[Updating] The first bicycle Eva Lin ever rode was not hers.
It belonged to someone else in the rural village in Fujian Province, China, where she grew up — a place, she remembers, that did not have indoor running water until she was about 7 years old. When a neighbor finally let her climb onto the seat, she felt something she had not felt before.
“It was such a thrill,” Lin said in written responses to Pasadena Now. “I felt so free.”
That borrowed thrill, transported across an ocean and across nearly four decades, is the through-line of a quiet Pasadena tradition that has now distributed more than 1,000 bicycles to local children.
On Saturday morning, May 16, Lin and a corps of volunteers will assemble 100 more at Victory Park, from 9:30 a.m. to noon — the latest installment of the Eva Lin Team’s Charity Bike Build, which she has hosted twice a year, in spring and December, since 2018.
No prior experience is required to help. Wrenches and instructions will be on hand. So will the children.
A Mother’s Idea, Tested on Day One
Lin, a broker associate at Lin Realty Group operating under EXP Realty, started the bike build in 2018, the year her daughter Olivia was born. The two events arrived together — the daughter and the idea — and she does not separate them.
“2018 was the year I became a mother,” she said.
The plan, she said, took shape as she was learning about “the amazing work Hillsides does and the unbelievable resilience of the children they serve.” Hillsides, founded in Pasadena in 1913, provides foster care, behavioral health treatment, and family support services to children and families across Los Angeles County.
The first event, held on the Hillsides campus, did not match the picture Lin had carried in her head. She had expected joyful anticipation as children were sized for their new bikes. Instead, she encountered the full range of human reaction: some delight, some neutrality, some skepticism.
“This gave me an insight into how important it is to show extra love and care for the kids in our community who face big challenges at a young age,” she said.
Hillsides confirmed the inaugural build in a 2018 release, recording 50 bicycles donated to children living in the nonprofit’s residential treatment program, with the bikes presented as holiday gifts and the remainder given on Christmas.
A Pause, and Then a Larger Ambition
The builds were paused in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. They resumed in the summer of 2021 at Brookside Park, where 50 bikes were assembled for children in transitional foster care at Hillsides — described at the time as the fourth such build Lin’s team had held. A May 2022 build benefited 100 Hillsides children.
That December, at Victory Park, the team built 150 bicycles for the Boys & Girls Club of Pasadena — the largest single build to that point. Roughly 30 volunteers turned out, many of them members of the San Marino Boy Scouts Troop, according to Lin’s husband and business partner, Joe Rock.
“We have our own little girls, and just knowing that there are kids in the community that don’t have the same opportunities, and maybe never even had a bicycle or have the opportunity to have a bicycle, is something that we thought created a great opportunity for us to do something special,” Rock told Pasadena Now in the wake of that build.
A May 2024 build wrapped at Victory Park with thanks to Wish for Wheels, Big Brother Big Sister, and Foothill Family.
A Good Problem
By her own count, the cumulative total now exceeds 1,000 bikes — a number that has, paradoxically, made the next bike harder to give away.
“Because we’ve given out well over 1,000 bikes, sometimes our contacts will say, ‘Thank you but we’re still good from the last time! Try us again in 6 months,'” Lin said. “I think it’s a great problem to have when we need to expand our search.”
It is the kind of problem that arrives only after a long enough run. Lin immigrated to the United States at 13 with her two sisters, joining their parents, who were building a restaurant business. She has written elsewhere of learning English as fast as she could, splitting her hours between community college and her mother’s business, and later working three jobs to pay her way through the University of Southern California’s business entrepreneurship program. Her firm today reports more than $100 million in annual real estate sales.
She does not draw a straight line in public between the borrowed village bike and the boxes of new ones stacked each May and December at Victory Park. But she does not need to. The line is the event itself — a child, a wrench, a stranger willing to help, and a bicycle that, for the first time, belongs to the rider.
If You Go
- What: Eva Lin Team’s Charity Bike Build
- When: Saturday, May 16, 2026, 9:30 a.m. to noon
- Where: Victory Park, Pasadena
- Who: Volunteers and community members welcome; no experience required
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