All right. Well, today is March 17th [2023] is St Patrick's Day, but I have no connection with Ireland or Irish Americans that I know of. But my name is Gordon H. Chang. H is for my middle name, Shochu, which is actually misspelled in the romanization. But it means in Chinese young is meant to mean young scholar. I was born in Hong Kong. My father was from near that village right near Hangzhou, China. He was an artist and quite accomplished a successful artist in China. My mother, Helen Fong. Helen Mabel Fong. She was born in May and her birthday's coming up. She was born up near Truckee, and on my mother's side, I'm fourth generation Chinese American, so she was technically sort of born in America. I was born in Hong Kong but was brought up from infancy to adulthood in the United States. So I identify with my mother's background. So she was born in Marysville and her mother was also born, I think in my mother was born up in near Truckee, a small town named Washington. Her mother was born in Marysville, north of Sacramento. And so we trace our ancestry on my mother's side back to the 1850s.

My mother and father met during World War Two when my father came to the United States as a goodwill ambassador, as an artist. He was interested to see how his art could help promote good US-China relations. China was already at war at the time. The United States was not at war yet with Japan. But when he was here, Pearl Harbor happened. And so he got stuck here for five, six years. And during that time, he met my mother, who was living in San Francisco and became his sort of secretary. And they, you know, travel around the country and they became very close, even though both were married at the time, to other people who were a distance. But that's another story I can talk about. It's an interesting story.

My grandfather, my mother's father, was quite well known, gold mine operator, manager up in a small town named Washington. And in Nevada County, and that's near Nevada City. So I'm very proud of that lineage. He was quite prominent in the small town of Washington, which had hundreds of Chinese miners at one time and half of his children, 11 children were born there. And then he and his wife moved down to Vallejo. So I have Vallejo connection. After World War Two, my mother went to China to see Shuji. My father, and they got married there and I came along afterwards. And then because the Chinese Civil War was going on, I, my mother brought me back here to the United States where she was from. And I grew up in the San Francisco, Oakland and then Piedmont areas.

(Interviewer) Where your father what was his level of education?

He was a professional artist and had attended art school in Shanghai in the 1920s, one of the first Western based art academies, institutes, schools. So he was always called professor, and he taught in art in middle schools or high schools, and also at the university level. And he became a well-known art instructor in addition to becoming a professional artist himself.

(Interviewer) And your grandfather, he came here because of the gold mines for gold work.

Oh, he came for work. He came. Fong Chao was his name. And where we know all this. And there was a early book written about him when the first books on about a Chinese American. And that book, it was by Theresa Sparks called China Gold. And that's a biography of him. So what we know about him is largely from that book, although there's family lore, and I'm engaged in a biography of him right now trying to track down documentation. But according to that book, he entered in 1882, the year of the Chinese Exclusion Act. And according to the book, again, he and his family in China, in southern China, knew about the growing hostility towards Chinese in the United States. And he hurriedly, with his uncle, came to the United States just at the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act. He was only 13 at the time, so it was quite an adventure. You can try to imagine coming across the ocean and entering North America. I say North America because it appears he came in through Vancouver and then came across the border without documentation into the United States. And as far as we know, he never left. He's never had documentation. He was, in fact, undocumented. So that's something I think about a lot, about documentation, undocumented children and the whole controversy around undocumented people today. So I have great sympathy with people who came in undocumented because I'm a product of an undocumented immigrant, presumably.

We we spoke English almost entirely, although early on my mother said that we did speak Chinese quite well. But I forget by time I was had any memory, I don't remember. And then I sort of my mother tried to she had a hire tutor's for my brother and myself. And so we learned some embryonic rudimentary Chinese as youngsters. It really didn't stick very much. Couldn't say that we were fluent any degree. So English was the dominant language or the predominant language. My mother spoke impeccable English. She also spoke Chinese Mandarin, but mainly Cantonese and Toisan-wa [Taishanese]. And she the only Chinese I really heard much growing up. It was whenever we went to a restaurant, and she'd order, and we did restaurant Chinese. But my but my cousins, aunts and uncles, everybody spoke English when we were together. Although all my aunts and uncles spoke some Chinese, at least. I think they spoke together. I spoke to each other in English. But I you know, I was young, so I really don't have much recollection now. He was a bit of a distant figure because he was an artist. He was off duty. He just would do art artwork all day. He was he was sort of a loner, although he liked to socialize, so he liked gardening. He had Chinese garden, he liked fish and go fishponds. And he had his own studio. So I don't remember him very well even being in approximate space with him. So I sort of lament that I didn't have a closer a relationship with a father.

