On Irving Street between 25th and 26th Avenues in the Inner Sunset, Wendy Lin has run a boba shop called Sunset Pearl since 2012. The shop is open Tuesday through Saturday and Sundays only until 1 p.m. From 1:30 to 5 p.m. on Sundays, Wendy closes the shop, hands out tea and snacks, and teaches free ESL to a rotating group of about a dozen Chinese-speaking seniors. She has done this every Sunday for twelve years, missing only when she has had a family death.
Wendy is 41. She was born in Guangzhou, came to San Francisco at age 11, attended Lincoln High School and then San Francisco State. She has a master’s in education from State. She taught at a public middle school for four years before opening the boba shop in 2012 to support her parents.
The Sunday class started, she says, by accident. Her father needed help reading a notice from Medi-Cal in 2013. She read it for him. The next week, the father of a regular customer needed help with a different notice. The week after, three seniors showed up at 2 p.m. The week after that, six. By the end of 2014 she was closing the shop on Sunday afternoons to make space.
“A grandmother who cannot read a doctor’s appointment letter is not a grandmother with a language problem,” Wendy says. “She is a grandmother with a city problem. I am closing the shop to fix it.”
Her curriculum is practical. The textbook is a stack of real San Francisco documents, Medi-Cal renewal forms, MUNI fare-discount applications, prescription pickup notices, jury duty letters, voting ballots. She has assembled them into a binder organized by topic. Students learn the vocabulary they will actually encounter on real paper, not the vocabulary of a textbook.
A typical Sunday has between 8 and 14 students. They are mostly Cantonese-speaking seniors from the Sunset and the Outer Richmond, ages 60 to 88. About a third are men; about two-thirds are women. The youngest current regular is 58 (Mrs. Cao, who just retired from a sewing factory). The oldest is 86 (Mr. Yuen, whose vision is failing but whose hearing is sharp).
Wendy is not paid for the class. The shop is closed during the class hours, so she is also not earning. She loses, by her estimate, about $180 in revenue per Sunday afternoon. Across the year that is about $7,400. She makes it back, more or less, with the regular weekday customers who come because of the Sunday class.
In 2020 she pivoted the class to Zoom for fifteen months. Only seven seniors could connect reliably. She made twice-weekly home visits to the other six, masked, leaving the binder and the assignment on their porch and reviewing the homework with them through the window.
On the Sunday I visited at 2:18 p.m., eleven seniors were sitting around four small folding tables. The topic was a Medi-Cal redetermination letter in English. Wendy was reading it aloud, sentence by sentence, then in Cantonese, then walking through what the letter wanted the senior to do. The lesson took 90 minutes. Three of the seniors stayed after to ask follow-up questions. Wendy made them tea and answered each question by name.
