The insurgent progressive and former diplomat is running for congress on a promise to put Queens’ working families first.
BY COLE SINANIAN
cole@queensledger.com
Take an afternoon stroll down Roosevelt Avenue and amongst the street vendors selling momos and tamales, you may run into Chuck Park, a 40-year-old former foreign service officer running for New York’s 6th Congressional District, which includes Flushing, Elmhurst, Forest Hills, Maspeth, Middle Village, Kew Gardens, Bayside, and parts of Woodside.
If not, you’ll surely see his Instagram reels, in which he looks directly into the camera, often while walking, and delivers blistering, highly quotable condemnations of the Trump Administration, corporate super PACs, or his opponent, the incumbent centrist Democrat Grace Meng.
“Hey Representative Meng, let’s break the ICE,” he says in one. “A few months ago, you signed on to this resolution, thanking ICE. A whole lot’s happened since then.”
It was this clip, which goes on to show a montage of brutality by federal agents, that first caught the attention of Thuy Petersen, a mom of three who described herself as, until recently, largely apolitical due to her sense that most politicians are bought by corporate and foreign lobbyists.
But not unlike those of Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the slew of insurgent progressives challenging incumbent Democrats from the left, Park’s campaign was, to Petersen, a breath of fresh air. It’s grassroots and laser-focused on ending foreign wars, boosting social welfare, abolishing ICE, and getting big money out of politics — an appealing message to those who’ve felt squeezed by an ever-rising cost of living and abandoned by the Democratic establishment as federal agents kidnap immigrant schoolchildren and war rages on in Iran, largely on the behalf of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government in Israel.
“You can’t make decisions for the people you represent when you are accountable to the people that give you money,” said Petersen, who’s now a volunteer for Park’s campaign. “With Chuck, I felt like here’s someone who is brave enough to stand up for what he believes in.”
In person, Park is energetic, tan and clean-cut. During an interview at the Queen’s Ledger’s Sunnyside office, he was quick to admit his black corduroy-lined jacket was in fact a Uniqlo knockoff of a designer brand.
One of five, Park was raised by Korean immigrants in Woodside. Back then his parents sold jackets and jeans on Canal Street in Manhattan. When ICE raided Chinatown last October, Park couldn’t help but see his own family’s experience in the merchants facing down armored vehicles and masked men in military fatigues.
“That’s where my dad used to sell T-shirts,” Park said as tears welled in his eyes. “I get so angry just thinking about it. When I see them grabbing a dude, they’re grabbing my dad. They are destroying our stories before they can even start.”
Park’s congressional run is an attempt to channel his anger into something productive. When ICE detained a seven-year-old elementary school student in Elmhurst with her mother last August, a chorus of elected officials issued statements calling for her swift return. But Representative Meng said only that her team had contacted the family and “we are seeking more details.”
The next day, Park filed his candidacy with his wife as treasurer.
“They murdered Alex Pretti and Renee Good,” Park said. “They’re shooting high school kids in the face with pepper spray, point blank. That needs to be wiped clean. I want to abolish ICE. That is a clear difference between me and my opponent.”
“A New Beginning”
Park studied economics at the University of Pennsylvania and got a consulting job in Manhattan after graduation. Politics wasn’t a huge part of Park’s life until Barack Obama started campaigning for the presidency in 2007. At the time, Park saw Obama’s rhetoric as the embodiment of the optimism that underpins the American Dream. Park cited Obama’s landmark “A New Beginning” speech in Cairo in 2009, during which the president confronted historic tensions with the Islamic world and vowed to fix them, as an expression of this optimism.
Inspired enough to take the foreign service exam and begin a career abroad, Park worked first in Juarez, Mexico at the US consulate, processing immigrant visas. He described sitting on the other side of a pane of bulletproof glass and speaking to Americans who also grew up in Queens, who spoke no Spanish, but whose parents had brought them across the border as children and had to return to Mexico to process their US citizenship requests.
“It definitely taught me in a very personal way how broken and stupid our immigration laws are,” he said. “What the hell are the two of us doing on the opposite side of this window? We have the same exact freaking story.”
After Juarez, Park worked in Portugal and Canada before returning to the US in 2019. By this point, Donald Trump was president and the hopefulness of the Obama era felt distant, Park said. The US government, despite Obama’s wishes expressed in “A New Beginning,” was not the force for good Park had wanted it to be.
Forever Wars
Nowadays, as Trump and Netanyahu’s war brings destruction to Iran and costs America billions, the notion that the US government’s actions abroad are in the best interest of Americans seems far from reach, Park said. As he sees it, broadly popular welfare programs like universal healthcare and childcare won’t be possible until politicians stop taking money from weapons manufacturers and foreign-interest lobbies like the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
“They’re burning through a billion dollars a day for bombs and missiles from Palestine to Iran to Caracas, instead of spending that billion dollars a day to take care of our own sick here in the United States, in Queens in New York City,” Park said.
“There’s no confusion among the Democratic base,” he continued. “We want health care and child care. We don’t want to be engaged in these endless wars overseas. It’s our leadership that’s not meeting the moment.”
Despite his progressive politics, Park has been passed over for key endorsements. In a rare break with its membership, the Working Families Party’s top state officers opted not to endorse Park in this cycle, even though 90% of its local chapter voted to back him.
Seeking an endorsement from the Democratic Socialists of America, meanwhile, is off the table for Park. Although he’s attended DSA meetings and aligns with the organization’s values, he is not a dues-paying member and, as he put it, doesn’t want to “pop up and be considered a poser.”
Still, Park’s grassroots approach remains popular among working families in his district. For Petersen, he’s the only candidate that seems truly willing to listen.
“People are really tired of being ignored,” she said. “People are really tired of struggling for the benefit of the wealthiest and corporations. Capitalism is wonderful until it’s not. So I think that’s the effect that we’re seeing. People are just tired of having to struggle while the interests of the uber rich continue to be the priority.”
