The New Yorker:

In a recently redrawn City Council district, two Chinese American candidates are both trying to claim the mantle of “public safety.”

By Jasper Lo 

On a Saturday in early fall, a sisterly crowd of political volunteers milled about in a community center in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. They were there to help elect a thirty-seven-year-old Democrat named Susan Zhuang as the City Council member for the borough’s first-ever majority-Asian district, the recently redrawn Forty-third. The district, in the usual manner of these things, has a complicated outline, with several sharp turns. It roughly resembles a crowing rooster, with the top of its head touching Kai Feng Fu dumpling house, on Eighth Avenue, and its feet perched right around the Shore Parkway Jewish Center, in Bensonhurst. Voting for the seat concludes on November 7th.

Zhuang, who lives in Bensonhurst, grew up outside Shanghai, and came to the U.S. when she was twenty. She describes her introduction to local politics as almost accidental. A friend asked her to deliver a box of tea to a longtime assemblyman named William Colton; when she got to his office, she was struck by the number of people waiting for his help in dealing with various issues—housing, food stamps, Social Security. Zhuang, who has an M.B.A., volunteered to help low-income families and small businesses with their taxes. Eventually, she became Colton’s chief of staff.

Go to link