And after he passed away, my mother brought us up as a single mom. She never remarried and she never had any long-term associations that I know of. And she said that she didn't want to remarry because and I never understood it at the time. She said she wanted to protect us because she was concerned about bringing another male into the house and how he would relate to the two of us. So I think she had male suitors or friends. She was an attractive woman and was social and liked to travel and met me too. But she she never had another so relationship. So I was very much influenced by my mother growing up and her values, which I can talk about in a moment too.

She ran a business. The business was was devoted to reproducing my father's artwork, reproducing the artwork in the form of greeting cards or painting cards with his paintings on them, Christmas cards with Chinese themes and prints and that type of thing. When he was alive, he sold. And particularly in China, he was very successful in selling his original artwork. But in the United States, Chinese artwork didn't really sell. So they developed this reproduction business. This was in the fifties and became quite successful. There was sort of a boom of greeting card business in the United States, and they had a sort of interesting, unusual niche in the greeting card business.

(Interviewer) And you mentioned your father also had children back in China. Did you keep in touch with your father's side of the family?

I did not until later on, much later in life. But I. But you asked about the discussions we had within the family. I think my mother kept in touch with his daughter, two daughters and a son, something of that sort, who were maybe 20 years older than I was. So they were from his first marriage, and I think she kept in touch with them. And so we have found some of those letters from the 1960s or something about sort. But then she would send I think she sent money over occasionally, I mean, those type of thing. But I didn't know very much about them at all. I didn't meet them in person until 1971, which is when I first went to China. I sat on as a tourist.

I was in graduate school at the time here, right in this building. I was in the history graduate student, and this was after the announcement of Nixon's impending visit to China. So things started open up pretty quickly. And a an editor, a publisher of a Chinese American newspaper in San Francisco, Chinese Voice, Chinese Voice, which was a liberal left wing newspaper in San Francisco, Chinatown, the only one at the time contacted me because I was an activist, had been a student activist, and was well known among certain circles, and that he was organizing or he was asked to organize a trip of other Chinese Americans to visit China. And so I jumped on board. And in September of 1971, we went…we gathered in San Francisco. It was mainly folks from San Francisco, Los Angeles, maybe Sacramento, other Chinese Americans and we took off and went to Hong Kong and we were there for almost three weeks. We went to Hong Kong, took a train from Hong Kong into Shanghai and then where to go from Guangzhou to Beijing for the National Day celebration. So that was September, October 1971. It was fascinating visit. And of course, very, very few Americans had any direct contact with China for decades. So it was very exciting to go into this country that was so mysterious to most of us.

The others who went were some were younger and some other professional people. No one famous but all Chinese Americans. And so we went back. We were were greeted in China as like returning countrymen. Watch out, you know, overseas Chinese. Whereas most of us felt uncomfortable with that because we were Chinese Americans, not not overseas, Chinese. But there were also some international students from Taiwan who were in the group, and that was unusual. And I think they were quite interested in them because they were liberal radical in Taiwan, and they had more positive feelings toward the mainland. So they wanted to cultivate the religious faith. The Beijing folks wanted to cultivate their relationship with us.

(Interviewer) And how old were you around that age?

Around 22. So I got 20, you know, 22, 22, 24.

My father was born 1900, and my mother May 1912. So she was her Chinese name is Yick Mun. Her English middle name is Mabel because she's a May birth, but in Chinese her Chinese name means also US citizen, which is interesting. And this reflects back on my grandfather, who was progressive or liberal in those times. And she's also a citizen because that's the year or two of the Chinese revolution and women are given rights in China.

So he wanted to acknowledge that and said that she was also a citizen along with males. Parenthetically, the name names are interesting because her other siblings had interesting English names. The first born was named Theodore, first-born male, and he was born around 1903 or four. Theodore for Theodore Roosevelt. Next was Hiram. Hiram Johnson, the Governor of California. Then there was Taft, William Howard Taft, the President. Helen, I think may have been she was might have been named for Woodrow Wilson's daughter. So, again, going back to this theme of this mix of American and Chinese traditions.

Well, the others all got Chinese middle names, too. And in the end, you know, still still favored the males. And they had a special naming that designated their generation within the male hierarchy of of the Fong's. So the female side is much less attended to. So the male side, we have a genealogy that goes back 1200 years of all the Fong's over 1200 years and eventually wind up in California, which I didn't know about until I went back and was a 97, you know, much later. I didn't know about the genealogy until around 93 or 94. After I visited, after my mother passed away, I went back to her ancestral village and met Fong's relatives there, and they brought out this zhu-fu, which is a genealogy. Well, a lot of these things are still in families that sort of hidden, and they were deliberately hidden for some time because they could get people in trouble. Yeah.

