Fave Five: Tucson's Chinese-American community donates thousands of masks to frontline workers

— Gloria Knott

Thousands of N95 masks recently came full circle after they were donated to medical professionals in China earlier this year and the unused ones were given back to Tucson’s health-care providers in April.

The initiative started when Tina Liao and her husband, Jinshan Tang, started to hear what Liao described as “horrible stories” happening amid the coronavirus crisis in Wuhan, China, home of the first COVID-19 outbreak.

“We have friends who live in Wuhan, and they were very desperate for masks because medical staff didn’t have enough protection,” says Liao, who is the president elect of the Tucson Chinese Association. “They were crying out for help.”

“When we heard from our friends in Wuhan, we said, ‘OK, we want to help them — whatever way we can,’” she says.

Tang owns local company Innova Engineering and knows of suppliers who carry N95 masks. Tang and Liao started ordering masks in bulk in January and February — out of their own pockets at first — from all of the available suppliers they knew between Tucson and Phoenix.

Liao says she often became emotional when telling suppliers of her plans to send the masks to China.

“As soon as they got the supply in, they’d call us,” Liao says.

The couple ordered the masks, and shipped them, in separate batches, during the first two months of the year.

When Tucsonans — most in the Chinese American community and from the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center — heard what Liao and Tang were doing, they pitched in to help cover the priority shipping fees to China, which totaled thousands of dollars.

“Because it’s so urgent, I said, ‘Whatever it takes,’” Liao says, adding that if she purchased standard shipping through some carriers — rather than priority — the masks would’ve taken months to be delivered overseas.

“You can’t think about it too much when you’re helping someone so desperate,” Liao says. “It’s about people’s lives.”

Read the full story here.