We are two months away from the conference and the Secretariat looks forward to seeing you in Austin. Here are important reminders:

 

*A DRAFT (as of 2/3/10) of the conference schedule is now available for viewing. http://www.aaastudies.org/2010/schedule/2010ConferenceSchedule.pdf. Please contact Pia Sengsavanh at piaseng@illinois.edu by February 19th if there are any errors you need corrected.

 

Only requests for corrections (names, titles, affiliations, etc) will be considered. Any corrections requested after the 19th will be listed in the conference addendum.  NO changes to or shifts in the days/times of panels will be made.

 

*Booking your travel? Don’t forget that the conference workshops and sessions start on Wednesday, April 7th at 2:30 pm.  The first conference plenary begins on Thursday, April 8th from 8:30 am - 10:00 am and will feature Gail Nomura, Gary Okihiro, Shirley Hune, Davianna McGregor, and Rick Bonus. For more information on the conference schedule, go to http://aaastudies.org/2010/schedule/2010ConferenceSchedule.pdf

 

* When calling the conference hotel (Omni Hotel in Downtown Austin), you must say that you are a part of the AAAS 2010 conference in order to get the conference room discount. Staying at the conference hotel has its perks - one of them is FREE INTERNET in your rooms as long as you join (FOR FREE) their Omni Rewards Program when you check into the hotel (or before then).  Conference attendees staying at the hotel also are allowed FREE access to the fitness facility and pool. For more information on the hotel, please go to http://www.omnihotels.com/FindAHotel/AustinDowntown.aspx

 

*All conference presenters MUST register by the March 1, 2010 OR your name will not appear in the conference book.  There are no exceptions to this. There is significant savings if you register by March 1st so we encourage everyone to do this. For the registration page, please go to

http://aaastudies.org/2010/registration/index.php

 

*Tours are filling up fast. Please make sure you sign up for those by March 1st. Space is not guaranteed for individuals who sign up for tours after that date.

 

*Discounts are available to AAAS members for the Super Shuttle from Austin-Bergstrom International Airport to the Omni Hotel from 4/3/10 - 4/12/10. You can enter the group discount code - PKQ94 for your roundtrip reservation online or go to http://www.supershuttle.com/default.aspx?GC=PKQ94

Cheers -

Anna Gonzalez and Pia Sengsavanh

 

Welcome to Austin! the live music capital of the world, home to the Austin City Limits and South-by-Southwest music festivals, Willie Nelson, Lance Armstrong, and the Whole Foods flagship store.  Our conference convenes at the Omni Downtown Austin, a few blocks from the bar and music venues of Sixth Street and the Lady Bird Johnson Hike & Bike trail rimming Lake Travis.  It is in this venue that the Association for Asian American Studies will come together for our annual meeting and reflect on our past as well as the future of our field.

 

Below, you will find special events that will help you experience Austin. These events are open to those who register to the conference as well as their guests, partners, and family members.

 

Registration for these events can be submitted along with the conference registration form online at http://aaastudies.org/2010/registration/index.php. Don’t forget registration deadlines for the conference. Early bird registration ends ON March 1, 2010.  ALL PAPER PRESENTERS AND PANELISTS MUST REGISTER BY THEN IN ORDER TO PARTICIPATE IN THE CONFERENCE.

 

 

Tour of East Austin

 

It’s true enough that Austin is a progressive city; some describe it as a “little blue oasis in a big red state.” And yet when it comes to matters of urban displacement and segregation its history is as fraught and complex as any other. This is a guided tour of the Eastside — home to Austin’s largest concentration of Mexican American and African American residents. The Eastside offers lessons on community-resilience and the creation of alternative institutions despite legacies of segregation and displacement. This tour will cover many of the celebrated sites of the Eastside: churches, community and cultural centers, parks and the ethnic commercial strips. The tour will also include a presentation of the changing racial composition and geography of Austin in light of new immigration, rapid urban development and gentrification.

 

The tour will last 90 minutes and cost about $8 for transportation.  Scheduled for Friday afternoon, April 9, 2010.

