When Phong Duc Yen opened a Chinese grocery store on San Francisco’s San Bruno Avenue in 1991, selling chicken feet, bean sauce and bok choy might have seemed like a risk.
The street was flanked on one side by the Portola neighborhood, which was mostly Black and white, and on the other by the majority Black Bayview-Hunters Point.
But Yen, an ethnically Chinese refugee from Vietnam, saw an opportunity, later opening a Chinese herb shop and the area’s first Chinese restaurant with his wife, Lien.
“My dad had a vision,” remembered Yen’s daughter, Elaine Chan. “For us, it was always about building a community.”
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Left: Elaine Chan greets Paul Ly at Imperial Garden Restaurant in San Francisco. Right: Nameer Hirschkind and Emily Ma help plant produce at Florence Fang Community Farm in San Francisco.
Florence Shen/For The S.F. Chronicle
Top: Elaine Chan greets Paul Ly at Imperial Garden Restaurant in San Francisco. Above: Nameer Hirschkind and Emily Ma help plant produce at Florence Fang Community Farm in San Francisco.
Florence Shen/For The S.F. Chronicle
A customer orders at Wing Lung B.B.Q. House on San Bruno Avenue, the commercial corridor on the edge of Portola and the Bayview.
Florence Shen/S.F. Chronicle
More than three decades later, that vision looks prophetic. Bayview-Hunters Point has one of the city’s fastest-growing Chinese communities, with a population that is about 27% Chinese based on U.S. census data collected from 2020 to 2024, the most recent numbers available. The neighboring Portola is almost 46% Chinese.
Most shops along San Bruno Avenue are now Chinese-owned, with bakeries selling golden-brown pineapple and pork floss buns and Hong Kong-style barbecue restaurants with crisp roasted ducks hanging in windows. The non-Chinese Asian population in both neighborhoods has also grown.
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The changes are part of a larger shift in San Francisco’s Chinese population, which has remained steady at a little more than 20% over the past two decades, but has declined in historically Chinese enclaves like Chinatown and the Richmond and Sunset districts. Instead, many families have followed relatively affordable housing prices to the city’s southeast neighborhoods — creating a new Chinatown in Portola and the Bayview.
But as the neighborhoods have transformed into a thriving Chinese enclave, many longtime Black residents have also left. Those changes have contributed to a sometimes tense relationship between the two groups, though community leaders and neighbors have worked to build cross-racial solidarity, including through joint celebrations and a communal farm where collard greens and bok choy grow side by side.
Left: A panoramic view of Hunters Point in San Francisco on Sept. 2, 1958. Right: The official closing ceremony for the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco on June 28, 1974.
Barney Peterson/S.F. Chronicle; Art Frisch/S.F. Chronicle
Top: A panoramic view of Hunters Point in San Francisco on Sept. 2, 1958. Above: The official closing ceremony for the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco on June 28, 1974.
Barney Peterson/S.F. Chronicle; Art Frisch/S.F. Chronicle
Navy ships at Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco in July 1947. The shipyard, once the area’s largest employer, helped draw thousands of Black workers to Bayview-Hunters Point.
Duke Downey/S.F. Chronicle
New arrivals
The Hunters Point naval shipyard, where warships from the Pacific Fleet were repaired during World War II, helped draw thousands of Black workers to Bayview-Hunters Point.
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But after the shipyard, the biggest employer in the area, was deactivated in 1974, the working-class neighborhood struggled with rising poverty, unemployment, violence and open-air drug dealing. Housing was inexpensive.
In 1980, Gordon Gee, an immigrant from Hong Kong, bought a house in the neighborhood for $42,000.
Gee had previously rented a tiny room in Chinatown and worked as a busboy for $1 an hour before enrolling in college in San Jose to study electrical engineering. “I was poor,” said Gee. “That was all I could afford.”
When Gee arrived, Bayview-Hunters Point was more than 70% Black. Only one other Chinese family lived on his block.
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But he was at the beginning of what would become a trend. In a 1988 paper, Benjamin Bowser, a sociology professor at Cal State East Bay, found that some Chinese households had begun settling down in a hilly section of the Bayview east of Third Street.
Gordon Gee, who moved to the Bayview in 1980, walks home after picking up food at the Rafiki Community Market. When Gee moved to the neighborhood, he had few Asian neighbors.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
Bowser theorized that Black people could no longer afford to live in Bayview-Hunters Point, and because it was considered “the ghetto,” white buyers were reluctant to step in.