Oh, when my father was alive, we would go to outings. He really loved the outdoors, Carmel in particular. And also to the Oakland, to Lake Merritt, which I don't know if you know, Oakland has a beautiful lake in the middle and they had the duck pond there and he was an expert in painting birds. So he would go and just look at the birds all the time and we just sit and play and all that and watched them flop around. And so have a lot of good memories of being outdoors and appreciating the gardens and flowers and birds of the area. We went to Hawaii once when I was maybe six, five or six years old because my father as an was invited to go over there to give an exhibition. We also went to museums like the De Young Museum because he was an artist. He was, as I said, he was celebrated and had exhibitions there and we had a lot of contact. So I remember with some fondness running around the big Young Museum. So I was surrounded by art and thinking about art for much of growing up.

Well, like guys were all trying to be in the sports. My mother was very strict on certain things. You can't play football because those guys are bigger than you are. They're heavier, you know, knock your head off. So I was sort of disappointed the time because all the guys, you know, they were mainly in the football, but I was appreciative. I think over time, you know, because so you can't get a motorcycle and so I'm sorry again motorcycles. So that she was very concerned about her safety. So I went in other sports, the basketball, track for a little while, but then I got some injuries. And so I didn't do pursue sports very much beyond my sophomore year.

(Interviewer) And after your father passed, did your mother have any help with families or relatives around by close by or was was just pretty much her taking care of the both?

We we worked a lot in the garden. She brought us to work here mowing the lawn and cutting the ivy, weeding. And she liked being outdoors, too. So I got an appreciation for gardening. I still love gardening and my parents had planted a lot of plants that were familiar to him. So there were these unusual for it for the surrounding area. Unusual plants such as loquat tree, banana tree, jasmine flowering blossom trees. He loved working with his hands and made beautiful fishponds. And two or three of these fishponds were in our garden and he loved going and feeding them. I remember fascinated to see the fish come up to the surface when he was feeding them and all this type of thing.

(Interviewer) You still have that home?

No, no, it's long, you know, I wish we did. You know, I hate to tell you, some of this is so you got a you might be of interest to somebody somewhere some time. My mother after my brother, I grew up, we moved out of the house and had our own families. And she stayed in this house by ourselves. Three bedrooms. So. So it was a big house by herself. And she finally sold it as part of my father also had died. He died in the house because he had cancer. And in his last days he was in the home. Oh, some years later, his his cousins came to the United States and been very faithful to his memory, wanted to visit the home where he had died. So they went to, I hadn't that I never bothered people who bought the house or to two generations, who bought the house and they went they just knocked on the door and they sort of introduced himself. And then they said, you know, we've always wondered about who we lived here before because there's a ghost in the house, a ghost of a Chinese man. So I don't know. And said they said where? And they said, well, up over in that bedroom. And that's where he died. It's weird. And strange. [inaudible]

Garden was still there. Yeah, yeah, the garden was there. I don't know. They filled in the ponds, and I was always so happy and proud to when we had guests over to show the ponds and see the fish. And I a little little waterfall that he created and turned on the faucet type of thing. And he had to sort of like, you know, Chinese ponds with, with, with a rocks and little what we call bonsai all around.

(Interviewer) And growing up, did you interact with how was your interaction with media like TV and radio? You were watching a lot of movies or television and and how did you see kind of any reflection of characterizing you within the things that.

I can’t recall when we got I think we were first on one of the early on, my mother or father, both. I can't remember when this happened, but we bought a TV. They had a TV very early on, small little Magnavox, which was a TV, radio and record, phonograph, all in one sort of cabinet. So we had small little black and white TV. And then after he passed away, it must have been after he got my mother bought a color TV, which was a big box like big thing. You know, we my brother and I watched a lot of TV. We had TV that we had. You know, TV was in a room, and we brought our TV dinner, literally had TV dinners, and went to watch. So we watched a lot of TV and all the stuff that was on there in the fifties and early sixties. So saw TV westerns, comedies, saw the shows that had Chinese characters, Asian characters, them, you know, living with Life with Father, with Benson Fong, I think it was, or Sammy Tong or some of these early. And so there was a part of the family, my mother's family, that was connected to Hollywood.