 

 

Zilker Botanical Garden

2220 Barton Springs Rd

Austin, TX 78746

 

Located on 30 acres, the Zilker Botanical Garden is known as the “jewel in the heart of Austin.” With rose, herb, and Japanese gardens interspersed among waterfalls, streams, and Koi ponds, the Zilker Botanical Garden provides visitors a natural and nature-filled refuge. In particular, the Taniguchi Japanese Garden, which occupies three acres, features two ponds and a Togetsu-kyo bridge (”Bridge to Walk Over the Moon”). The garden is named after retired Stockton, California farmer Isamu Taniguchi who spent 18 months designing and transforming the rugged landscape. The garden opened to the public in 1969. This guided tour will take approximately 2 hours and is estimated to cost $6 per person, transportation by shared taxi included.  Scheduled for 1:30-3:30 Thursday, April 8, 2010.

 

http://www.zilkergarden.org/gardens/oriental.html

 

 

Harry Ransom Center / The University of Texas at Austin

 

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin holds extensive collections of rare books, manuscripts, photography, film, art, and the performing arts.  Focused on advancing the study of arts and humanities through the acquisition and preservation of original cultural materials, the Harry Ransom Center houses the Gutenberg Bible, the first photograph, and a rich archive of first-edition manuscripts. The Center’s film holdings are the focus of an exhibition titled, “Making Movies” (February 2 - August 1, 2010), which features iconic Hollywood star photographs, Gone with the Wind costumes and storyboards (including Scarlett’s “curtain dress”), Gloria Swanson’s annotated script for Sunset Boulevard, and Robert De Niro’s costumes from past films. The Center’s film collection contains over 10,000 radio, television, and radio scripts, 15,000 posters and lobby cards, and over one million photographs.  This guided tour, which will include collection materials relevant to Asian Pacific American Studies, will take approximately 2 hours and requires only transport costs: $2 by bus or $3 by shared taxi.

 

Scheduled for 1:30-3:30 Friday, April 9, 2010.

 

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu

 

 

LBJ Library and Museum

2313 Red River Street

Austin, TX 78705

 

The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum houses forty five million pages of historical documents (inclusive of the former president’s entire public career). One of thirteen presidential libraries administered by the National Archives and Records Administration, the LBJ Library and Museum includes coins, stamps, Oval Office furniture, personal presidential items (owned by the former president and former First Lady), and a collection of four thousand editorial cartoons from all facets of LBJ’s presidency and political career. Additionally, the LBJ Library and Museum showcases over ten thousand items of political memorabilia from George Washington’s inauguration to the present day.

 

Admission is free. Self-guided tours are about 90 minutes.  Shared taxis are about $6.60 per person and buses are also convenient.

 

http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/

 

 

Whole Foods Cooking Demo and Tour

 

Austin is home to the Whole Foods flagship store, centrally located at the intersection of Sixth St. and Lamar.  Enjoy a one-hour, three-course cooking demonstration of Tex-Mex cuisine at their cooking academy followed by a self-guided tour of this organic products paradise which includes a chocolate fountain, bars dedicated to cheese, beer, barbeque, and raw food dishes.

 

Estimated time for this demo and tour is 3 hours.  Estimated costs are $27 which includes a three-course meal and transportation by shared taxi.  This tour may be cancelled if NOT ENOUGH INDIVIDUALS ARE enrolled.  Scheduled for 11-2 Saturday April 10, 2010.

 

http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/stores/lamar/

 

http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/stores/lamar-culinarycenter/

 

 

 

Re-SEAing SouthEast Asian American Studies

Memories & Visions: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

 

San Francisco State University

March 10-11, 2011

Call for papers

The third tri-annual interdisciplinary Southeast Asians in the Diaspora conference will take place at San Francisco State University. The San Francisco Bay Area is home to sizable populations of Burmese, Cambodian, Filipino, Hmong, Indonesian, Lao, Malaysian, Singaporean, Thai, and Vietnamese Americans. This conference will foreground the large Southeast Asian American communities of the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, and the Pacific Northwest, as well as continue to build momentum and grow just as the Southeast Asian American demographics increase in size and visibility here in the U.S. and in particular, on the West Coast.

