Dr. Lucinda Lee Katz was born and raised in North Beach, San Francisco, CA adjacent to Chinatown proper, where she spent her K-12 years attending San Francisco's public schools. Throughout her K-12 education, her peers were primarily Chinese, but she never had a Chinese teacher. She attended Chinese school every day after school and on Saturdays through her senior year in high school, yielding a higher level of Cantonese proficiency. As a member of the National Teacher Corps (1965-1968), she earned a Master's degree in teaching while also serving as a teaching intern at a public elementary school. Stationed at Jean Parker Elementary in San Francisco's Chinatown for her first teaching assignment, she was thrust into running parent-teacher conferences that semester as her master teacher was ill. She met Mrs. Lau, the mother of Kinney Kimmon Lau, who was the main plaintiff in "Lau v. Nichols" (1974). At the time, the language of instruction at the school was English only. Throughout this interview, Lucinda illuminates how the advocacy of Mrs. Lau led her to be transformed by the justice orientation of a bilingual education model.