SOMEWHERE ON A narrow Chinatown street there's a cramped single-room-occupancy hotel with a nine-by-nine white-walled room that Lily Wu, her husband, and their three-year-old son call home.

When she describes the apartment, Wu keeps her expression carefully composed, but her body tells another story. With her arms folded in her lap, Wu, a slight woman with long black hair and olive skin, leans forward in her chair and grips her hands into tight fists. A crimson shade slowly creeps into her cheeks.

"You wouldn't believe what it's like," she says through a translator. "Some rooms have two children and two parents. It's very cramped, with things piled everywhere. The children are ashamed.... You wouldn't have imagined our lives to be like this."

Speaking in her native Taisanese (a Cantonese dialect), Wu says she won't disclose exactly where she lives because she's afraid of what her landlord might do. The 28-year old and her family share a hotel kitchen and bathroom with more than a dozen other residents.

"We all have to take turns," she says. "And the hygiene is not good."

While they may be difficult, the Wu family's living conditions aren't so unusual. Theirs are the kind of cramped quarters new immigrants often find when they enter this city – and they accept them with the hope that better conditions will come, once they can save a little money.

But what Wu and her husband have found is that the dream of moving into a larger apartment is unreachable for now. When she first moved here in 1998, she says, she worked in a Chinese restaurant for $6.75 an hour. Her husband is an electrical contractor, making $12 an hour whenever there's work. These days, with the Bush economy taking its toll, Wu's former employer no longer has hours for her, and her husband's employment is very unstable.

So, after taxes, the young couple pull in less than $1,000 each month. Half of that pays the rent, part of the rest goes to help support their parents, who also live in Chinatown SROs. What's left over – and there's not all that much left over – buys food, health care, and electricity. They stopped shopping for new clothes some time ago, Wu says.

The Wus are hardly alone. UC Berkeley professor and labor economist Michael Reich estimates that 54,000 people hold down low-wage jobs in San Francisco, working either at or near the state minimum hourly wage of $6.75, as Wu has. Forty percent of those people are Asian American, according to an analysis of census data by proponents of Proposition L, the fall ballot measure designed to increase the minimum wage within city limits.

Living in San Francisco on such a small salary may seem impossible. It's not – if you squeeze into a tiny apartment like the Wus' and tighten your belt. Most of the time, Wu says, she chooses her groceries with fastidious caution, only buying the cheapest vegetables and fish. She says she's looking for work; if she finds it, she's lucky to have relatives who will watch her son so she won't have to pay for child care. In the meantime, she's training through a City College of San Francisco course to become a janitor.

Wu's vision of her future, once full of optimism, is somewhat grim. "I don't have too many expectations in San Francisco," she says. "The housing costs have gone up. I've thought about moving to other places, but I've lived here for so long, and it's difficult for me to move away."

The hardest part is finding hope for her son. In her current home she has to keep him away from the walls, because a community doctor has warned her that the old lead paint is poisonous. But that's essentially an impossible task with a toddler.

"It is very stressful," Wu says. "My child is so young. He just started his life, and it's already so difficult for him."