 

The main objectives of this conference are:

· to encourage the interdisciplinary and comparative study of Southeast Asian

American peoples and their communities;

· to promote national and international cooperation in the field;

· to establish partnerships between academia and the community.

 

This two-day conference explores memories (e.g., memories of homeland; memories of war; memories of childhood and growing up American; historical memories; embodied memories; intergenerational memories; technologies of memories; and imagined/created memories) and visions (actual sightings and sites of Southeast Asian Americans and their communities, both real and imaginary). Because this conference takes place after the constitutionally mandated 2010 census, the focus will be on locating/situating Southeast Asian American Studies for the 21^st century.

 

The conference invites proposals for panels, workshops, and individual papers from all disciplines and fields of study that explore the dialectical relationship between memories and visions related to the following topics:

· Southeast Asian American health and wellness;

· Southeast Asian American social justice;

· Southeast Asian American and critical pedagogy;

· Southeast Asian American youth cultures;

· Southeast Asian American folklore, folklife, and religions;

· Southeast Asian American families, relationships, and communities;

· Southeast Asian American queer cultures and spaces;

· Southeast Asian American sexualities;

· Southeast Asian Americans of mixed heritage/race;

· Southeast Asian American transnationality, transnationalization, and transnationalism;

· Sino-Southeast Asian Americans;

· Explorations of how artists (writers, filmmakers, visual artists) “see” and envision themselves and their communities as Southeast Asian Americans;

· the location and relationship of Southeast Asia to Southeast Asian America;

· the shifting demographics of Southeast Asian Americans vis-à-vis (in)visibility.

Papers will also be considered on any related topics in Southeast Asian American Studies.

250 word abstracts should be submitted by June 15, 2010 to Dr. Jonathan H. X. Lee at jlee@sfsu.edu with the following information: a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, and d) abstract with title.

All papers will go through an internal review process and decisions regarding acceptance of papers for the conference will be communicated by October 15, 2010.

 

Information on pervious conferences:

 

1^st 2005 at University of California, Riverside

http://www.international.ucla.edu/asia/events/showevent.asp?eventid=3062

 

2^nd 2008 at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

http://www.aasp.uiuc.edu/seasiandiaspora/2008/schedule.html

 

Jonathan H. X. Lee, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University
Department of Asian American Studies
1600 Holloway Ave, EP 103
San Francisco, CA 94132

Our Secretariat, currently based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recently informed your officers that our association has reached a membership roster that now exceeds 1,000.  I am extremely pleased to share that news with you.  Just two years ago, we had a membership count of less than 760, but because of the hardworking and proactive efforts of our officers, secretariat staff and volunteers, conference organizers, and the Johns Hopkins University Press administration, our community is now, more than ever, expansive and robust in terms of our reach and character.  On behalf of your officers, I would like to thank you for the remarkable energy you invest in the sustenance of our collective and I encourage you to stay connected and engaged in the activities of our association.

The growth of our collective coincides ironically with and despite the significant downturns of local and global economies. These conditions are now considerably affecting the larger and deeper contexts of our academic lives, ranging from tuition hikes that will definitely reduce access to schools for many of us and our allies, to programmatic budget cuts that will erode at the ways we nurture our field.  Many of us are already struggling with salary deductions, and for those of us who hold unsecure positions, a bleak future looms.

It is not surprising that our association, organized around and through intersecting race-based struggles, is profoundly entangled in this challenging set of events.  We are, after all, fundamentally a set of communities of color whose historical formation as well as contemporary labors simultaneously constitute and resist our society’s political, economic, and social arrangements.  In this spirit, therefore, and in this moment of our collective’s growth and struggle, I would like to enlist your help in expressing our solidarity with and support of those who are taking action against policies that will threaten access to and retention within public higher education, particularly those who are on the campuses of the University of California system.  Their fortunes and struggles are intimately tied to us, and I think it is this moment that they need our community’s increasing strength to address the forces that threaten our schools’ commitments to access and social justice.

