Elkie Li bustled through the growing crowd, greeting clients and coworkers who had become friends over her 20 years working for the Asian Health and Service Center.
Her husband Richard Louie settled into a chair alongside with his father, 94, and his mother, 93. The family had spent many happy days at the center, which launched in 1983 from the basement of the Chinese Presbyterian Church in Southeast Portland. It moved above ground in 1999 to a narrow two-story building on Powell Blvd., a space the popular nonprofit quickly outgrew.
There they gathered with other friends, immigrants and refugees from China, Korea and Vietnam for senior lunches, games of pingpong and dances and events.
More than 30 years after the center opened it, Louie and his family gathered last week in the shadow of the center’s new home — a sleek three-story building in the heart of Lents. Like many families, they contributed to the $6 million project.
“This is our own place,” said Louie, “All of us have a stake in it. It will be an icon for the Chinese community.”
Asian Health and Service Center staff primarily serve Chinese-speaking, Vietnamese-speaking and Korean-speaking seniors, but center director Holden Leung said the center would become a bridge to unite the neighborhood.
“We hope people of all cultures come to this place where they can find love and kindness,” he said. “Our goal is to create unity despite diversity.”
The new building will have treatment rooms for the medical and mental health providers who provide western and holistic care, many in their patients’ primary language. It will include an Asian Cancer Resource and Support center, a collaboration with the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute. The building will include multipurpose rooms for classes and therapy groups, and its centerpiece: a 6,000-square-foot hall for events, social gatherings and the weekly senior meal program.
But the center hopes to expand its reach to fold in the surrounding community — one on the edge of prosperity, struggling with its identity and fractured by its diversity.
“One day we will see ourselves having lunches together, doing tai chi together. We will see the mentally ill smile and our children laugh,” founder Dr. Erik Szeto said to community members and elected leaders who prepared to cut the ribbon to the new building. “If that is not enough, what is?”
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