Monterey County’s Chinese community leads the effort to secure 10,000 new masks amid shortage.

Some of the most effective help in supplying first responders with high-grade masks in Monterey County is coming from the local Chinese community.

Thanks to the efforts of Hanwei Tan, Yue Ming and Danni Lu, who teach at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, 10,000 KN95 masks are being shipped here from China, with the first batch of 600 having arrived on April 6.

“We are not a virus ourselves, we are ready to help people fight against the virus,” Tan says in a message that pushes back against the racist linking of Chinese people to Covid-19.

The planning for the shipment started more than a month ago. “We didn’t have any positive cases locally yet, but we thought we might do something to prepare,” Tan says about a conversation he had with Don Gruber, a local resident who is not of Chinese descent.

Gruber located a possible vendor of masks in China, and county officials told him they’d be interested in buying some to add to the supply coming from state and federal agencies. But it was hard to tell if the Chinese supplier was legitimate.

Tan and his colleagues stepped in, making phone calls and researching the supply chain. “We ended up making several calls, got pictures, got the names of the factories, making us confident we got the right product,” Tan says.

Then, the foreign factory said it couldn’t accept a county check. So Tan became an impromptu international broker, putting together four credit cards to pay for the masks, which cost $1.65 each; he charged no commission. Tan says he plans to bring 50,000 surgical masks next.

“We are not stopping,” he says. “And we have more people joining our effort.”