In solidarity,

Rick Bonus

President

Association for Asian American Studies

 

 

Ronald Takaki, 1939-2009

The Asian American Studies program expresses its profound sorrow at the loss of Ronald Takaki, world-renowned Asian American scholar and public intellectual. He had retired in 2002. After struggling for almost two decades with multiple sclerosis, he died by his own hand on May 26, 2009.

Born on April 12, 1939 in Honolulu, Takaki was the descendent of a sugar plantation laborer who migrated to Hawaii from Japan in the late 19th century. His father died when he was seven years old, so he and his two siblings were raised by his mother and his Chinese stepfather, who operated a Chinese restaurant in Honolulu. In his later years, Takaki would talk about how he had enjoyed surfing more than studying until a Japanese American teacher at Iolani High School encouraged him apply to the College of Wooster in Ohio. At Wooster, he found himself regarded as a foreigner. He became interested in the study of American history. At Wooster, he met his wife Carol Rankin who, together with his three children and seven grandchildren, survive him.

After graduating in history in 1961, Takaki went on to UC Berkeley, where he earned Ph.D. in 1967 in American history with a dissertation on the history of slavery in the U.S. He was hired that year to teach African American history at UCLA. After being denied early tenure, he accepted a position beginning in 1972 in the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies program, which had emerged from the 1969 campus wide student strike. His classes were popular and well attended, and in 1981 he received a coveted Distinguished Teaching Award.

While he served as Chair of the Ethnic Studies Department from 1975 to 1977, Takaki helped craft an Ethnic Studies major. Later, he worked toward the establishment of an American Cultures requirement that all undergraduates take a course intended to broaden their understanding of racial and ethnic diversity. In the early 1980s, he also helped develop the nation’s first Ph.D. program in Comparative Ethnic Studies. During the past two decades, about 130 graduate students have earned doctoral degrees. They have gone on to become professors at virtually every UC campus. Ethnic Studies alumni can also be found teaching at many state universities in California and in other states from Hawaii and Washington to Delaware and Tennessee. They have also been placed at private universities around the country, from Cornell and NYU on the East Coast to Claremont and USC on the Pacific Coast.

A prodigious scholar, Takaki authored almost a dozen books between the early 1970s and 2002, including the critically acclaimed Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th Century America (1979). Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (1989) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and selected by the New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year and by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the best 100 non-fiction books of the 20th century. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993) won the American Book Award. Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (2000) was is the first major study of the “Greatest Generation” from the perspectives of our nation’s diverse racial and ethnic minorities. Like many of Takaki’s other works, this book focuses on the voices and viewpoints of ordinary people whose stories are commonly ignored. Takaki also wrote books and conducted workshops for K-12 educators. Indeed, his work has changed the way American history is taught. In 2002, he received the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, and in 2009, he was recognized by the Association for Asian American Studies with its Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Besides being awarded the Goldwin Smith University Lectureship and the Distinguished Messenger Lectureship at Cornell University in 1988 and 1993, he received honorary doctorates from Wheelock College, the College of Wooster, Macalester College, Northeastern University, the University of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts College of Art, and Whitman College. He was invited to lecture in Austria, the Netherlands, Armenia, Russia, South Africa, Japan, and New Zealand.

A prominent advocate of multicultural education, Takaki appeared on such national television programs as the NBC “Today Show,” ABC “This Week with David Brinkley,” CNN “International Hour,” “Cross Fire,” and the PBS “Jim Lehrer Newshour” to discuss issues of race, diversity, multiculturalism, and affirmative action. In 1997, he was asked to advise President Bill Clinton on his major speech on race. Between 1980 and 2004, he faced Nathan Glazer in public debates on the issue of affirmative action at five different universities. In 1997, the Council on Foreign Relations hosted a debate between Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Takaki at the opening plenary session of its conference on America’s diversity and America’s foreign policy.