One part of the family was very sort of stable and traditional, so they went into traditional activities, opened up stores or became an insurance agent or this type of stuff. And the other side of the family were a little more wild. And they they were interested in Hollywood. So they became connected to nightclubs and Hollywood. So I had one uncle who had a lot of bit parts in Hollywood and we talked to. So they talked a lot about Hollywood. And we would see these different actors. Key Look, Phillip On, Sammy Tong, these are early James Hong, who has been celebrated recently. They were they were all sort of of that generation. And my mother talked about going out on a date when she was younger with some of them because they were also the American-born generation. So we would see them on television and they'd have these kind of demeanor about these these bit parts where their house boys and servants and the TV program Bonanza. There was a Chinese cook. And I mean, that was that was what we would see on TV.

(Interviewer) Can you tell us about your elementary and middle school?

I went to small communities, as I said. So I went to there are a couple of elementary schools. I went to Frank C Havens School, in Piedmont that was named after an early educator in Piedmont. I think it was very self-contained. You know, it was like the world outside really didn't exist much beyond Piedmont. And then I went to Piedmont Junior High School and High School, which was sort of combined into one location, and not too far away maybe half a mile and we would walk to school. Education was okay. I remember when I don't have a lot of strength, I remember playing sports a lot. I like baseball, you know, hot playground playing and summer and all this.

And one of the memories I do have is when I was maybe in fifth grade, a few days or soon after my father had died, and I probably was really quite troubled and distraught. And of course, I didn't know it at the time. And I remember being in class and I was started maybe sort of acting up and the teacher got very angry and sent me outside to go sit outside class, also sent me outside the door. So I sat in the hallway, and I was really angry. And I remember thinking to myself, my father just my father just died. Give me a break. Something like that.

But other than that, I don't have a lot of strong memories in the classroom. Got along with my teachers. They were all white. Interesting, and I do think about at the time, especially in high school, I now look back on it and and think that several of them, a number of them were gay, but no one talked about that at the time, and no one acknowledged it. You know, I had my English teacher, my French French teacher, other teachers, I think the way after in fact, actually I ran into one of them, you know, up in San Francisco at one time, I was and he was living with his partner, Brandon. But but it was very congenial. I did well in school. And I eventually when I applied to college, I got strong support.

I went to Princeton as an undergrad. So we were very I don't know of any others who from high school who went to to Princeton in my class. There was one guy who went to Harvard, oneto Northwestern. But everybody else, I think, pretty much stayed in California, went to UCs. So I went to Princeton because my biology teacher in high school I was with whom I was close to, with whom I was close close with him had come from Princeton High School. So he he loved Princeton and all that. So he got me to replace a little of it. But I had no idea what Princeton was like and no idea what I was getting to do. So I just just applied.

(Interviewer) You mentioned your biology teacher…being close to your biology teacher. Were there other teachers that provided kind of like mentorship to you during your school years?

He was the main one. Just briefly. He had a reputation himself. You're all too young to know this, but there was a late-night show hosted by Johnny Carson, and annually he would bring in Mr. Waxdeck. That was his name. One unusual name, Leonard J. Waxdeck, because he ran the annual at our high school bird calling contest. So the students would audition and they would come up with fantastic renditions of crows and warblers and all sorts of things. And it was so unusual that Johnny Carson had heard about and brought him on and Waxdeck would bring kids on to do these bird calls. So he became famous in his own right. I never did that. But but he became sort of a celebrity because of… other other teachers, I can't say anybody was particularly close. So but he was the most influential because of where I wound up in college. I can talk about college in a moment, too, if we want to try and figure out something else of interest in high school.

So I in high school, I was interested in science, architecture. I like the more that kind of subject material. What ironically, I really disliked was history. I hated high school history because it's pretty much similar to how it's taught today is very rote memorization and kind of how to think about these famous presidents or generals and all that stuff. And that was even worse for me at that time because there was no diversity in history, didn't know anything about slavery, you know, about civil rights, all that. So it was all elite, mainstream history. So I find it ironic I wind up being a historian.

Well, I wasn't sure what I would major in. I was interested in political affairs, international relations. Um, and I gather that in high school it was somehow, perhaps also because of the influence of my father, who had been, as I said, a goodwill ambassador or always had heard about US-China relations and trying to improve them. And that time in the fifties and sixties, a terrible situation with China and the United States. And there was somebody who was well known at the time who was a specialist on Russia, U.S. relations, George F. Kennan. And so some people said, oh, you should become a China Kennan, he was the Russia specialist for the United States. So I said, Oh, that was interesting. And I remember reading his memoirs and studying his career, and he had gone to Princeton, too.

