For one social worker, COVID-19 means round-the-clock assistance with unemployment benefits and grocery shopping
Victor Leo's work supports the Chinese American community in Southeast Portland’s Jade District
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Victor Leo sits amid mountains of files: on his desk, on the floor, on shelves of his tiny office at the back of a peeling blue house in Portland’s Jade District. The room is accessible only through a narrow walkway lined with case files, old Chinese newspapers, inexplicable boxes of brass doorknobs, a small combo TV-VHS and other long-hidden items that make the space feel more like a storage unit than an office.
Leo’s phone almost never stops ringing. From early mornings until the middle of the night, he spends his day fielding calls in a mixture of Toisan, Cantonese, Mandarin and English. They come from his clients, neighbors, community members, friends and whoever else might get his number. When his phone isn’t ringing, there’s usually someone walking through the door of his file-cramped office.
For more than 40 years, Leo, who is a licensed clinical social worker, has worked predominantly in substance and gambling abuse therapy in the Chinese community — though that’s never made him particularly beloved — as well as adjustment counseling for new immigrants looking to start their lives in America. He’s never advertised and doesn’t even have a business card, instead relying solely on word-of-mouth and common knowledge that if there’s a Mazda minivan out front, Leo is inside.
For the past two months, Leo’s social work has been overtaken by COVID-19 assistance. Primarily, he’s helping people in the community navigate the unemployment application process, but he’s also answering questions about healthcare, how to access benefits, setting up ReliaCards — the reloadable debit cards many without direct deposit receive to access their unemployment funds — once people receive them from the state, even taking people in the community shopping.
As he started talking about the influx of calls he was getting regarding unemployment questions, an elderly client of Leo’s walked through the door with several envelopes from the state in hand, almost as if he had summoned her.
For the next several minutes, Leo and the woman chatted away in Toisan as he tore open envelopes. One contained her ReliaCard, which he promptly ripped off the page before grabbing his still-dinging phone and dialing the number on the card to activate it. Shortly after trying to explain what a PIN was, he handed the card back to her.
“That’s my life,” Leo said, as the woman thanked him and headed back out into the rain. “I tell you I have an open door, people walk in.” No money changed hands.
It’s not the first time he’s needed to help people with the unemployment system though, Leo said. Oregon doesn’t offer its unemployment application in Chinese, making understanding an already confusing and specific system even more difficult for non-native English speakers. The struggle with successfully filing those applications, Leo said, has been with finding someone who understands both the application and the government-speak it’s written in, someone who can clearly communicate the correct meaning between two completely different universes.
“We have a lot of meaning that is understood, so you and I can say something that we understand, but when a third person is listening to us, they don’t know what we’re talking about,” Leo said. “That’s exactly what happened with the unemployment (application). A lot of the questions are written for people who know what the system is asking. For someone who is outside the system, they have no idea.”
Aside from his work and the endless phone calls, Leo also finds time to help elders in the neighborhood, often taking them shopping or dropping off groceries. “I can’t say no to those people,” Leo said. “The ones I usually take out, they don’t drive. If they want to go to Costco, they don’t have a car and sometimes they want to go to the grocery. How can they carry a lot of stuff? So I say, ‘Okay, after I get off work, I’ll help you.’ I don’t know what else to tell them.”
For Leo, the work that he does for the Chinese community and the trust and confidentiality he’s been able to cultivate within a culture that often does not value counseling is paramount. He knows he should charge more money and hire someone to help organize his files, but that doing either of those things might prohibit someone from coming to talk to him.
“I have a really simple lifestyle. I don’t like to eat fancy food, I don’t like to buy expensive clothing, I'm happy if I have a bowl of rice,” Leo said. “Many people don’t even know I charge! They don’t know I’m in private practice! It’s okay, I have enough income. Of course I would make more if I worked for the government, but I think my satisfaction is not money, it's not for the government, it’s the community.”
-- Samantha Bakall
Samantha Bakall is a Portland-based, Chinese American writer whose work has appeared in The Oregonian, where she covered food for four years; Eater; The San Francisco Chronicle, Travel Oregon and more. Find her work at samanthabakall.com and on Instagram.