The Asian American Studies program was honored to have worked with Ronald Takaki.

On behalf of all AAAS members, the AAAS Executive Board and the Editorial Board of the Journal of Asian American Studies, we would like to extend our heartfelt condolences to the family of the late Him Mark Lai. Often called “the dean of Chinese American history,” Professor Him Mark Lai was a self-trained pioneering scholar who worked avidly towards legitimizing Chinese American Studies. His selfless commitment to this field, and to the larger field of Asian American Studies, has made him a great role model for many scholars, teachers, and activists. He leaves a legacy of scholarship and service that will last for generations to come.

 

Rick Bonus

President

Association for Asian American Studies

 

 

————————————

Rick Bonus

Associate Professor

Dept. of American Ethnic Studies

Univ. of Washington

Seattle, WA  98195-4380

(206) 543-3929

 

On behalf of the executive board and the membership of the Association for Asian American Studies, including the editorial board of the Journal of Asian American Studies, I would like to join the communities of academics and activists who are mourning the loss of Prof. Ronald Takaki.  A most worthy recipient of our association’s most recent Lifetime Achievement Award, Prof. Takaki was a towering figure in Asian American Studies, having pioneered in vividly historicizing the presence of Asians in America, taught countless students in the most critical and inspiring ways, and mentored hundreds of teachers and scholars who themselves have emulated his leadership in many campuses.  His body of work, including his books, essays, lectures, as well as his distinguished record of service to countless communities and families within and outside of academia, represent a most generous legacy of scholarship and service that will hold so many of us in gratitude and admiration. 

 

Rick Bonus

President

Association for Asian American Studies

 

 

 

——————————————–

Rick Bonus

Associate Professor

Dept. of American Ethnic Studies

Univ. of Washington

Seattle, WA  98195-4380

(206) 543-3929

 

BERKELEY – Remembering Ron Takaki (AsianWeek) By Beleza Chan

It is with great sadness to announce that Professor Emeritus Ronald Takaki passed away on the evening of May 26th, 2009. He is survived by his wife, Carol Takaki, his three children Dana, Troy, and Todd Takaki, and his grandchildren.

Ron Takaki was one of the most preeminent scholars of our nation’s diversity, and considered “the father” of multicultural studies. As an academic, historian, ethnographer and author, his work helped dispel stereotypes of Asian Americans. In his study of multicultural people’s history in America, Takaki seeked to unite Americans, today and in the future, with each other and with the rest of the world.

He was a professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught over 20,000 students during 34 years of teaching.

Born in 1939, Professor Takaki was the grandson of immigrant Japanese plantation workers in Hawaii. He graduated from the College of Wooster, Ohio, in 1961. Six years later, after receiving his Ph.D. in American history from UC Berkeley, Takaki went to UCLA to teach its first Black history course.

As a Professor, Takaki hoped that his students would learn that skills of critical thinking and effective writing could be used in a revolutionary way. Epistemology, critical thinking, or in Takaki’s words “how do you know, you know, what you know about the America and the world you live in?” was a question Takaki posed to his students to challenge the way they looked at history, current policies, and even life.

In 1972, Professor Takaki returned to Berkeley to teach in the newly instituted Department of Ethnic Studies. His comparative approach to the study of race and ethnicity provided the conceptual framework for the B.A. program and the Ph.D. program in Comparative Ethnic Studies as well as for the university’s multicultural requirement for graduation, known as the American Cultures Requirement.

The Berkeley faculty has honored Professor Takaki with a Distinguished Teaching Award.

Takaki has lectured in Japan, Russia, Armenia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Austria, and South Africa.

He has debated Nathan Glazer and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. on issues such as affirmative action and multicultural education.

Takaki is a fellow of the Society of American Historians; its executive secretary, Mark Carnes stated that Takaki “has re-shaped American history.”

In 1997, Professor Takaki helped President Bill Clinton write his major speech on race, “One America in the 21st Century.”