So that was sort of in my horizon. I thought about sciences, but I took college math and failed abysmally. I did not do well my first year. It was a rude awakening, and I did well in high school, but my other classmates did much better than I did as far as I know at school. And many of them had gone to prep schools on the East Coast, Choate, or Milton and Exeter, Andover, and they had really good preparation for college. But I went to public school and California and didn't have that kind of background, so I struggled. I remember getting basically C's and didn't know how to study. I would just be studying nonstop, and I didn't know how to read all these, you know, all these long texts. And so I became discouraged, I think, and just try to do better. But after taking math, I knew I couldn't do anything in the sciences. So then I started to look around in other areas and I became interested in East Asian studies and then took some history history course or two and found out I really liked them. And the history in college was very different, presented differently than high school, and it was actually European history I got first interested. I still wasn't interested in U.S. history even. It was great. I was taught at Princeton, but East Asian history, European history, I found really stimulating. And that's eventually how I proceed in East Asian Studies. I started taking Chinese language and other courses in Chinese history.

(Interviewer)

And do you still have your father's books?

Yes. Yeah. So have his books. So very have a strong attachment to them. You know, even though I don't read them anymore, they're just still my office.

Well, at first, like I was in high school, I tried to fit in, you know, hang out with the guy, hang out with the dominant culture, which was a lot of weekend carousing, a lot of drinking and football weekend. You study intensely during the week and the weekend you go crazy. And it's a lot of drinking. And and even though I partook for a while, I got turned off pretty quickly because it was too wild and crazy. And there was also the misogyny because there were no women. Princeton at the time was all male, 800 men in my class. And on the weekends, there were a few graduate women. You know, women were brought in and but the only way you would have a date with a female was if you knew somebody And all the you most of the people were all from the East Coast. So they had friends from high school, or they could set up dates with and they knew someone from Vassar or something. They would come down here. I was this Chinese guy from California. I didn't know anybody there. And no, and and they were I was shocked one day when somebody said, “Oh, we will set you up with somebody from Mount Holyoke or something.” So I said, okay, I'll go on a blind date. So I remember meeting her, and as soon as I walked in, I knew this was bad news. She kind of looked at me, just was as cold as could be, and clearly not interested. And what I think she wanted was simply to get a ride down to Princeton and meet somebody else. So she was like…(trails off) Oh, there was another girl. Another was blind in actually who said, oh yeah, you have a better experience. She was from Wellesley or something and she's interest. She was white, but she was interested in taking Chinese. So she was sort of maybe I don't know I had yellow fever, I don't know what it was, but she turned out. So she came down and I remember waking up the day of the date when she was supposed to arrive, and I, I didn't feel well. I went to go to the mirror, and I looked at my and I had pox all over my face, but I had picked up some virus. And I quickly went over to the student health clinic at all isolation. I don't know what it was. So she came down and she came to the door and waved. Hi. I'm sorry. You know, she was very sweet, and I think we had date afterward and that was that.

So but but the other I go on all this because I had, I think, a respect for women, maybe in part, in part because of my mother. And, you know, I had a lot of love and respect for her. She was a great mother and progressive or liberal. She was anti-racist. I remember, you know, growing up, some of my relatives would use pejoratives in Chinese to talk about Black people. And my mother would say later, never use those terms. You know, there are “hak yun,” and, you know, black people not “hak guey,” black devil. So I remember that. And then it struck, and she she was Democrats should vote for Stevenson and and and generally really wanted us to be respectful of all people.

So I had gotten married sort of by formality. She was another activist, and it was it was international student. And I was worried about her citizenship or status in the United States. So she needed a green card, you know, a green card, marriage kind of thing. But that that's another story there. And we were both very active and lived in East Palo Alto for a while and then also had moved to San Francisco and then Oakland. Well, I didn't have any idea that I would return to graduate school, although ten years later I would. But I certainly, 1972, I didn't have any idea that would happen. So I just try to find think of other things to do as a to continue my community activism. So I wound up as a waiter, busboy, waiter. I did some journalism and then needed something a little more stable or better paying, and I became a teacher at Laney College in Oakland, which was the two-year, main two year college in Oakland.

So I started teaching at there and as a part-time and then full-time instructor in a community college from 76 to 82. And there I taught. It was great experience. You know, a lot of the students, a whole variety of students, Vietnam War veterans who come back, and a lot of them were so distraught about their experience. A lot of people from Oakland, Chinatown, other recent immigrants. Laney College is right in the middle of downtown Oakland. So but the community college system was not well funded, and I think I got laid off and had rehired. And then I said, oh, this is doesn't look good for a future occupation. So I said, maybe I should go back to graduate school. You know, I'm not sure what to do, go to school. So that's why I applied to come back into the program here and which is what I did in 1982.

(Interviewer) And so we'll talk a little about your personal. I had mentioned that you were married or are married. Can you talk a little bit more about your personal life in between school?

