Election season is fast approaching, and with this time of year comes the obligatory campaign runs by potential candidates for city council. Amongst the cluster of campaign signs placed alongside roads and in front of home lawns, you may have noticed a navy blue and orange sign with a call to elect Thomas Wong for Monterey Park’s city council. According to his campaign website, Wong has been serving the community for about fifteen years as a Monterey Park city commissioner. For a decade, he has served as an elected district board member for the San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District. 

I had the pleasure of interviewing Wong regarding his campaign as well as his career in public service. When asked about any role models from his teenage years that may have inspired him to pursue a career in public service, Wong was sure to point out how the generation of immigrants before him, including his parents, have inspired him to help and serve his community. He states that he was inspired by “seeing how [his parents] invested and tried to help and continue to help newer immigrants who have come after them.” Wong states that he grew up helping his mother at her optometry practice in Alhambra, and from there, he was able to interact with much of the new immigrant population that his mother served. He reviews this time of his life as a defining moment in his path towards the public service sector as he witnessed his mother accept clients of low income, immigrant, monolingual backgrounds— many of whom make up the population of the city he plans to serve. 

Now, Wong has applied these lessons from his youth to the community. You may have heard of AEF (Alhambra Educational Foundation), which sponsors many of the enrichment programs within AUSD (Alhambra Unified School School District). Wong has been a board member for AEF for a bit over two years, and during his time on the board, he has encouraged both students and teachers to be involved in environmental issues. He has even worked with our resident environmental science teacher, Ms. Eggerman, to organize the city’s Earth Day Festival, which highlighted the work of Mark Keppel’s environmental science students. Wong also speaks of funding for  landscaping changes at schools in the AUSD district, such as Brightwood Elementary. He discusses grants given to schools that were used to “build out basic water service stations and infrastructure for students to access,” which greatly affect students here at Keppel. Many of these improvements that Wong speak of took place during the COVID-19 pandemic, in which he worked to secure community funding in order to repair city roads and infrastructure. In this way, he attempted to open up more job opportunities for those who found themselves without work during the pandemic, while also fixing different aspects of the city as people remained indoors. 

Wong’s remarkable commitments to bettering the city of Monterey Park, as well as the greater San Gabriel Valley, make him a great candidate for a seat on the Monterey Park City Council. Even students of Mark Keppel high school have benefited from the steps that he has taken towards spreading environmental awareness, improving city infrastructure, and serving the members of the community. Wong emphasizes that without the help of high school students, he would not hold the leadership positions within the community that he occupies today. He encourages students to, “make change and build a better and stronger community.” He asserts that housing affordability, climate crisis, and pedestrian safety are all issues present in the day-to-day lives of community members. With that, Wong implores to the youth of the community, “If you see a concern or an issue, reach out and make noise about it. Work to make change in your own community.” Hopefully, the students of Mark Keppel, as well as other youth within our community, are inspired by Wong’s initiatives. Let us all contribute to further his work for the city. We are the next generation of community leaders, and by taking action now, we can work to improve our community to make it a better home for future generations to come.