About

The Immigration Act of 1965 allowed immigrants to come into the United States in equal numbers.  For the first time since the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the number of Chinese coming to the U.S. was equal to the number of immigrants from other countries.  Many immigrants of Asian ancestry relocated to California and the San Francisco Bay Area, and could only find employment in ethnic enclaves like Chinatown.  At that time, many Chinese immigrants were working in restaurants, garment factories, and low-wage occupations.  Both parents had to work, creating a high demand for child care in Chinatown when little or no care or referral services existed for Chinese speakers.

In the mid-1970s parents, teachers, grandparents and directors of the Chinatown Child Development Center (CCDC) and Chinatown Community Children’s Center (CCCC) began meeting on Sunday mornings to discuss the need for child care services and what could be done.  These meetings resulted in the formation, in 1976, of The Association of Children’s Rights (ACR), an umbrella organization comprising two primary services: child care and resource and referral services.  .  Because space in Chinatown could not be secured at the time, ACR was originally located at a church in the Richmond district of San Francisco.  The original child care center was named Lok Yuen (meaning “happy garden” or “paradise” in Cantonese), and cared for 35 Cantonese-speaking children.  ACR eventually became known in the community as “Wu Yee” (meaning “Protector of Children” in Cantonese).

Wu Yee continued to expand the programs and services in response to the many cultural and political climates that followed: the anti-immigrant sentiments of the late 1970s, the lack of social services that supported diverse populations that continued into the 1980s, the persistence of the “model minority” myth that ignored the needs of struggling immigrant working families, and the severe shortage of affordable child care services that exists even today.  In the late 1990s Wu Yee doubled in size as a result of the new funding opportunities resulting from the robust economy, which allowed the organization to meet the growing needs the of the community