“I won’t be bullied.” Dr. Richard Pan’s stirring road to the mayor’s race in Sacramento | Opinion

Editors note: This is the last of four profiles of the main candidates running for mayor of Sacramento that will be published ahead of a mayoral forum The Bee Editorial board will co-host with KVIE today at 2 pm.. In this profile and the others, the goal is to give readers a stronger sense of who the candidates are as people. These profiles are not endorsements but personal stories detailing the work the candidates have done in Sacramento and what drove them to run for mayor. Ultimately, our board will endorse one candidate on February 5, the day ballots are mailed to voters.

Since he was a child, Dr. Richard Pan has been fighting bullies.

A pediatrician and former state senator now running for mayor of Sacramento, Pan gained the enmity of unhinged, anti-vaccination zealots by writing important legislation that mandates immunizations for most children. In the last decade, he has stood up to misguided, sometimes violent people, who too often crossed the lines of decency to hound him.

In 2019, Pan was shoved on a downtown street by an anti-vaxxer who was filming the doctor as he harassed him. It was an ugly incident that drew national headlines. But the harassment that Pan has received in his private life — away from the cameras — has been even more disturbing. And it hasn’t only targeted him, but his family as well.

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“I dedicate my life to keeping children and families safe,” said Pan, 58. “And I’m not going to be bullied.”

Growing up an outsider

The genesis of Pan’s refusal to back down from physical and verbal threats began when he was in grade school. Pan’s parents, highly educated people from Taiwan, moved their children to Tennessee for their work. Pan grew up as one of the few Asian kids in his town.

“When I started first grade, I only spoke Mandarin,” Pan said. “For me to speak English, I was put in essentially Special Education classes. One of the things that really shaped me from that experience is that we were considered ‘the dumb kids,’ so everyone wanted to pick on us.”

Pan said he convinced the handful of Special Education classmates to defend themselves together. If any one of them came under attack from a bully, the others would shout out to each other and “swarm” the bully.

“I guess that was my first organizing effort,” he said.

Pan’s engineer father was working then at the Tennessee Space Institute in Tullahoma, Tennessee. His mother was an architect. And Pan is the eldest of three brothers.

When they lived in Tennessee, the closest Asian market to the Pan’s was in Nashville — 74 miles away. The family would often make the three-hour journey, round-trip, to shop for comfort food that made them feel a little less isolated.

His mother and father moved often to pursue work opportunities. Pan was born in Yonkers, New York, and moved to Tennessee, Virginia and Pittsburgh. Of all the places he lived growing up, he identifies the most with Pittsburgh because that’s where he went to high school and college.

(This means the Sacramento mayor’s race has two candidates with familial ties to Pittsburgh who also both work in public health: Pan and Dr. Flojaune Cofer.)

Pan moved to Sacramento in 1998, bringing with him sterling credentials as a graduate of Johns Hopkins, the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard. He was inspired to work in public health and was moved by low-income families with health challenges rooted in poverty.

First memories in Sacramento

Pan was recruited by UC Davis Medical School to teach residents to care about child advocacy. Having experienced large eastern cities, Pan remembers being struck by the first time he flew into Sacramento.

“When you leave Logan Airport in Boston, you see the whole city,” Pan said. “So here I am, never been in Sacramento before, hoping for my first glimpse of the city. The plane was landing from the north. I see rice fields everywhere. Then I took a taxi, we’re going down I-5 — there was no north Natomas at the time — and I saw this big building. I asked the cab driver what it was.

“He said, ‘That’s Arco Arena. That’s where the Sacramento Kings play.’ And I think, ‘They put it way out here in the middle of nowhere? And they put the airport in the middle of nowhere?’ There has got to be a city here somewhere.”

For Pan, Sacramento turned out to be the city where he would finally settle down. He was still a bachelor when he arrived, but he found established neighborhoods with strong community identities like the ones he knew in Pittsburgh — only Sacramento’s neighborhoods were more racially and ethnically diverse.

Combating health deficits

Pan was driven to make a mark in his new town. He did so by creating programs that pushed UC Davis pediatric residents out of the labs and into the lives of their patients. His training before arriving in Sacramento had opened his eyes to how zip codes and income levels dictate health outcomes. He knew communities that lacked a voice were at higher risk for illness and lack of access to care that would make them better.

It wasn’t that Pan had experienced these health deficits himself — after all, his parents had advanced degrees. But Pan intimately understood what it was like to be the outsider looking in at privilege. He was always the new kid, the Asian kid who stood out from white classmates as a curiosity or a target. He knew what it was like to have the deck stacked against him racially, ethnically and socially. So he channeled his personal experiences and melded them with professional ones — pointing him toward medicine as a way to heal people.

Pan was also struck by how money flowing to struggling communities often went to service providers and not necessarily to the communities themselves. He was particularly moved by how funding for worthy health programs would dry up.

“The communities would get the services, but then the services stopped,” he said.

More than anything, Pan saw a need for doctors in training to change their mindsets and drop paternalistic attitudes toward patients in need.

“After they went through our program, our residents would say, ‘My job is to lift the voices of the communities. Not to speak for them, but to be a supporting voice to give their communities credibility,’” Pan said.

Pan sought a state senate seat to advocate for health priorities that could become law. He then became one of the most influential senators in California. Pan helped restore benefits cut from state Medi-Cal programs after the great recession of 2008; and Time Magazine hailed Pan “a vaccine hero.” In the Time article, he was praised alongside medical heroes including Jonas Salk.

Representation is important

Pan is married now, with children of his own. He’s a political mentor to State Senator Angelique Ashby, who succeeded Pan in the senate after he termed out. Pan could become the first Asian American elected to mayor of Sacramento, roughly 20 years after Jimmie Yee was appointed to the job following the death of Mayor Joe Serna Jr. in 1999.

It’s not lost on Pan that he is running for mayor at the same time that violence against Asian Americans has been disturbingly high.

“I’m just me,” he said. “I’m just trying to do the right thing.”

At the Fourth of July parade in the Pocket neighborhood, where regional leaders participate in the parade and wave to residents as they go by in classic vehicles, Pan recalls seeing Asian parents saying to their children, “Look! The guy riding in the car is a state senator!”

“When the Asian parents saw me, they were telling their kids, ‘Look!’” Pan said.

As he recounts this memory, Pan pauses for a moment and his voice wavers just slightly enough to notice.

“I’m not as much into the ceremonial stuff, I’m about the work,” He said. “But that is important. It’s really important.”