Chronicle of Higher Education
January 14, 2000
The Scholar Who Legitimized the Study of Chinese America
By PETER MONAGHAN
Him Mark Lai's colleagues call him "the dean of
Chinese-American studies."
But that doesn't denote any official academic status.
Mr. Lai has never held a permanent or full-time position in
academe.
Long before the advent of Asian-American studies 30 years ago,
he followed a career path that was more open to
Asian-Americans than the academy: engineering.
And yet, he proceeded to write several key texts and to create
an enormous personal collection of documents relating to
Chinese-Americans. He has freely opened that archive to any
researcher, student, reporter, or writer who has shared his
determination to record and celebrate the lives of the
descendants of Chinese immigrants to America.
Mr. Lai is acknowledged in countless monographs and articles
on Chinese-American life. "He has really done the most
original research, and he did it totally on his own, as an
enthusiast, in the best sense of the amateur historian," says
John Kuo Wei Tchen, the director of the Asian/Pacific/American
Studies Program and Institute at New York University.
Certainly, he adds, because of "historical practices of
exclusion" that until recently kept so many qualified
candidates out of academe, "you end up with people who have to
do these things for their own personal reasons."
The books, newspaper and journal articles, and course outlines
that Mr. Lai was driven to write bridged a past at risk of
being buried and a present in which Asian-American studies
flourishes. His work has earned him several awards, including
two lifetime-achievement awards from the Association for Asian
American Studies.
Now retired from a long career as an engineer with Bechtel
Corporation, Mr. Lai can often be found at the Chinese
Historical Society here, at 73 still spry and passionate about
his work, and long recognized by the staff as an eminence who
quietly does his thing.
Apart from a couple of part-time teaching stints during the
early, tumultuous days of Asian-American studies, Mr. Lai has
pursued his seminal research in Chinese-American history on
his own time. If ever he regretted not having had the
opportunity to be an academic historian, he is well over that.
Sitting amid historical photos and displays, he smiles quietly
as he says: "I'm free from all the power struggles, because I
have no power to struggle with. So I'm not interested in that.
I just concentrate on the historical part, that's all."
He says his work, absent monetary rewards, has been about
"satisfaction."
As a student in the late 1940's, he did wish to be an academic
historian, but in deference to his family, and because "I like
to know where I'm going," he opted for a full-time practical
career, and part-time immersion in his consuming passion.
To do otherwise, he asserts, would have been foolish, since
"there were not many openings. I knew of a couple of people
who were in the humanities, and then a few in the sciences.
That's about all." It was, however, a time of increased
opportunity over all for Asian-Americans. "Things were just
opening up," says Mr. Lai, who finished his engineering degree
in 1947.
It was not until the mid-1960's that he decided he could no
longer deny his real passion, history. In 1965, he joined the
nascent Chinese Historical Society of America, and soon
afterwards took an evening course in Chinese-American history
at the University of California Extension, taught by the
historian Stanford Lyman.
Mr. Lai began going every Saturday and Sunday and on many
evenings to university libraries, historical societies, and
other sites, including the homes of other Chinese-Americans,
to gather as much historical data as he could, on any topic
pertaining to their lives and those of their forebears. "A lot
of it was a couple of sentences, or a couple of paragraphs, or
a couple of chapters in a book. So I had to go to the stacks
and look in every book."
He did that for a decade, to gather the first of what became
many cabinet drawers full of files.
As Mr. Lai's work progressed, the field of Chinese-American
history matured. First, a yearlong series of newspaper
columns he wrote evolved into the much-consulted A History of
the Chinese in California: A Syllabus, which he compiled with
Thomas W. Chinn and Philip P. Choy, and which the Chinese
Historical Society of America published in 1969.
That was the year Asian-American and other minority students
at San Francisco State University staged a strike in support
of establishing ethnic studies there. The college invited Mr.
Lai to teach the country's first full-fledged college course
in Chinese-American history, together with Mr. Choy, an
architect and himself a noted "barefoot historian," whom Mr.
