Judy Yung, 1946-2020

A researcher who transformed our understanding of Chinese life in the US has died.

Judy Yung was born in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1946 and studied English and Chinese at San Francisco State College (1967, now San Francisco State University) before going on to a master’s in library science at the University of California, Berkeley. It was while employed as a librarian that she began to forge a new career as a researcher.

This initially led to Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 (1980 and 2014), a book about Angel Island – the immigration centre in San Francisco Bay where her father had once been held – that Professor Yung wrote with Genny Lim and Him Mark Lai. Many years later, she would co-author with Erika Lee a more detailed study, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (2010).

“People contribute to diversity in different ways,” Professor Yung once observed. “For me, my contribution is to do research and add the voices of Chinese American women to the tableau of history.” From 1981 to 1983, she directed the Chinese Women of America Research Project, which led to both a travelling exhibition and tie-in “pictorial history”, Chinese Women of America (1986). After completing a PhD in ethnic studies, she joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1990, where she went on to become chair of department, eventually retiring as professor emerita in American studies in 2004.

Deeply committed to the development of Asian American studies at Santa Cruz, Professor Yung published detailed oral histories of Chinese women in San Francisco and co-edited Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Present (with Gordon Chang and Him Mark Lai, 2006). It was while working on this that she met her husband, Eddie Fung, the only Chinese American soldier captured by the Japanese during the Second World War. She would later draw on in-depth interviews with him to publish The Adventures of Eddie Fung: Chinatown Kid, Texas Cowboy, Prisoner of War (2007).

Alice Yang, associate professor of history at Santa Cruz, “felt lucky to have shared so many years of friendship with this incredible scholar, teacher, mentor and community activist”. She also recalled the standing ovation her students always gave Professor Yung and Mr Fung when they took part as guest speakers on her course in Pacific War memories: “They especially loved hearing about how Judy first discovered that Eddie wanted to take her out when she was playing back an oral history tape of an interview she conducted.”

Professor Yung died on 14 December 2020 after a fall.

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com