SAN GABRIEL VALLEYWIDE NEWS
By Jacqueline Tsai

There are more than 42,000 Asians living in Alhambra according to the 2006 U.S. Census Bureau. That is double the number of Caucasians living in the city. There are also 54,325 residents who speak another language than English at home.
With so many non-whites in Alhambra, it is a good thing residents who do not speak English very well can rely on the Asian Pacific Women’s Shelter for help.
Founded in 1993, the Asian Pacific Women’s Center – APWC – is a nonprofit organization that focuses on helping women and children who are domestic violence survivors by being a long-term transition shelter that caters specifically to those who face cultural and language barriers in the United States.
“We wanted to help [the] under-served, [which] usually [are] the people who don’t speak English,” Chunyen Chen, the executive director of the agency, said.
Language is the biggest problem affecting its clients, 60 percent of whom are Asian, 35 percent Latina, and 5 percent of another ethnicity, Chen said. The police do not know how to help non-white domestic violence survivors because they often cannot communicate with them. The Asian population also does not feel comfortable to go into shelters because of the language barrier, she said.
To solve this problem, the APWC has a staff that can speak 14 different languages when combined. It also hires interpreters so that it can serve everyone to the best of its ability.
The cultural barrier that affects APWC clients is more complicated. Many families who grew up somewhere else do not understand how the U.S. government and society works because it is very different from their homes countries, Chen said.
“They don’t know what they can ask and what they can’t ask. They don’t know what their rights are,” Chen said.
For example, if a women’s husband has as an affair in her home country, the women can be put in jail because adultery is illegal in some countries, she said. However, that’s not the case here, so many women do not know how to settle issues such as adultery.
Yet the hardest obstacle to overcome is trust. “Trust is the key issue to making them want to come to get help,” Chen said.
“Domestic violence shelters are government run, so [this] causes them to not have trust in them. Some don’t believe [nonprofit organizations] don’t charge,” she said when speaking about the shelters in the home countries of the organization’s clients.
The APWC wants to prevent, educate, and empower its clients, especially non-Caucasians, so that they know how to prepare for life outside the shelter.
“There is a large percent of API and Latino in this area, so [we] talk to mostly these people,” Amy Tien, the Outreach and Education Coordinator, said.
To give its clients the right tools to survive, the APWC offers programs and events that educate people about violence prevention and give them more knowledge about the law.
The APWC recently held an event called “Valentine Not Violence” in Alhambra. The goal of this event was to spread the organization’s message to ACT.
“A is to admit the problem. C, call it the right name, violence. T, tell someone about it,” Chen said.
The Alhambra office just opened January this year.
“The San Gabriel Valley doesn’t have very many DV agencies, so valuable that can open an office in Alhambra and start [helping] API people,” Tien said, adding that the office just opened in January this year. “We have plans to expand services to have more programs coming out of the [Alhambra] office.”
“We know [our programs] work because we have a 100 percent success rate,” Chen said.