Lai had known since childhood.
Filling in when needed, Mr. Lai taught courses at the college
again between 1972 and 1975, and at the University of
California at Berkeley in the late 1970's and early 1980's.
"He really set the course for the study of Chinese-American
history," says Mr. Choy. "He legitimized it, and along with
that, other ethnic history."
Mr. Lai also has facilitated the work of many other
researchers -- as a first port of call for anyone needing
historical data, no matter how arcane. Ruthanne Lum McCunn, a
San Francisco writer of historical fiction and
Chinese-American history, remembers when she wanted to write
about an obscure Chinese-American horticulturalist who had
lived in Florida in the early 20th century. She asked Mr. Lai
whether he could help her.
"He said, 'Wait a minute,' and goes into a back room," she
recalls. "Then he comes back with a stack of files about a
foot thick, and says, 'Would you like to meet a relative of
his?' He introduced me to a clansman of his in Chinatown, who
gave me a letter to the relative.
"But that kind of thing happens over and over with Him Mark.
He's an amazingly generous person. Whenever I have any
questions, I turn to him, and he says, 'Well, I'll take a look
in my files.'"
His holdings are legendary among the many colleagues he has
drawn into his field. Judy Yung, an associate professor of
American studies at the University of California at Santa
Cruz, met Mr. Lai while she was working as a librarian at the
Chinatown branch of the San Francisco Public Library: "Him
Mark would ask me to save all the back copies of periodicals.
He would come by every week. He was very frugal and
resourceful." If a Chinese business or store was about to
close, he would make sure to be there to preserve any records
that might otherwise end up in the trash.
As Mr. Lai's reputation spread, the editor of East/West, a
now-defunct bilingual weekly in San Francisco, asked him in
1967 to write a series on such topics as Chinese laborers in
19th-century California.
"That was really the first time that was done," Mr. Lai notes.
The articles "fit right into what the Chinese-Americans want,"
he says, "because as part of their drive for equality in
American society, one of the things they seek is this sense of
community and sense of ethnicity." One early controversy was
whether the original Chinese settlers were "sojourners," or
came here to stay. "Behind that was a lot of the
Chinese-American feeling about being a part of this country,"
he says. "They want to be part of this country, so they try
to use history to prove that they have always wanted that."
Most, he says, proudly insist that they or their forebears
wanted to be Americans.
In 1977 Mr. Lai published, with Karl Lo, now a librarian at
the University of California at San Diego, Chinese Newspapers
Published in North America, 1854-1975. Among its surprises was
that Chinese-language newspapers in this country predated any
in China.
His A History Reclaimed: An Annotated Bibliography of Chinese
Language Materials on the Chinese of America appeared in 1986
(University of California). "People always complain that
there's no material on Chinese-American history," he explains.
"I said, 'No, that's not true. There's lots of material. It's
in Chinese.'"
Mr. Lai is among a dwindling number of Chinese-Americans who
read and write Chinese. He is even rarer in being fluent in
both Cantonese, the language of his family, and Mandarin
Chinese, which he learned as a child. For much of the 1970's,
he programmed a local Chinese-language radio show, Hon Sing
(Voice/Sounds), with news, interviews, features, and music.
His essays and articles, published in varied journals
including Chinese America: History and Perspectives, which he
helps edit for the Chinese Historical Society, have ranged
over many topics, including Chinese benevolent associations
and the history of the Chinese-American left -- "one of the
first groups to realize that you have to fight for your rights
in this country rather than just look to China for support."
The Chinese-American left, although it strongly supported
nationalist movements in China, did work closely with the U.S.
Communist Party and anti-imperialist causes, until the
McCarthy era put an end to the movement.
Mr. Lai had his own McCarthyite experience. In the 1950's, he
helped run Mun Ching, a community organization that held
English classes, published a newsletter, and presented drama
and music -- until Federal Bureau of Intelligence agents
pressured it to shut down, judging its activities too leftist.