“But the Chinese had both the means and willingness to buy,” he wrote.
By 1990, the Bayview was 10% Chinese and the neighboring Portola 20%. At her parents’ Chinese supermarket, the 11-year-old Chan worked the cash register alongside her siblings. When she was tired after school, she’d fall asleep on bags of rice in the storeroom. She remembered her dad dealing with shoplifters by giving them the food for free, telling them in his broken English, “When you have money, you give it back.”
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Left: Alvin Huang prints a receipt at Shun Yuan Herbs and Ginseng on San Bruno Avenue in Portola. Huang and his parents, who run the shop, moved to the Bayview for its affordable rent and Chinese community. Right: Students gather in a boba shop on San Bruno Avenue in Portola.
Florence Shen/For The S.F. Chronicle
Top: Alvin Huang prints a receipt at Shun Yuan Herbs and Ginseng on San Bruno Avenue in Portola. Huang and his parents, who run the shop, moved to the Bayview for its affordable rent and Chinese community. Above: Students gather in a boba shop on San Bruno Avenue in Portola.
Florence Shen/For The S.F. Chronicle
People cross San Bruno Avenue in Portola, whose Chinese population is almost 46%.
Florence Shen/S.F. Chronicle
For decades, upwardly mobile Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, who often first landed in Chinatown, looked west to the Richmond and Sunset.
But as those neighborhoods became more expensive, more Chinese families have turned their attention to the southeast.
Susan Liang, who came to the U.S. as a 9-year-old in 1992 from Guangzhou, grew up in Chinatown, North Beach and the Tenderloin in single-room occupancy units. Her dad worked as a cook and her mother as a seamstress. In 2010, they pooled their money to buy a house in the Excelsior, and in 2018, Liang and her husband decided to buy a home for their own growing family, a townhouse in a new development in the old Naval Shipyard.
A biker rides past shops on San Bruno Avenue, which is lined with Chinese-owned businesses.
Florence Shen/S.F. Chronicle
“When I was growing up, the Bayview was a place you never want to walk into,” Liang said. “If you go there, you get shot. Now I go into the Bayview and it’s just another neighborhood.”
The shipyard’s broader redevelopment has largely stalled amid unresolved concerns about radioactive waste, leaving thousands of planned homes unbuilt. But Liang said she likes where she lives.
San Bruno Avenue gives her the “nostalgic” feeling that she’s back in Chinatown, and she grows vegetables at a local community garden.
Erdong Chen takes a smoke break outside his store, LL Trading Co., on San Bruno Avenue.
Florence Shen/S.F. Chronicle
What started with a single grocery store gradually flourished into a Chinese shopping district that continues to draw new Chinese business owners.
Alvin Huang and his parents moved from Guangdong province in 2019, settling in the Bayview because rents were low and plenty of Chinese people lived there. They bought Shun Yuan Herbs and Ginseng on San Bruno Avenue last year, and said the business — selling ginseng, Chinese herbs, red dates and other dried foods — is thriving.
The Bayview has remained a relative bargain for homebuyers. Danli Xu, who immigrated to the U.S. in 2016, bought there with her family two years ago, after years of renting a one-bedroom in Chinatown. They paid just over $1 million, about a third less than a similar house would cost in the Sunset or Richmond District.
But that affordability is also changing. Though the Bayview’s housing prices remain well below San Francisco averages, the neighborhood saw one of the city’s highest spikes — at 146% — from 2010 to 2024, according to Zillow.
Tensions rise
As more Chinese families have moved into the Bayview and Portola, Black families have left, many priced out. Only about a quarter of the Bayview is Black today, while it’s 40% Asian. Those changes have fueled tensions between the Bayview’s Chinese and Black communities.
In a 2020 incident captured on video, a Chinese man in his late 60s who was collecting recyclables in the Bayview was attacked by multiple Black men and chased by a crowd. “I hate Asians,” one of his attackers shouted.
Tensions sparked again in 2022 when San Francisco redrew its electoral districts. A proposal to combine the majority Asian and white Portola neighborhood into the same district as the Bayview led to backlash from some Black community members who said it would neutralize their voting power.
In one heated meeting, a Black resident said she “no longer felt welcome” walking down San Bruno Avenue.
