Him Mark Lai

Historian, scholar, and writer

• Born: November 1, 1925
• Birthplace: San Francisco, California
• Died: May 21, 2009
• Place of death: San Francisco, California

Internationally renowned as the foremost authority on Chinese American history, Him Mark Lai devoted his life to researching and writing in both Chinese and English about Chinese Americans. His prodigious scholarship—ten books and over a hundred articles—laid the foundation for a new field of study and helped to promote a deeper understanding of Chinese Americans from a multiracial perspective and transnational context.

Areas of achievement: Scholarship, education

Early Life

Him Mark Lai was the first of five children born in San Francisco, California, to Lai Bing and Dong Shee, immigrants from Guangdong province in southeast China. Lai grew up during a time of racial segregation and economic depression. His parents were garment workers in the Chinatown sewing factories, and the family of seven lived in a one-room apartment in a tenement on Grant Avenue.

Lai’s love for learning was nurtured by his parents and his teachers. He attended Nam Kue Chinese School and Commodore Stockton Elementary School and was a regular visitor to the public library, where he borrowed books on a wide range of subjects. He won first place in a citywide competition in US history while in high school, graduated from junior college as valedictorian, and earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1947.

Although history was his favorite subject, Lai chose to study engineering for practical reasons. For the next thirty years, he worked as an engineer at Bechtel Power Corporation while pursuing his passion for Chinese American history on the side, then full time after he retired in 1984. His lifelong quest to expand the frontiers of knowledge about Chinese Americans was assisted by his wife, Laura Jung, whom he had met at Mun Ching (a youth organization that supported the new People’s Republic of China) and married in 1953.

Life’s Work

Lai’s interest in Chinese American studies began in the 1960s after he took sociologist Stanford Lyman’s course The Oriental in North America at the University of California Extension in San Francisco. In 1969, Lai taught the country’s first college-level course on Chinese American history at San Francisco State College, following the Third World Strike that led to the establishment of the first ethnic studies and Asian American studies departments in the country.

Based on his meticulous research of primary sources in Chinese and English, Lai pioneered and legitimized the study of Chinese Americans with his seminal publications. Soon after taking Lyman’s course, Lai became a member of the Chinese Historical Society of America and collaborated with fellow historians Thomas Chinn and Philip Choy to write the classic study A History of the Chinese in California: A Syllabus in 1969. He went on to pen the article “A Historical Survey of Organizations of the Left among the Chinese in America” in 1972 and publish the books Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940 (1980), A History Reclaimed: An Annotated Bibliography of Chinese Language Materials on the Chinese of America (1986), and From Overseas Chinese to Chinese American: A History of the Development of Chinese during the Twentieth Century (1992), the first book-length Chinese American history written in Chinese from the perspective of an American-born Chinese person. Many of his other groundbreaking articles on the geographical origins of Chinese immigrants to America, the development of district associations and cultural institutions, and China politics in the Chinese American community were later published in two anthologies, Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions (2004) and Chinese American Transnational Politics (2010).

A community-based scholar, Lai believed in using his historical knowledge and bi-literate skills to benefit the Chinese American community. From 1971 to 1984, he was the producer of Hon Sing, a Chinese-language radio show that was sponsored by Chinese for Affirmative Action. The weekly hour-long program provided the Chinese community with news, commentaries, and music. In 1980, he directed a major traveling exhibit, Chinese of America, 1785–1980, for the Chinese Culture Center (CCC) and cowrote the exhibit catalog with the same title. To promote research on Chinese American history, Lai helped to establish Chinese historical societies in other parts of the country and founded Chinese America: History and Perspectives, the annual journal of the Chinese Historical Society of America (CHSA), serving on its editorial board and often contributing articles for publication. Under the auspices of the CCC and CHSA, Lai cofounded the In Search of Roots program with Albert Cheng to encourage Chinese American youths to learn about their family history and ethnic heritage through educational workshops and a visit to their ancestral villages in China.

Throughout his life, Lai generously served as a reference librarian, consultant, and mentor for the many who sought his expertise from all over the world. For his prodigious scholarship and community service, Him Mark Lai was honored with many awards, including the Before Columbus Foundation’s National Book Award (1982), CCC’s Distinguished Service Award (1987), the Association for Asian American Studies’ Award for Lifetime Scholarship (1993), and CHSA’s Lifetime Achievement Award (1995). In 2011, the San Francisco Public Library Commission renamed his childhood library Chinatown/Him Mark Lai Branch Library in his honor.

Significance

Him Mark Lai well deserved the honorary title of dean of Chinese American history that his colleagues and community bestowed upon him at his eighty-second birthday celebration in 2007. An engineer by training and a historian by avocation, he made a lasting contribution to Asian American studies with his groundbreaking scholarship and treasure trove of archival documents accumulated through a lifetime of painstaking research.

Lai put his bilingual skills to good use. He was the first American historian to research primary sources in the Chinese language, to collaborate with Chinese scholars in different parts of the world, and to publish his findings in both English and Chinese. His work has thus had a far-reaching impact in promoting understanding and improving relations between different generations of Chinese Americans, between the United States and China, and between Chinese Americans and mainstream American society.

Bibliography

Lai, Him Mark. The Autobiography of a Chinese American Historian. Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, UCLA, 2011. Print. Published with photos two years after his death, the book covers his family background, childhood, career as an engineer, political activism, and passion for Chinese American history.

---. “Musings of a Chinese American Historian.” Amerasia Journal 26.1 (2000): 2–30. Print. An autobiographical essay on Lai’s development as a historian and how he came to research and write about Chinese America.

Yung, Judy. “Him Mark Lai: Reclaiming Chinese American History.” Public Historian 25.1 (Winter 2003): 50–69. Print. An oral history interview about the driving forces behind Lai’s passion for Chinese American history and his development as a pragmatic public historian.