Yoon Hosts ‘College Night’ at Kong

The bar on the second floor of the Hong Kong restaurant was packed with college students last night, but there were no scorpion bowls in sight. Instead, young people gathered for “College Night with Sam Yoon,” a Kennedy School graduate now running for mayor of Boston.

“College students are a vital part of our city, and too often they’re overlooked,” Yoon said. “They’re seen as second class citizens.”

In a speech at the event, he appealed to students to join his campaign, offering positions of leadership and the opportunity to learn how campaigns function.

The campaign has only collected 700 of the 3,000 signatures needed to put Yoon on the September ballot, where he would compete with four-time incumbent Mayor Thomas M. Menino and fellow councilor Michael Flaherty. Yoon said the remaining signatures would be collected by the end of next week.

Currently serving his second term as a Boston city councilor at-large, Yoon is the first Asian American ever to hold that position, and the first to run for any public office in Boston.

Despite the historic nature of his campaign, few of the students interviewed were familiar with his platform before yesterday’s event.

Attendees, about two thirds of whom were Asian American, were divided over the importance of Yoon’s heritage.

“It’s huge,” said Allison J. Rhee, a Northeastern student attending the event. “[His being Asian American] is one of the only reasons we knew his name,” she said.

But other students at the event said they were more interested in Yoon’s positions—such as a promise to bring more transparency to Boston government—than his ethnicity.

Yoon said he had been prompted to run for the council during an effort to secure land for low-income housing in Chinatown.

“I asked myself, ‘what if there had been just one Asian at City Hall or in the State House?’” Yoon said.

During his speech, Yoon yielded the floor to Harvard students representing an initiative to bring a temporary storefront library to Chinatown, a neighborhood which has lacked a library since 1956.

Weijie Huang ’09, at the Kong to promote the library project, said that although Cambridge residents cannot vote in Boston elections, he thought last night’s event was important because it reached a student population that sends many volunteers to Boston through the Phillips Brooks House Association.

Yoon, who moved to Boston in the 1990s, served as housing director for the nonprofit Asian Community Development Corporation before running for office in 2005.

—Staff writer Sarah J. Howland can be reached at showland@fas.harvard.edu.