Over three decades, she has risen before dawn seven days a week, loaded up her vehicle with coffee and doughnuts and trekked to camps up and down the coast where homeless people congregate. She repeats the routine with evening meals.

In addition to food, Ms. Chinn is known for delivering tough talk.

“I love them. I am honest with them,” she said of her approach. “I tell them: ‘How much longer am I going to live on this earth? You’ve got to learn how to take care of yourself.’”

Ms. Chinn, 69, who had no formal education, said her meal deliveries are financed largely by her Social Security and retirement pay as a former schools employee. Her husband, Leung Chinn, a retired physics professor at Humboldt State University, also helps.

She said she is driven by empathy forged during extraordinary hardship in childhood.

As a girl in the 1960s, she spent years on the streets, she said, after her family was targeted during China’s Cultural Revolution. Her father fled their hometown and her mother was imprisoned.

She became mute, she said, and eventually made her way to California to reunite with an older sibling.