across from the Catholic church and what was then Housewives Market and Swan’s Market. Dad had a Chinese herb business, and we lived there until I was 5 years old. At that time, I was going to go to Lincoln Elementary and that was too far to walk to. So we moved to 7th and Jackson. That’s 4 blocks from what is now the Asian Resource Center (the ARC) —EBALDC’s first project. And I went to Chinese school in a building across the street from the ARC.

Then in the 1950s, many [in the area near 8th and Webster] were new immigrants from Southern China. At that time, they all lived near each other because of shared language and culture, and also because you couldn’t buy a house anywhere else because of discriminatory practices against Asians. The kids went to Lincoln Elementary, which was 80-90% Chinese. It was a tight community because we had to be, and there were a lot of success stories. The goal for many families at that time was for the kids to study hard, do well in school, and eventually go to UC Berkeley for college. A lot of the kids I grew up with became outstanding in their professions.

What drew you to working in community housing development?

It started from my interest in business and real estate. [After nearly failing physics], I decided that instead of math and engineering, I would follow my older brother’s footsteps and go to business school. At that time, business was part of the College of Letters and Sciences – not a stand alone school.

I was already very interested in real estate. While I was in school, my dad—who had saved up and purchased rental property—was getting older. He was 65 when I was born, and as he got older, I started helping out regularly with different things on his properties.

Then I saw an ad from the Department of Real Estate sponsoring internships and stipends…. When I reached out to respond to the ad, the guy said that they didn’t have any internships available, but if I could find my own, they could sponsor it. I found my own, reaching out to Bill Lem, who handled the Silver Dragon Restaurant—a site that had previously been a church before BART acquired it to build the tunnel underneath for train service. After they were done, BART offered the site out for development, and so it became the restaurant and Bill’s office. The community part came out of my time at Berkeley.

How did your time at UC Berkeley seed the idea for founding EBALDC?

Before Berkeley, I had been mostly focused on schoolwork. But remember the time—the late 60s and 70s: it was the period of the Anti-War movement, the Third World Liberation Front strikes, Nixon bombing Cambodia. Coming out of the Third World Movement Strike, there was an effort to teach Asian American Studies with a curriculum designed and taught by community folks, designed to give a more balanced approach to history.

We took a class from Richard Aoki, who was [an early active] member of the Black Panther Party. As a child, Richard had been interned with his family during WWII, and when they came back, they settled in West Oakland in a predominantly Black community. Taking his class was my first exposure to the Asian American movement. He’d been in the US Army and when he came back, he enrolled at community college in Oakland where he met the Black Panther founders. Richard recognized parts of Black history that related to the Asian American movement and applied it to teach history lessons.

A lot of us who had the benefit of a good education at Berkeley also felt we had an obligation to give back to our community. Many of the organizations that serve the Asian American community started in the East Bay out of Berkeley or in SF out of SF State roots from about 1965 into the 1970s.

At school, I was already talking with Andy Gee, who I had met in real estate classes, about the possibilities for helping our community in Chinatown. What really struck us was how spread out the Asian community serving organizations were—like Asian Law Caucus was in one area, Community Mental Health was on 17th, Asian Health Services on 10th and Harrison, and Oakland Chinatown Community Council (which later became Family Bridges) was just in a back space of a storefront.

Lyon Storage Moving Co Building before it became the Asian Resource Center (ARC).

Andy pushed us to think big. We learned about the Lyon building, a deteriorated warehouse, being available and discussed it as a site for what could be an Asian-focused center for community services and resources. It would be a huge project, but the more we talked about it, the more it clicked that there was potential for so much community benefit.