Maggie Weis, chairperson of the Portola Neighborhood Association, remembered the conflict as deeply painful.
“There were battle lines between the African American and Asian groups,” said Weis, who is white. “African Americans felt they were being locked out. Asian people felt their boundary lines were being split and their voices watered down.”
Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, said the Bayview may be experiencing what sociologists call “ethnic competition” — rivalry over limited resources as a newer group moves to an area. The loss of the historic Black community, he said, is painful. At the same time, he continued, Asian Americans have often faced hostility whenever they move into a new area, “because we’re seen as perpetual foreigners, that we don’t belong.”
Healing divisions
Ann Kim, an Oregon-born Korean American doctor, who moved to the Bayview with her family in 2015, was aware of the neighborhood’s history and concerned about displacing longtime residents.
But when she toured a home in the area owned by a local Black activist named Marie Harrison, she said Harrison was welcoming to her family.
“It felt like a blessing I didn’t deserve and wasn’t looking for,” she said.
Kim and her husband, Danny, were among several Asian congregants at Redeemer Community Church in the Bayview who moved to the area out of a desire to better care for the neighborhood where their church was rooted.
Danny Kim, a former SFUSD teacher, joined forces with other teachers in 2017 to start a private Christian school, Rise University Preparatory, intended to address education inequities.
Today, it has 87 students across middle and high school, and 80% of seats are reserved for students who are low-income, would be the first in their family to go to college, or live in the Bayview. About 90% of the tuition costs are covered through fundraising, and all its most recent graduates were admitted to four-year colleges, said Kim, whose own son graduated last spring.
Left: From left, Chi-Ming Chien, Yvonne Hines, Danny Kim and Ann Kim pray together at Yvonne’s Southern Sweets in the Bayview during a block party to celebrate 20 years of the business. Right: Ella Kim, 16, feeds her chickens with her dad, Danny Kim. The family moved to Bayview in 2015.
Florence Shen/For The S.F. Chronicle
Top: From left, Chi-Ming Chien, Yvonne Hines, Danny Kim and Ann Kim pray together at Yvonne’s Southern Sweets in the Bayview during a block party to celebrate 20 years of the business. Above: Ella Kim, 16, feeds her chickens with her dad, Danny Kim. The family moved to Bayview in 2015.
Florence Shen/For The S.F. Chronicle
Danny Kim teaches his Advanced Placement English Language and Composition class at Rise University Preparatory in San Francisco. The students conducted a discussion of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book, “The Beautiful Struggle.”
Florence Shen/For the S.F. Chronicle
Both Asian American and Black community leaders have encouraged racial harmony.
Since 2010, local nonprofits have hosted a joint Lunar New Year and Black History month celebration. Lion dancers perform alongside traditional African musicians.
For about 15 years, the nonprofit Community Youth Center has organized regular “solidarity tours,” inviting Chinese immigrants and Black residents to visit historic landmarks.
Perhaps nowhere is the melding of the Bayview’s Black and Asian communities more evident than at Florence Fang Community Farm, a one-acre plot where Chinese immigrants and Black residents grow food side by side.
The farm manager and board chairman are both Black, but its founder, the late Teddy Fang, named the farm after his mom, a prominent Chinese American philanthropist and businesswoman.
Fang, who died in 2024, started the farm in 2014 because parts of Bayview Hunters Point are food deserts, said his widower, Tony Thompson, who also serves as board chair.
On a recent Sunday, Xiu Juan planted a-choy, a leafy lettuce variety popular in Taiwan, as she sang traditional Chinese opera songs. Xiu, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1987 and settled in the Bayview in 1994, reminisced about Fang.
“We really loved him,” she said in Mandarin. “He cared a lot for us.”
During the pandemic, Thompson, who is Black, said he and Fang were pained to see violent incidents of anti-Asian hate splashed across the news, as well as racist backlash directed at both Asian and Black people.
“We brought (the two groups) together through working side by side, helping rebuild that land, and learning each other’s traditions and living with them,” Thompson said.
As the neighborhood enters a new era, one chapter is coming to a close. Elaine Chan will soon shutter her father’s dim sum spot, Imperial Garden, after 31 years. Even with legacy business status, margins are thin and evening foot traffic is slow.
Still, when she looks at San Bruno Avenue today, she takes pride: “We were part of building that.”
Dining and Cooking