Zhang Chenhua, who has a background as a software engineer, searched to find tweets from the San Francisco Board of Education five years ago that involved discrimination against Asians, causing a major earthquake in the political arena. (Reporter Li Han/photo)
Education commissioner Reed Gao’s old tweets from five years ago caused controversy. (Twitter screenshot)
Zhang Chenhua was born and raised in the United States, and graduated from San Francisco’s prestigious Lowell High School (Lowell) and UC Berkeley. She is fluent in Mandarin, and her mother is from Taiwan. Her father is of Filipino-Chinese descent and his surname is Yap, so her English surname is Yap and her Chinese name follows her mother’s surname, Zhang.
In an interview on March 21, Chen-Hua Chang said she herself was not passionate about politics, but since the Unified School District Board of Education changed the Merit-based admissions at Lowell High School to a lottery, she became involved in political and social affairs, especially the Board of Education.
“Because it was my high school,” Chen-Hua Chang said, there are some people who are prejudiced against Lowell High School, thinking that people who can attend Lowell High School, do well in school and score high on tests are those who have good families and can spend money on extracurricular tutoring. But she stresses that this is not true and does not fit her own story or those of her close classmates. She said many Lowell students are low-income, nutritious lunch-eligible students, and she also said Lowell is the only place many students from humble backgrounds can get more high-end classes.
She has also listened to several recent Board of Education meetings and believes that some Board members may have an “anti-Asian” bias and that they don’t really care about the experiences of Asian students. So, with a background as a software engineer, she searched for tweets that mentioned the word Asian on Reed Gao’s Twitter account, and found them.
“I didn’t read through every tweet she had made for five years, I was just doing a keyword-specific search,” Chenhua Zhang said, adding that she wanted to know why Reeds and the rest of the Board of Education were so active in trying to get Lowell High School’s admissions system changed, and she thought there might be some motive behind it.
When she found the tweet, which was on Thursday, March 18, she shared it with the people in the recall the Board of Education campaign. That tweet then began circulating on social media that night. The incident began to fester on Friday, with numerous officials speaking out demanding that Gao Li Si step down, and on Saturday Gao Li Si responded with an apology.
Chenhua Zhang supports the current movement to remove the Board of Education, while believing that Reed Gao should resign, saying, “Board members are not representing the interests of the district’s students very well.”
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