Well, she or she was an activist, I said. And I think much of the attachment we had for each other was because of politics. That was sort of like a crusade. We're going to a crusade together. So that was a common interests, a common bond, and a reason, if not rationale, for staying attached, even though there was growing disaffection, you know. There was a certain thought…. We're in the movement. We're going to do this for the revolution. And so I thought, you know, this is part of my sacrifice, personal sacrifice, happiness, because of we're in this for the greater good and for us to be a stable couples involved in activism is what we should do. So that's why the marriage went on, I think longer than it should have. Eventually fell apart. Oh, and it was very difficult. So or wherever I was going with this… we had no children and increasingly less and less of a personal life. It was all political life. And she was had been born in and had grown up in Taiwan. So we had a lot of cultural connections, which I think was important also as as a glue. But as I said, we we grew apart. And then after in college and back in graduate school, I became this time much more interested in graduate school. And so I became more serious about studies.

Well, I came to Stanford originally in Chinese history, modern Chinese history. I was going to study the Chinese communist movement in part that was connected to my political interest. But when I came back, I really didn't want to go into Chinese studies because for various reasons. But I wanted to switch to U.S. history to study more about the United States, not about China. And so I switched fields and then the department allowed me to do so. So I became a U.S. historian rather than China historian. But then I was always interested in the interplay between the two. So if I always thought about the to what extent do we have destiny in ourselves, are we meant to do different things? And that takes time for us to realize these, to become self-aware. So over time, I think I became more and more accepting, if not aware and embrace. I mean, all different levels that, number one, I was an intellectual and number two, that I was very much interested in Asian American things and three also in Chinese-American relations.

And that I was, as I like writing and reading and all that and, and I say came to that slowly because I'd been so involved in political activism, which was anathema in many ways to those different features of myself, even though I was consciously and and inspired to be radical and to go into community organizing or labor organizing or something like that. But it just didn't sustain me. So coming back to graduate school, I finally increasingly realized this is who I was. And so I initially I thought about doing a my dissertation on my Aunt Alice Fong Yu. I mentioned before, and I started I did enter oral histories with her. She was at that time retired. And she was a real pioneer, very a leading member of the Chinese community in San Francisco East Bay. So I thought about doing a history of her. But then as time went on it, I was not confident that I would be able to get a job in Asian American history. It just was very, very young at the time to feel so I gravitated to my other interest and that was U.S.-China relations. And there was more interest in that in diplomatic history and international relations history and so forth. So that's why I wound up pursuing, even though I always thought it was still in the back of my mind at that interest in Chinese American history.

Some of the key philosophies or well, maybe one, as I mentioned, the other, I think a strong ethical sense. I don't know if it is philosophy, but my mother's, I think, a view of of being moral, ethical, being a good person was very important. And and even when there was ugliness around it, she would say, you know, the right sort of very Asian and kind of rise above it, you know, be better than they are. So I always took that to heart. On the other end of the spectrum, I became very influenced by Marxism. As an undergraduate, I studied Marxism and Marxist literature and writing a thought about what Marxism says by class conflict and class society and social transformation, social bases of of inequality and all that. So that was very, very influential. And I was an intellectual. I read a lot of that stuff. And then third, I think me being connected to the growing awareness of minorities, African Americans and others, and specifically was very influential too, to to think about the country in radically different ways because of the racial history and racial awakening. And that was transformative because on all those different counts kind of set me apart from others. You know, the moral Marxist and then racial awakening to think of that this country was, could be and should be radically different because of its terrible history, legacy of racism and slavery and imperialism and war, and that the country was needed to radical transformation.

I'm not sure if I could even say today I know who I am. You know, I think I'm still learning. And I think I would suggest that all of us that have that attitude, because life is is always surprising. There's always something going on and there are always things that we can learn. So I'm still learning about the world, but also learning about myself. I think that's important so that we don't become stagnant and that our our insides is a universe just as the heavens are a universe. You know, there's more and more to explore. But sometime, I suppose during my graduate years, student years, I got my degree in ‘88 and then I stayed here for a year or two as a researcher. I went to UC Irvine, and my first university job, it was at UC Irvine. It was down there for a year and a half and then I came back here in a position as faculty in 1991, and I've been here since then. So I was a became a professional professor over the years, and then I became the senior associate vice provost for undergraduate education. I'm no longer in that position. I retired and ah stepped out of that position in September. But I was in that position for three years previously. So I've had my professional career largely here at Stanford and it's been a wonderful experience to Stanford, despite its many flaws, and there are many. But as a university and as a place, it's given me a good life and provided me a space to become a writer, historian, thinker, advocate.

