Reaching Out : New Center Strives to Cross Ethnic Lines to Serve Asian Elderly

Retired meat cutter Sam Takeda sat by himself at a table in the lunchroom of the new Asian Human Care Center.

The chicken wings and rice were gone, and so were the 30 people who came last week to inaugurate the center in the Formosan Presbyterian Church on West Olympic Boulevard. But Takeda, 69, a soft-spoken block of a man, didn’t move.

“I got no reason to go. I’m all alone,” said Takeda, whose wife of 39 years died recently. “Since I retired, I have no one to talk to. My only contact is with the clerk at the grocery store.

“I don’t know what I came here looking for. Maybe a companion to converse with.”

Takeda, a Japanese-American, learned about the center from a notice in the English section of Rafu Shimpo, a Los Angeles bilingual Japanese newspaper. The center, just west of Koreatown and within walking distance of Takeda’s home, is the first one on the Westside geared toward all Asian ethnic groups, according to Carol Iu, the center’s program director.

“The time has come to meet each other, to understand each other’s cultures and the concerns of each other’s communities,” Iu said to the Koreans, Japanese and Taiwanese who ringed the church’s spacious social hall on opening day.

Special Needs

She said she hoped Chinese, Filipinos, Indochinese, Indonesians and others would also come to the free nondenominational center, which is open to people 55 and older on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 9 a.m. and 12:30 p.m.

Although older Asians share the same problems facing the elderly everywhere, many do not speak English and require special services, such as information about government programs, which the new center hopes to provide, Iu said.

“An Asian elderly person doesn’t just walk in (to a non-Asian center) and say, ‘I want to join your dance class,’ ” Iu said. “Language is one problem. Culture is another. Think of the reverse. Would an elderly person from Ohio feel comfortable if he was served noodles and sesame oil at a senior center instead of meat and potatoes?”

To meet the special needs of the Asian senior citizens, Asian food will be served for lunch when the program gets going, although lunch is currently not available, Iu said. The center offers classes in meditation, tai chi and Asian arts and crafts, such as Chinese brush painting. It also provides multilingual counseling about Social Security and other government benefits.

The idea for a pan-Asian senior citizens center was born three years ago when members of the Synod of Southern California and Hawaii, the Presbyterian organization that sponsors the center, noticed its Asian congregations lacked services.

Of the synod’s 294 churches, 60 are Asian congregations, 12 of them on the Westside.

“The pastors were trying to do everything from nursing to teaching English to chauffeuring people around,” Iu said.

Local Presbyterian churches and the national organization raised $100,000 for the center this year, Iu said. The center is also seeking government support and was just granted $125,000 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to make an educational filmstrip.

According to census figures, the Asian population in Los Angeles County nearly doubled between 1970 and 1980, from 238,000 to 457,000, and by 1985, it nearly doubled again to 792,000, 47,520 of whom are elderly, according to United Way estimates.

Isolated Parents

“The young people who came started sending for their parents,” said Peter Alegria, director of the Asian and Pacific Coalition on Aging, a government-funded umbrella group that oversees 14 other Asian senior citizens centers in Los Angeles.

Alegria said many elderly Asians are isolated because they baby-sit for their grandchildren during the day and tend not to learn English.

On opening day at the center, visitors watched Hu-ping Chang, 62, and the other brightly clad elderly Asian dancers perform traditional folk dances. Kenneth Lee, a volunteer who came from Taiwan nine years ago, translated the introductory speeches into Japanese and Taiwanese.

“The exercise is good for us, and I like to see old friends and learn about other cultures,” Chang said as she joined her friends in the lunchroom after the dances were over.

Takeda said that although he didn’t make any friends at the opening, he enjoyed the opening-day lunch and might stop in at the center again.

“The first couple of weeks after my wife died, I didn’t care about anything,” he said. “But now I’m searching for some interests.”

By the end of the week, Takeda had returned to the center for a calligraphy class.