Not soon enough, however, to prevent Mr. Lai from conspiring
to marry one student at Mun Ching. Ever since, Laura Lai has
been his constant colleague in his historical research -- an
essential partner, as she does all the driving because of his
poor eyesight.
Mr. Lai's best-known publication has been Island: Poetry and
History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island 1910-1940
(University of Washington Press, 1991). It includes 135 poems
written by Chinese immigrants detained at the Angel Island
Immigration Station, in San Francisco Bay. There, during the
Chinese Exclusion period, which ran from 1882 into the 1940's,
would-be Americans from China were housed, sometimes for
months, questioned, and then accepted or rejected as American
immigrants.
Mr. Lao translated the 135 poems in Island, and then edited
and commented on them with Ms. Yung and Genny Lim, a prominent
Chinese-American playwright. The poems were written or carved
on the walls of the barracks to express the frustrations of
the procedure. As one poem put those frustrations:
Today is the last day of winter,
Tomorrow morning is the vernal equinox.
One year's prospects have changed to another,
Sadness kills the person in the wooden building.
The poems’ eloquence is clear now, even though many are limited in a
literary sense. And yet, says Mr. Lai, before their
publication, "the Chinese in Chinatown never mentioned these
poems. Nobody really considered them very important until the
Chinese-Americans came along and said, 'This is our
heritage.'"
Mr. Lai's own father, a merchant, had been in the first group
to come through Angel Island, in 1910. His mother, too, spent
time there, in 1923. They later worked in the sewing factories
in San Francisco. Mr. Lai did, too, doing piece-work for 25
cents an hour, to pay his way through college. That, he says,
permitted him to complete his college degree rather than
accede to his parents' wishes that he go to work in the
shipyards, which were booming in anticipation of American
entry into World War II.
Although he was fascinated by Chinese history, and although,
while growing up, he had heard much nationalist sentiment in
San Francisco provoked by Japan's invasions of China, he had
already decided against moving to China during the late
1940's, as Mao's revolution approached.
He had heard much of the nationalist sentiment while attending
Chinese school, in the evenings. Mr. Choy, who met Mr. Lai
while they were students at Galileo High School, in San
Francisco, recalls: "Some of us, like myself, would play hooky
from Chinese school, to take part in school sports, but he
remained a very serious student in Chinese studies."
Mr. Lai is now writing a two-part history of Chinese schools
in the United States. The first part, covering the period up
to World War I, will be published this month in Chinese
America.
He is also working with librarians at the University of
California at Berkeley to house and index his holdings -"because," he notes, hamming just slightly, "let's face it,
I'm 73 years old. ..."
Mr. Lai has plenty of projects in progress, even so. There is,
for example, his general history of Chinese America, published
in Hong Kong in 1992 but not yet translated.
"I keep on promising I'll put it out in English, but I haven't
done it yet," he says.
There is no shortage of Chinese-American topics still to write
about, says Mr. Lai. One is the way the composition of Chinese
America is changing. In the San Gabriel Valley near Los
Angeles, he points out, many thousands of Vietnamese have
settled, and they are considered Indochinese, but in fact some
30 to 40 percent are ethnic Chinese.
Also awaiting fuller study, he says, is the role of the public
schools and Protestant churches in Chinese-Americans'
Westernization and loss of Chinese language skills.
And then there's the history of Buddhist practice in America.
At many temples, he says, "it's just like you're in China."
But you are not.
"These things are all part of American society."
That is demonstrated every day by a San Francisco program with
which Mr. Lai works, called In Search of Roots. For a decade,
the program has helped young Chinese-Americans trace their
ancestry to China by teaching them about migration patterns
within China and to the U.S., showing them how to perform
genealogical research, and then sending them to China to visit
their ancestral villages.
Making the whole process easier, says Linda Chu, the president
of the Bay Area Chapter of the Organization of Chinese
Americans, is that "you tell Him Mark your last name, and he
knows the whole history of your family and your village. He's
a walking encyclopedia."