Parents didn’t want her to grow up in SF SRO. Here’s how they escaped

This meant that in May, Winnie’s family moved out of the SRO, where Winnie’s father, Junchang Tan, said conditions were crowded and air quality poor, into a three-bedroom house

in San Francisco’s Sunset District.

The Tans are one of about 900 households

in San Francisco — including about a dozen in Chinatown — benefiting from the vouchers, said Karen Chan, a legislative aide for outgoing San Francisco Supervisor Gordon Mar. Chan previously worked as an organizer for the Chinatown Community Development Center and helped refer the Tan family and other candidates for vouchers. Under the program, residents typically pay 30% of their rent and the government covers the rest.

Most other Chinatown residents who got vouchers stayed in or close to Chinatown, but the Tans were unique in moving farther away, Chan said, to have a better environment for Winnie and her brother, William, a high school senior.

Some things have not changed much. Similar to Chinatown, the Tans’ new neighborhood in the Sunset is heavily populated with Chinese and Taiwanese residents, said 52-year-old Tan, who is from Zhongshan, China, and moved to San Francisco in 2011 with his wife, Qianyan Li, Winnie’s mother.

They’ve continued some practices they grew accustomed to in the SRO. There, Tan didn’t feel comfortable letting Winnie use the communal bathroom on their floor, so he would wash her hair in a plastic tub. That has carried over to their new home, even though it has a full bathroom.

There have been some adjustments, too. Tan’s commute is now considerably longer. He works as a janitor at North East Medical Services, a health clinic in Chinatown. What used to be a quick trip within the neighborhood now takes at least three hours round-trip — one hour by bus in the morning and two to three hours in the evening, depending on wait times.

For Winnie, the move has meant having her own room, bed and desk for the first time, after sharing a bed with her brother her whole life. In the corner of the room is her own stack of snacks: Ferrero Rocher, Hello Panda and packets of dried seaweed.

Winnie has started at a new school, where she’s learning to play the ukulele in her music class. She hasn’t seen her best friend Latifah since the move, but is adept at online friendships — she, Latifah and her new friends from school hang out often on Discord and play “Roblox” and “Genshin Impact.” She and her brother message on Discord even when they’re in rooms next to each other, both enjoying their relatively newfound personal space.

Catherine Ho and Claire Hao are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: [email protected], [email protected] Twitter: @cat_ho, @clairehao_