Evergreen Chou came to the United States from Taiwan whan he was 9 years old, and lived in the Bronx for the next seventeen years. When he left Taiwan, he knew his family was going on a trip, but he did not understand that they would not be coming back to Taiwan.
Coming to America was an exciting move, but it was also a culture shock to be part of a community that had only one other Chinese family. He still remembers being unable to communicate with his teacher or fellow students, the feelings of exclusion, and the jeers from his classmates as they made fun of his name and the way he looked and spoke.
Evergreen Chou has been a worker since he was fourteen years old. His first job was after school as a stockboy at a supermarket. During his four years at the Bronx High School of Science, he worked evenings as a waiter at the Peking Garden Restuarant on the Grand Concourse.
He attended City College in Harlem, while working nights at Citibank. Basketball filled every waking hour between school and work, but somehow the NBA overlooked him when making their picks.
Evergreen Chou met his wife Day Starr at a poetry reading in 1987, and they were married two years later. They lived in a Caribbean community in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, while he attended Downstate Medical Center and studied to be a Diagnostic Medical Sonographer.
It was during this time that Evergreen became aware of the many inequalities in the City of New York. He saw differences in housing, education, and even the health care that different communities received. As he did rotations at Long Island College Hospital, Kings County Hospital and Mount Sinai Hospital, he saw that in some communities patients had to wait much longer to receive appointments for tests, forcing them to depend on emergency room treatment. Those who held out until the day of their appointments often had a 3-4 hour wait on the day of their test.
These were the crack years; and drug-selling was allowed to go on openly on many street-corners in communities of color. Evergreen's activism began when he marched with the December 12th Coalition to close down the crack houses. He joined the Chinese Progressive Association and worked on voter's registration and other community issues in Chinatown; he became a member of the Mary Trail of Tears LongHouse, where he was ceremonially adopted by the late Cherokee elder Mary Morningstar Atkinson. He was further inspired by working with long-time activiste Yuri Kochiyama on issues uniting the Asian community with other communities of color.
Evergreen Chou graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Science, and was told by almost everyone he knew that he'd never get a job unless he cut his hair. While it's true that Domino's Pizza refused to hire him unless he cut his hair - Lutheran Medical Center did take a chance on him. He's worked at Lutheran since 1989, where he is also a proud member and delegate of the 1199 National Health and Human Services Union.
Evergreen Chou and his wife Day Starr have lived in Flushing Queens since 1992, where they rent a small apartment in downtown Flushing. Their 12-year old nephew "Little Horse" or Xiao Ma, has lived with them since 1996.
In 1996, when Evergreen Chou heard that Ralph Nader was running for president with Native American activist Winona LaDuke as his vice-presidential choice, he immediately volunteered for the campaign. He soon became interested in the Green Party and their 10 Key Values of Social and Economic Justice, Ecological Wisdom, Democracy, Decentralization, Community Economics, Feminism, Respect For Diversity, Personal and Global Responsibility, Peace and Future Focus or "Seventh Generational Thinking" as the Native Americans call it - considering the effects our choices of today will have on the Seventh Generation to come. This fit in perfectly with Evergreen's own political and activist view; and he and Day Starr became members of the Queens Green Party.
Evergreen Chou volunteered again for the 1998 campaign of "Grandpa" Al Lewis for Governor; getting petitions signed on his lunch break and after work. While driving Al Lewis home from an event one night, Evergreen confided that he would like to run for City Council in the next election. "Grandpa" Al told him to go for it. "I'm gonna tell you something that my mother told me... if you do your best, if you're honest and you get your message through and you don't sell out - then you've won! " Al Lewis's message also got through -- and he got over 50,000 votes making the Green Party and official electoral party in New York State.
In May of 1999 Evergreen and his wife Day Starr Chou founded the Flushing Greens, a local of the New York State Greens in downtown Flushing. He volunteered to serve as Treasurer for the campaign of Richard Jannaccio, a progressive Democrat who was running on the Green line in a special election to fill the State Senate Seat. In December of the same year, Evergreen Chou was elected Treasurer of the New York State Greens/Green Party of New York State.
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