English text by Cynthia Sun and Irene Luo
Pictures courtesy of Michelle Wu
Growing up, Michelle Wu always loved to keep busy, from shelving books at the library to volunteering at the local hospital. In school, she found free period boring, so she offered her time to the assistant principal, helping her alphabetize and organize her papers.
Michelle had an insatiable appetite for helping others, and after some initial run-ins with government bureaucracy, she decided to try to achieve reform through public office. In 2013, Michelle was elected to the Boston City Council at age 28, becoming its youngest member as well as its first Asian-American councilwoman.
Winding Path
“I get bored easily,” says Michelle, the daughter of two Taiwanese immigrants. “Since I was little, I always wanted to figure out what I could do next.” In school, she was actively involved in many student groups, from science clubs to math teams, and in her senior year, she became president of the National Junior Classical League, one of the largest student-run organizations in the country. She graduated in 2003 as the valedictorian of her class and a U.S. Presidential Scholar, earning her a ticket to Harvard University.
During this entire time, Michelle never even considered a career in politics. Her mother always said, “When you grow up, remember three things: Find a stable job, make a lot of money, and don’t look for trouble.” So Michelle studied hard, majored in economics, and landed a well-paying consulting position in downtown Boston.
But one day, a sudden phone call steered her life onto an entirely different course.
“You have to come home right now. There’s something very wrong with mama,” her little sister told her. It turned out that their mother was struggling with a mental health crisis. Suffering from depression, she was barely able to eat or sleep and could no longer take care of herself or Michelle’s younger siblings. So Michelle, the oldest of four, returned to Chicago to become the caretaker for her mother and the guardian of her sisters.
To boost her mother’s spirits, Michelle decided to fulfil her mother’s lifelong dream of opening a teahouse. She planned every detail—what food and teas they’d serve, what color to paint the walls, and even what music they’d play. But in the end, it was the permit that would be the greatest barrier. Even though Michelle read the entire Municipal Code of Chicago, it still took almost eight months of bureaucracy, inspections, and repeated appeals to finally open their teahouse. When she asked neighboring shopkeepers, they echoed her experiences.
At the same time, Michelle was fighting to put her sisters into the right schools and to persuade her mother’s healthcare insurance to cover a provider who would speak Mandarin, because that was the only way her mother would accept treatment.
Suddenly, she had to face bureaucracy and government almost every day. “And each of those experiences was incredibly frustrating, not just for my family but for every other family that I’ve talked to who had been in the same place,” Michelle says.
Serving Her Community
Hoping to help craft better laws and ordinances, Michelle returned to Harvard for law school, bringing her mother and younger sisters with her to Boston. While working at City Hall as a Rappaport Fellow in Law and Public Policy, she wrote a comprehensive online guide to Boston’s restaurant permitting process and spearheaded Boston’s food truck program.
Later, when she was elected Councilor-at-Large, she pushed for reforms to Boston’s permitting system. And as a mother of two young boys, she passed an ordinance for paid parental leave for municipal employees. She also increased government transparency by releasing weekly summaries of the council’s discussions, voting results, and upcoming hearings.
To aspiring politicians, Michelle says, “Don’t think about the position that you want, but about the difference that you want to make.”
Now, Michelle lives in a two-family home in Roslindale, a neighborhood of Boston. She lives upstairs with her husband and two sons, and her mother lives downstairs. Not many people live with their parents nowadays, but Michelle says the arrangement enriches her family. “My sons can grow up knowing their grandma, and they get to see ‘wai-po’ everyday and spend time together.”