Professor Takaki was the author of 12 books. Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th Century America has been critically acclaimed. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans has been selected by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the best 100 non-fiction books of the 20th century, and A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America is read on college campuses across the country and has over half a million copies in print.

AsianWeek will be running a series of articles on honoring and remembering Ronald Takaki on AsianWeek.com. If you would like to contribute with written pieces, pictures, or videos, feel free to contact Beleza Chan at belezachan@gmail.com

PLEASE PASS THIS ON TO PROMISING MASTER OF ARTS CANDIDATES!

FULLY-SUPPORTED MASTER OF ARTS
GRADUATE STUDENT POSITION IN A/PA ARCHIVES
Asian/Pacific/American Institute
New York University

GRADUATE STUDENT EMPLOYEE IN A/PA ARCHIVES:

The Graduate Student Employees in Archives at the A/P/A Institute (A/P/A) work on collection building efforts while simultaneously pursuing Master of Arts degrees in the Archives and Public History Program in the History Department at New York University. As part of A/P/A’s commitment to ongoing preservation, the grad student will help to create access to A/PA collections of the New York area. The student serves as a key resource person connecting A/P/A’s network of scholars, researchers, activists, archivists, librarians, artists, curators, and community members with archives.

The two-year MA Program is designed to give the graduate student practical experience in archives, in addition to a solid grounding in archival theory and historical scholarship. The grad student employee will work with both the A/P/A Institute and the Tamiment Library of NYU to survey, appraise, and process collections of the New York City area. The student will also aid in organizing the A/P/A Institute’s archives. The student will regularly meet with the Institute’s staff to discuss progress and expectations. The student works an average of 20 hours per week during each 14-week term. (Dates of appointment are 9/8/09-12/15/09 for Fall 2009, and expected to be 1/19/10-5/3/10 for Spring 2010.)

Archival management is an important and growing field with many employment opportunities in the New York area. Recent graduates have gone on to work at the United Nations Archives, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Rolling Stone Magazine, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Smithsonian Institution, American Civil Liberties Union, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, and Sports Illustrated. Graduates also work in the city and region’s many museums, libraries, and historical societies as well as in government and corporate archives. Graduates can expect starting salaries ranging from $40,000 to $50,000 depending on the institution.

A/P/A works closely with community members to facilitate the process of finding an accessible, permanent home for New York Metro region and East Coast Asian/Pacific American materials.

Past and current archives student employees have curated and published on “yellow peril” and artist social movement collections, been central in bringing in individual and organization collections, taught undergraduates, posted an archival blog, developed archival theory, and much more.

REQUIREMENTS:

o Bachelor’s Degree with a major or minor in Asian/Pacific American Studies preferred.
o Background knowledge or demonstrated interest in Asian/Pacific American history and community.
o Ability to take initiative and work independently and as part of a team.

SCHOLARSHIP:

The selected Graduate student employee receives 100% remission of tuition, fees, and student health insurance for full-time study in the History and Archival Management Program at NYU. For the 2009-2010 academic year, the monetary compensation for the 20 hours of work per week as of 18 May 2009 is still to be determined and applicants will be notified as soon as the information is available; however, as in the past, paychecks will be disbursed every two weeks between September 2009 and May 2010.

APPLICATION PROCESS:

Qualified applicants should contact Professor John Kuo Wei Tchen by email at apa.archives@nyu.edu with cover letter, resume and any additional relevant information no later than Sunday, June 7th, 2009; and if requested, apply to the MA in History and Archival Management Program at NYU online by Sunday, June 21st, 2009 at:

http://history.fas.nyu.edu/object/history.gradprog.archivespublichistory.html

For more information:

Archives and Public History Program:
http://history.fas.nyu.edu/object/history.gradprog.archivespublichistory.html

The Asian/Pacific/American Institute:
http://www.apa.nyu.edu/

May 22, 2009

UCLA Asian American Studies Center
Him Mark Lai: Dean of Chinese American History, Passes (1925-2009)

Him Mark Lai, the internationally noted scholar, writer, and “Dean of Chinese American History” was born on November 1, 1925 in San Francisco’s Chinatown.  His ten books, more than 100 essays, and research in English and Chinese on all aspects of Chinese American life are published and cited in the U.S., the Americas, China, Southeast Asia, and Australia.

