Here's a nice profile on the newest member of Congress, Congressmember Judy Chu of CA-32. As you know, APAP's PAC endorsed her last year and helped place a Glenn S. Fukushima Fellow on her campaign. This article shows why she's such an inspiration.

Judy Chu was sitting down on Dec. 18 to what she describes as “a nice, quiet breakfast” at her desk at the California Board of Equalization when word spread that President-elect Barack Obama would nominate Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.) to be Labor secretary.

Chu, a political veteran from Solis’s district, had an immediate, almost reflexive reaction.

“It dawned on me that it was possible to run for Congress,” she recounts.

Nearly seven months later, Chu, a Democrat, was sworn in as the country’s first female Chinese-American federal lawmaker. Her ascent to Congress, however, had a much longer buildup, one that early on earned her a place in the coterie of Asian American politicians.

She now joins Sens. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), Rep. David Wu (D-Ore.) and eight others to make up the largest contingent of Asian Americans in Congress in history.

This group of 12 still far under-represents the Asian American population, but Chu and other experts say the ethnic group’s political maturity has reached a critical point. The trailblazers have now set an example for others to follow and proven their ability to maneuver in an arena that many Asian Americans used to shy away from, they say.

For Chu, the symbolic richness of her election hit home when she was sworn in in July. She brought her two young nieces to witness the ceremony on the House floor, realizing she was exposing a new generation to the importance of politics and their potential role in it. Chu was also affected by the reactions of her constituents and supporters.

“People had tears in their eyes,” she says. “It’s times like that when I realize there’s been a void for so long. People thought it couldn’t be done.”

Chu, 56, initially thought she wouldn’t be the one doing it. Her grandfather came to the United States “from nothing,” she says, but opened a neighborhood Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles that gave her family a footing in their new country.

As an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles, Chu liked math and thought she would be a computer scientist. That changed when she took an Asian American Studies class and became privy to the discriminatory laws her grandfather was up against when he immigrated to the U.S.

Still, she thought she would play more of a supporting role in politics and policy rather than taking the lead herself.

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