The Asian American Studies (AAS) Program was founded in 1969. In 2010, it changed its name to the Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies (AAADS) Program. This renaming is a marker of how our Program's intellectual, political and pedagogical concerns have developed in the last half- century. As a native of Hong Kong who immigrated to the U.S., I experienced the sweeping global and domestic forces that compelled a paradigm shift in the field. (My 1995 essay, “Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroads,” offers an in-depth analysis of these changes. It remains a key theoretical document in the literature.) It was the manifold repercussions of these transformations that drove my academic career of almost three decades.
My early years at Berkeley saw rapid demographic shifts in UC Berkeley’s student body after the 1965 immigration reforms. To serve the hitherto neglected language needs of Asian American students, I revised, taught in, and trained instructors for the AAS Reading and Composition series for a number of years. I published articles on Chinese ESL learners and co-edited two volumes on second-language groups in the U.S. In 1996, “Multiple Discourses, Multiple Identities” (with Sandra L. McKay) appeared in Harvard Educational Review. It has been cited numerous times since then for its attention to both the learners’ subjection to complex discursive forces and their agency in shaping their identity as language users.
A second area in which I contributed to AAADS is through teaching and research on Asian American literature. Drawing on my bilingual, bicultural background, I published extensively on Anglophone Asian American literature as well as Sinophone Chinese American literature. My Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance, first published in 1993, still in print and still being taught, establishes a theoretical foundation for studying Asian American literature as a “textual coalition” beyond its documentary value, as amenable to critical methods as anything in “the canon,” yet sensitive to Asian American groups’ unique historical and cultural experiences.
As for Sinophone Chinese American literature, I was among the first U.S. scholars to offer courses on Chinese immigrant writing (read in Chinese) and film; to publish critical (as opposed to descriptive) studies of Sinophone literature in the diasporic context; and to introduce this type of criticism to mainland China. I worked closely with critics in Taiwan, where Asian American literary studies has become a thriving field. From interacting with international scholars, I developed an interest in the global ‘traveling” of Asian American texts; in comparative reception studies; and in theorizing what the shifting definitions of Sinophone diasporic writing means in terms of cultural claims, nationalism, and geopolitics, in particular in the context of the rise of China. Huamei: Essays on Chinese American and Sinophone Diasporic Literature, a two-volume collection of my essays translated into Chinese, just came out in Taiwan in 2020.
In 2014, I received the Asian American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in scholarship and mentorship. I am proud of having “grown up” with this vibrant and ever-morphing academic discipline, and having played a role in AAADS’s intellectual endeavors and institution-building. Name change notwithstanding, our Program has been steadfast in keeping alive the flame of its founding values, such as anti-racism, gender equality, community building, activism, pan-ethnic alliance, and social justice. Interestingly, these ideas are now being “discovered,” and the need for ethnic studies recognized, by an increasing number of Americans, in response to undeniably worsening racial inequality and anti-Asian violence. These are, we should note, precisely what AAADS has been engaged with through its curriculum, research, publications, and advocacy for the last fifty years.