Lai was a member of Amerasia Journal’s editorial board for more than 30 years and a contributing writer.  Among his works published by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press are: A History Reclaimed: An Annotated Bibliography of Chinese Language Materials on the Chinese of America (1986); in 2000 Amerasia  Journal published his autobiographical essay: “Musings of a Chinese American Historian.”

With the writer Ruthanne Lum McCunn, historian Judy Yung, and editor Russell C. Leong serving as the co-editors, the UCLA Asian American Center Press will be publishing his autobiography in 2009-2010.

* * *

Him Mark Lai was born in San Francisco Chinatown to immigrant parents from Nam Hoi District, Guangzhou, and attended local schools including Francisco Junior High, Nam Kue Chinese School, and was graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1947 with a degree in mechanical engineering and until his retirement worked for Bechtel Corporation.

In late 1949, he began volunteering for Chung Sai Yat Po, the first daily paper to support the People’s Republic of China, and became a member of organizations active in persuading students to return to China to serve the new government.  He also joined the Chinese American Democratic Youth League, more familiarly known as Mun Ching, where he met Laura Jung, a new immigrant, whom he married in 1953.

According to Ruthanne Lum McCunn:

“Lai joined the Chinese Historical Society of America soon after its founding in 1963.  These events, together with contemporaneous changes in the status of minorities spurred by the Civil Rights movement, led Lai towards developing a Chinese American identity, and in 1967, he accepted a proposal by Maurice Chuck, editor of the bilingual East/West, the Chinese American Weekly to write a series of articles on Chinese American history.  This marked the beginning of Lai’s career in reclaiming the Chinese/American experience-a fortuitous confluence of his passion for history and his deep commitment to his bicultural heritage and democratic principles.

His East/West articles-revised and annotated-became the cornerstone for the classic A History of the Chinese in California, A Syllabus, co-edited with Thomas W. Chin and Philip P. Choy, as well as the basis for the first Chinese American history course in the United States, which Lai team taught with Choy at San Francisco State College in Fall 1969 and which resulted in another classic Outlines: History of the Chinese in America.  Lai’s first scholarly essay, “A Historical Survey of Organizations of the Left Among the Chinese in America,” published in the Fall 1972 issue of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars-together with subsequent revisions-remains a standard reference.  So do Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island 1910-1940, co-authored/translated with Genny Lim and Judy Yung; Lai’s “Chinese on the Continental U.S.” in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups; his From Overseas Chinese to Chinese American: a History of the Development of Chinese during the Twentieth Century (in Chinese) and articles in the Encyclopedia of Chinese Overseas and Huaquiao Huaren baike quanshu [Encyclopedia of Chinese and people of Chinese descent overseas];  his studies of Chinese newspapers and schools, district associations, and communities in the Pearl River Delta.”

Indeed, almost every researcher or scholar who has studied Chinese Americans during the past forty years is indebted to Him Mark Lai’s pioneering and lifelong work based on primary Chinese-language sources.  According to editor Russell C. Leong, “Him Mark Lai gave Chinese Americans a voice in history because he listened to ordinary people both in America and China and trained himself to read what they felt and thought–in the Chinese language. His legacy challenges us to listen, to think, and to feel more deeply–to untangle, to clarify, and to refine the historical and political record of our lives here.”

The UCLA Asian American Studies Center is also grateful for Him Mark Lai’s support of the work of others as a long-standing member of the editorial committees of Amerasia Journal and of Chinese America: History & Perspectives, the two leading scholarly journals which have collectively published the most materials on Asian Americans and Chinese Americans during the past four decades.

-Russell C. Leong
Editor, Amerasia Journal, UCLA