Queens Council Member Sandra Ung’s district can feel like a blur of New Yorkers going about their lives — some of them having spent the first part of those lives a half a world away.

Like many residents of the district, which includes Flushing, Ung is an immigrant

“I actually don’t share a lot about this part,” she told NY1.

What You Need To Know

  • Asian American representation is larger with this historically diverse City Council

  • But it's still not proportionate to the city's AAPI population

  • Ung is advocating for greater language access

The council member survived the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s as a baby and lived as a refugee in Taiwan for several years.

“We didn’t go back,” she said of Cambodia. “And there was nowhere to go back home to. One day, my mom just stopped getting letters from my grandparents and from her sisters, my aunts, and up to today, we don’t know what happened to them.”

Ung shared her story earlier this year at the State Democratic Party convention, one of the few Asian Americans in the speakers’ lineup.

She is among only six AAPI members of this 51-member City Council, the representation triple that of the last council but still not proportionate to the percentage of Asian Americans who make up the city’s population.

“We all came to this City Council seat in different ways. We also all have really actually different backgrounds,” she said of her colleagues.

As a legislator, Ung is prioritizing increasing language access, calling in part for funding for smaller community-based organizations, “especially with the Asian American ones. I don’t think we get the funding that we should be getting. And we are actually the ones on the ground, doing the work.”

On a recent day in Flushing, she advocated for other types of access.

There was the reopened Flushing branch of the Queens Public Library and there was accompanying Chipotle employee Brenda Garcia, who claims she was fired for trying to unionize, on her first day back at work.

Ung said the political clout of AAPI New Yorkers isn’t where it should be.

“Asian Americans, we are not known to be voters,” she said.

But just as others inspired her to get to the polls and get on the ballot, she said she hopes she can lead by example.

“Seeing women running and then winning,” she said, “I think gave me just the impetus to really think about when I should run for office.”