Lin, Vida Chan, 1955-

Vida Chan Lin was born in San Francisco as the middle of five children--all given Spanish names because the family migrated to the U.S. via Chile. Vida began working as a young child in her immigrant parents' Chinese restaurant, but soon the family opened the first Yet Wah, and the Chan family restaurants eventually numbered eleven in the San Francisco area. Vida moved to Las Vegas in 1993 to help her sister and brother-in-law with legal issues. Because she found no cohesive Chinese or pan-Asian community, she joined every AAPI group she could find, including three Hawaiian groups and seven Filipino groups. As an AAPI woman with a high school diploma, she learned from each of her life and work experiences. She became an insurance broker and agency owner, and educated the AAPI communities on the ways homeowners insurance could help them through the 2008 housing crisis. She is the past president of the Asian Chamber of Commerce, and in 2015 she founded the Asian Community Development Council (ACDC) to provide community services and began doing voter registrations. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, as AAPI businesses began to suffer, ACDC continued its focus on voter registrations but also assisted Clark County School District by purchasing Chrome books for students and helping with the decennial U.S. census, food distribution, mental health, bystander awareness, and COVID-19 vaccine clinics.