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After Shen Hui came to New York from Taiwan, he devoted half of his life to helping Liu Zigao establish the Asian American Physicians Association and Charitable Foundation, connecting Chinese doctors, insurance systems and community services, and continuing to protect the community during the epidemic and cancer.
In 1973, 13-year-old Shen Hui moved from Taiwan to New York with her family. When she first arrived in Manhattan’s Chinatown, she could not speak English or understand Cantonese. At that time, Chinatown was mainly concentrated in the area of ​​Mott Street, Pell Street, and Byrd Street. Most of the streets were filled with older overseas Chinese who spoke Taishan dialect and Cantonese.
He never imagined that this strange land would become the place where he devoted half his life.
He is not a doctor and does not wear white robes, but he has participated in the establishment of an important platform linking Chinese doctors and the American medical system. From an initially small organization of just under 20 doctors to the Chinese American Association of Independent Practice (CAIPA) today with more than 1,600 medical professional members, Shen Hui has witnessed the journey of Chinese doctors in New York from working alone to uniting and collaborating.
The starting point of this story spanning decades was a therapy experience when she was 16 years old.
When she first arrived in the United States, Shen Hui’s family was not well-off. His father works at Daily America and has five children at home. She remembers her father telling them that a place to stay and dinner would be provided at home, and breakfast and lunch could be taken care of at school, but if they wanted something else, they would have to work hard for it. This kind of growing environment allowed him to learn to be independent very early.
When she was 16 years old, Shen Hui needed to see a doctor for the first time due to teenage health problems, but she didn’t even know what a “family doctor” was. At that time, Chinatown was dominated by Cantonese. Not knowing Cantonese, she hoped to find a doctor who could speak Mandarin, so she looked at the newspaper where her father worked and found an advertisement for a doctor that caught her attention.
Her educational qualifications and professional background in advertising made her feel credible, so she decided to seek medical treatment. This doctor was Liu Zigao, the future founder of the Asian American Medical Association.
➤➤➤ 🎙️It is difficult for Chinese people to see a doctor, and Chinese medicine is ignored⋯Liu Zigao created a medical network for ethnic minorities to listen to Asian people
From a simple medical-patient relationship at the beginning to jointly promoting a Chinese physician cooperative organization, the fate between the two lasted for decades.
In the late 1980s, the death of a patient at an unlicensed clinic on East Broadway in Manhattan’s Chinatown attracted mainstream media attention. Some reports extended individual incidents to the entire Chinatown medical environment, causing public suspicion even for Chinese Western medical practitioners with legal licenses.
At that time, many Chinese doctors, even if they had excellent professional abilities, still faced discrimination and development barriers in mainstream medical institutions because of their language, culture, and ethnic background. Some decided to leave the hospital system and open their own businesses in Chinese communities, but faced complex insurance systems and operational pressures alone.
Liu Zigao did not want to see the professional reputation of Chinese doctors affected, so he decided to hold a press conference to clarify the matter and went to a lawyer’s office to seek legal advice in advance.