(Interviewer) And so you also wrote a book about Asian American art history. So what kind of inspire did that focus?

That was a great experience in my life and unexpected. It was a product of a collaboration with a colleague from San Francisco State who came down to meet me because he had started this project on recovering Asian American art history. He was Mark Johnson was the director of the gallery at San Francisco State and had heard a little bit about my father, who whose was not well known at this time. Now, in the teens, 20 teens. And I hadn't given much thought about him as a Chinese artist or certainly not as an Asian American artist. But he was sort of interested and he got me thinking differently because, in fact, my father worked in the United States for many years, for five years in the forties, and then seven years, eight years in the fifties before he died. So he spent a good number of his career and years of his career in the United States and as his painting evolved over time. So I began to think of him in a different frame and an issue with history, including art history, is that we inevitably think in certain frames, frameworks, U.S. history, Chinese history, this genre of history, watercolor history, or and Western painting or Chinese or Eastern. And then but these frames can become limiting, and we just try to put people into these boxes. And that happens all the time. So for example, minority history, while that's a box miner, but then you think about minority history in the greater framework of U.S. history, we see U.S. history much more differently, that it's not just white history or minority history or you have diversity or whatever it is.

But the challenge of being a good scholar and thinker is to think in fresh ways, in ways that hadn't been thought of before, and that also applied to art history. So instead of thinking of themselves as Chinese art history here and Asian of an art history here, that what is the connections? What are the sinews, what does the intertwine in histories of these artists in which there are substantial? So that's what got me really intrigued in with this project and eventually produced this book on Asian American art history. And if you look at it, you can see right from the beginning we confront this issue about what is Asian American art history, who are Asian Americans because it's an elusive term, it's a mobile term, it's a fluid term. And I take a position that I'm happy with having it fluid. I don't think it's possible to have a rigid definition, almost all ethnic and a lot of historical and ethnic terms. If held too tightly, become constricting. So even you think of a term such as Black, Black person, which we think it's pretty clear who a Black person is.

Well, I don't know, you know, as it was when when President Obama was president, some people said he was not black enough, you know, because he didn't have X, Y or Z or he had a white mother or something like this. So I think that's not helpful. And in the same way, well, so and so is not an Asian American artist because they were born in the United States or something. But then or someone was born in the United States and went to Asia and said, well, they're not an American or whatever it is for these these rubrics, these categories can be too can be too confining. And rather than to open up ways of thinking that show the richness of the human world and human experience, which I think is what we should be doing.

(Interviewer) The artwork in some of the themes that you examined, did it begin, did it influence the way you taught, you teach history or a perceived history at the time and the connection between art and history?

That's a good question. And I think actually the depiction, as you can see in the chapter I have in the book and other information, is that I like to think of the fluidity of these categories and how my father's work or Japanese American artists or others at the time. I wrote my chapter about art during the war years to see the complexity of their depictions, both in terms of the style, their artistic style, but the messages they were trying to convey reflected the diversity and the complexity of Asian American experiences. And I think that's true for a lot. All people. That it's that there's no prototypical Irish American artist or writer or something like this. Artists who fundamentally are individuals, and they have many, many influences on them. And that's why I think it's important to appreciate that they have many different influences and are trying to say many different things. They're not just always talking about race all the time or ethnicity or religion. They talk about a lot of different things. So I think we can certainly be interpretive and highlight those things which we think are most important or speak to us today or a certain way, but not to constrict these historical actors in ways that are don't do them justice. Well, I love art. And I think art has a lot to say, and I urge my students to take art history and be able to think about art in ways that go beyond, oh, that's a pretty picture. But to see that art, great art, says can't say a lot and that or it can speak to us, or we can take away from art.

In many ways, we know a lot of times artists don't have an explicit message, but we can look at it and think about something. So I think art is important. To be an inspiration, to be provocative is not didactic in the sense of being strictly educational. You take what you can from it, and everybody can take something away from a piece of art that's different or so I think that's very important for students to understand and to have confidence in their own thinking ability. You come to college, you know, you learn things, you learn skills, you learn facts and all this, but you also hopefully learn it maybe sounds presumptuous to learn to be able to think, to have that dimension of being creative, to be original, and even just for oneself to think about things in ways that are meaningful to oneself. And that's why the humanities, as opposed to just say, some of the other disciplines that you have in college which are skill based or leading to certain things. But humanities important to be able to think about, to think to think about literature, art, philosophy, all sorts of things as ways that can expand the mind as opposed to just being literal.

