Growing up in a multigenerational household in Hong Kong, I watched my mother and aunt rearrange our three-bedroom apartment around my grandparents as they aged. Handrails went into the shower. Adjustable beds replaced the old ones. Eight of us shared that space—crowded, complicated, and never once in question. In Chinese, we have a word for this: 孝, xiao, filial piety. But for my family, we didn’t call it anything. It was just what you did.
Across AANHPI communities in Washington and beyond, that instinct takes many forms. A parent moves in. A daughter adjusts her work hours. A grandchild learns which foods their grandfather can and can’t eat anymore. Caregiving isn’t outsourced or scheduled around convenience — it’s woven into the fabric of daily life, passed down without ceremony from one generation to the next.
But what happens when someone needs that kind of care and the family can’t be there?
Chinh Vo knows. Seven years ago, a stroke caused a brain bleed that paralyzed his right arm and leg. He lives by himself. He cannot cook for himself. He tried home care agencies, but none fit his needs. And for nearly 18 months—stretching through the worst of COVID, when caregivers were afraid to enter anyone’s home—he went without. Family and friends helped where they could, but they were stretched thin themselves.
“I live by myself,” Vo said. “And it was just hard to find one.”
Eventually, his case manager at the Department of Social and Health Services suggested a different route: Carina, a Washington-based nonprofit platform that connects people eligible for state-funded home care with independent caregivers. Instead of waiting for an agency to assign someone, Vo could post a job listing himself, describing what he needed on his own terms.
He posted a listing. Within a month, he had responses. Within two months, he had a caregiver.
That was over five years ago. Since then, Vo has found multiple caregivers through Carina—all Vietnamese speakers, all through his own searching. When people ask why he doesn’t just go back to an agency, his answer is always the same.
“I just feel more comfortable being in control of who I find and who connects with me,” he said. “That’s very important with a caregiver.”
For Vo, that control means something specific. Because of his disability, he can’t cook — and finding a caregiver who can make his culture’s food is about more than nutrition.
“Finding someone who can cook my food, my culture’s food—that was important to me,” he said. “To feel like it’s close to home, close to my mom. My caregiver made me braised pork and things that were familiar to me. That made me feel really good.”
Before Lunar New Year, there is a tradition of tidying the house—washing clothes, cleaning, getting everything organized. With a Vietnamese caregiver, Vo doesn’t have to explain what needs to be done or why.
“Having a caregiver who understands that and knows what needs to be done—that helps without having to explain too much,” he said. “To me, that’s a wonderful asset.”
Linh Nguyen understands that connection from the other side. She came to the United States from Vietnam in 2024, still learning English, and saw caregiving as meaningful work she could do well while finding her footing. The hardest part was finding people who needed her.
“I just stay at home—I don’t know who needs me,” she said.
When she found Carina, that changed. She built a profile—her availability, her interests, things about herself—and clients started reaching out. One was a Vietnamese-speaking client, and the relationship became something she hadn’t expected: while she cares for him, he has been helping her practice English. And beyond the practical, she knows what it means to work with someone who truly shares your world.
“When I work with Vietnamese clients, we have the same culture—we can share food together, I can cook for them, we can talk about our culture,” she said. “It’s like being in a community.”
In early 2026, Carina expanded its platform from 3 languages to 13—adding Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Khmer, Arabic, Farsi, and others—based on data showing which languages were most commonly spoken by home care workers across Washington state. Nguyen had found her way through the English-language platform on her own. The language expansion opens that door for the many others who could not.
“When someone can search for a caregiver in the languages they’re most comfortable in, they’re not just getting information—they’re gaining access to dignity and safety for their family,” said Nidhi Mirani, Carina’s CEO.
These connections matter now more than they ever have. Washington’s AANHPI community is one of the fastest-growing in the state, and as the population ages, more families are navigating care for the first time. But one in three Asian American adults has limited English proficiency, according to Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and most of the infrastructure for finding home care—agency referral lists, government databases, online tools—was built in English, for English-speaking families.
In home care, that isn’t an abstract barrier. It’s the difference between a caregiver who knows to tidy the house before Lunar New Year without being asked and one who doesn’t understand what you need.
Kandie Luo has watched the interplay of culture and care across three generations of her own family. She grew up in a medical household—her father a doctor, her mother a nurse—and developed an early affinity for elders and their stories. Today, she has been a caregiver for 12 years and serves as Vice President of the AAPI Caucus of SEIU 775, which represents long-term care workers across Washington, Montana, and Alaska.
She also coordinates care for her own mother. Keeping her mother at home isn’t just practical—it reflects a value she sees echoed across the communities she serves.
“Being able to stay at home is very important to my mom,” she said. “She feels safer and has more freedom. I think that is also true for a lot of Asian families.”
For Luo, the question has never been whether families should be at the center of care—it’s whether caregivers are supported well enough to sustain it. Through her union, SEIU 775, caregivers in Washington have won wages and benefits that are rare in the industry: wages starting above $22 an hour, health insurance, paid time off, and retirement. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics , home care aides earn about $16 an hour on average and annual turnover approaches 80 percent. When someone like Nguyen finds work through Carina in Washington, they are finding a union job—and for Luo, that infrastructure isn’t separate from the caregiving. It’s what makes it sustainable.
“When workers have good jobs, people get good care,” said Nidhi Mirani, Carina’s CEO.
Luo’s older daughter lives with a disability and has used Carina to find caregivers on her own — something that, as a mother, she doesn’t take for granted.
“Knowing that there is a tool my daughter can use to find caregivers by herself gives me peace of mind,” she said. “I really love doing this work because I know I am contributing to my community.”
Washington is beginning to build new infrastructure around this reality. The WA Cares Fund, a first-in-the-nation public long-term care insurance program, launches statewide this summer—giving residents a new benefit to help pay for services and supports as they age. But funding alone doesn’t close the gap if the systems people use to find care don’t work in the languages they speak.
Vo thinks often about people in his community who have to navigate caregiving systems in a second language, at moments when everything already feels hard.
“To have the ability to understand services in your own language definitely helps a lot,” he said. “And finding caregivers who speak your language is tremendous because of the cultural familiarity—things they understand within your culture.”
Five years in, he’s still advocating for the platform that changed his experience of care. Not because someone asked him to, but because he remembers what it was like to go without—and what it felt like when someone finally showed up who understood what he needed before he had to explain it. A meal that tastes like home. A house tidied for the new year. The quiet act of being known.
“I continue to advocate for it because I’ve had success with it,” Vo said.
At its best, that is what caregiving has always been in AANHPI communities: not a service arranged around what’s available, but an extension of family—offered in the language you dream in, with the understanding that one day, someone will do the same for you.
Jocelyn Moore is a communications professional at Carina, a nonprofit that connects people who need home care with independent caregivers in Washington and Oregon. She immigrated from Hong Kong and writes about caregiving, community, and the AANHPI experience. To learn more about Carina, visit carina.org.
