Bilingva Provides Chinese Interpreting at the San Francisco Mayoral Town Hall
Bilingva provided interpreting and translation services in Chinese language at the San Francisco Mayoral Town Hall. The Asian Pacific Islander Council held a town hall on Thursday to learn how each of the five San Francisco mayoral candidates would address issues that directly impact the API community.
As SF Examiner reports: A mayoral town hall dedicated to San Francisco’s Asian American community ended up sounding largely indistinguishable from many of The City’s 2024 campaign forums that preceded it.
Each of the five San Francisco mayoral candidates on Thursday took turns answering questions and speaking to dozens of Asian American leaders and advocacy groups during a series of live interviews hosted by the API Council at the Hilton across from Portsmouth Square in Chinatown.
The discussion occurred at a critical time in the campaign, with polls indicating the race is still wide open with a little over a month before Election Day.
The candidates — incumbent Mayor London Breed; former interim Mayor Mark Farrell; Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin; Supervisor Ahsha Safai; nonprofit founder and Levi Strauss heir Daniel Lurie — have long coveted the Asian American vote. Thursday’s forum was the latest sign of the growing influence San Francisco’s largest ethnic minority group, representing roughly two fifths of The City’s total population, has had in recent elections.
None of the candidates are of East Asian descent. Safai is Iranian-American.
Unlike a debate, in which all the candidates appear on stage together and speak directly to each other, the five candidates came up one by one to answer the roughly half-dozen questions from the moderators, MSNBC news anchor Richard Lui and KNTV anchor Gia Vang.
The questions centered around policies considered pertinent to San Francisco Asian Americans: affordable housing, public safety, food insecurity and poor seniors. Candidates, while directly addressing a roomful of The City’s Asian Americans, largely relied upon the same talking points familiar to people who have been following the tightly contested race.
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