Rose Lim Luey
Chinese American Public Health Nurse
Rose Lim Luey was born in Oakland in 1929 and is the daughter of Chinese immigrants. When her parents arrived from rural China in the 1920s, they opened a laundry where Rose began to work since the age of six sorting socks. She began her nursing career in 1951 when she became one of the first Chinese-American students to attend Samuel Merritt Hospital School of Nursing. The California diploma school began in 1909 and affiliated with local colleges to provide science and liberal arts courses (the diploma program transitioned to a Baccalaureate program in 1981, in line with national nursing education trends at that time).
Rose held a variety of nursing roles during her 65 year career, and also left nursing during periods to care for her three children. She served as a bilingual public health nurse with Alameda County Health Care Services and was a founding member of Asian Health Services. She also became a disaster nurse chair with the Oakland, California chapter of the American Red Cross, where she volunteered for 20 years. She served as a public health nurse at the end of the Vietnam War to meet first arrivals of Vietnamese at Oakland airport and facilitate their health care. In 1972 she was honored as Oakland’s Mother of the Year and in 1984 she managed Alameda County’ prenatal Hepatitis B vaccination program.
After she retired, she stayed connected with Samuel Merritt School of Nursing by volunteering at a monthly podiatry clinic in an Oakland community center. Nursing students and retired public health nurses also used the clinic to distribute free shoes and clothing to low-income and homeless patients. In 2008 she and her husband created an endowed fund to award scholarships at the school and in 2017, at the age of 87, she became the first alumna to participate in the Samuel Merritt series of oral histories established to “showcase the trailblazing role played by healthcare professionals of color in Oakland.” In her talk, she encouraged nurses with a second language to keep it up. She died at the age of 90 in 2019.
Sources
We sourced information for Rose’s bio from Samuel Merritt University, Nurse Journal, and Triage Staffing.
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Know Your History
- Nursing CLIO to engage with historians and scholars committed to deep work around historical accuracy in healthcare and nursing.
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Examine Bias
- NurseManifest to attend live zoom sessions with fellow nurses on nursing’s overdue reckoning on racism or to sign their pledge.
- Breaking Bias in Healthcare, an online course created by scientist Anu Gupta, to learn how bias is related to our brain’s neurobiology and can be mitigated with mindfulness.
- Revolutionary Love Learning Hub provides free tools for learners and educators to use love as fuel towards ourselves, our opponents, and to others so that we can embody a world where we see no strangers.
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- National Coalition for Ethnic Minority Nurse Association to stay engaged with topics relevant to nurses of color.
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