(Interviewer) And closing out a little bit on that subject is the recent Cantor exhibit. And you had mentioned that this was the first of its kind. Can you talk a little bit about how that came to be and your role in that?

The organizers of that show, Marci Kwon, Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander are great friends and colleagues and they did a tremendous job in starting up this Asian American Art Initiative at Stanford, which they say is inspired and builds upon the work that Mark and I did with that book, and opening up the field. I mean, there are others, too, who are very interested in Asian American art history, but they, Marci and Aleessa really took the initiative and had this ambitious vision of building a collection of Asian American art here at the Cantor, collecting it. It was at a time when there was minimal collecting. And so people have done a tremendous job, and this exhibition was to highlight some of their acquisitions. So it was wonderful to see because this much of this art had not been displayed previously or had their different frames or context in which this art appeared. But now to put it together in conversation with other pieces and with social history or history was was really first, I think certainly at the size of the show and attracted tremendous attention. So I think that's a really transformative exhibit. And they asked me to give some questions and asked to contribute in some ways, which I did in some small way. But the the show, I think, attracted tremendous attention across the country, certainly locally. And I think it's just the start of many, many other shows in the future.

Well, I don't want to sound trite or something, but in a sense everyone I study is something new and including those I studied in high school. But I would study them with a different critical eye and mentality. So all the Asian American subjects I study Japanese, Chinese, South Asian. I mean, I've written a number of books with different I mean, these none of them here, their experiences never appeared in an art school. So they were all revelatory to me and I was I pursued these projects to share with other people, but also just to learn myself. You know, I very early on decided on certain projects in part to sort of please or speak to others, particularly as I was being judged as an intellectual or a scholar. But a lot of the things I took up just because I was interested in them and that's why I appreciated the space that Stanford has provided to allow me to explore.

And I think the philosophy is that you do that for people and then they develop scholarship and they're able to develop things which can be very helpful for others and transform our body of knowledge. So that's what I've done in much of my work. I take up things which I think are new and novel, and first of all, they're of interest to me. But even to thinking about other historical subjects in new ways has been part of my life. When I was in graduate school, I remember studying a lot about the American Civil War and Abraham Lee and read different books on Abraham Lincoln. And I came away thinking about the Civil War, entirely different ways than I did in high school of the deep drama, tragedy, the passions, the fundamental issues that were involved, particularly on slavery, that were really not presented very much at all in high school. I think about the Depression, thought about Eisenhower or Kennedy. I mean, people were the big names in high school history, but I thought about them in different ways. And I did some study of John F Kennedy, and I came away being much less enamored of him. I'm less of fan of Kennedy than I was in high school when he was sort of lauded as a martyr and a very cultured, educated and moral leader. And I found out, you know, things differently. So even the traditional past became unfamiliar to me when I opened up my mind to think about the past in different ways.

The Committee of 100. It is now a more than 100 members. But originally the idea was to have 100 prominent Chinese Americans who would gather together to have a collective voice to be able to speak on matters of importance to Chinese Americans, both domestically and internationally, that as a new US-China relations, The organization was founded after Tiananmen in 1989, and there was a great outcry in the United States against China and also lots of passion and feeling passionate feelings about what happened in Beijing. And people such as I.M. Pei, the architect, Yo-Yo Ma, and a few other very prominent people, many along the East Coast, Boston in New York area, some very, very successful financiers, business folks put together what admittedly is a very elite organization. You can join only through invitation. And they wanted, I think, to keep it that way. That's why they limit it to a certain number of individuals. So over time, there have been a number of people have gone in and out of the organization celebrities, actors, businesspeople, some intellectuals, but mainly businesspeople, many Chinese Americans who've been successful in banking, high tech, some in politics, but people who had distinguished themselves in their professional lives. So a few years ago, I got invited. I mean, I sort of said this was a mistake on their behalf.

I'm not anywhere on the level of some of these other folks in terms of their professional accomplishment. It's business businesspeople, but it certainly terms in academia. I can understand and I was flattered and honored to be asked and I joined. So some of the people who are our members today include people such as the president, who is Gary Locke, who is the former governor of Washington State and had been the U.S. ambassador to China. Janet Yang, who's the president of the American Academy of Arts and Motion Pictures. You just saw her, several other very prominent businesspeople, the CEOs of Ancestry.com and and others. So we are to be a, not just a this is not an honorific organization, supposedly, but to be an organization that will have a voice. And the focus has been in the past few years of decrying, condemning anti-Asian violence and also seeking ways to improve communication and understanding between U.S. and China. We don't take a position on one or the other side other than to say that the two should be in dialog and we need to find ways to be in communication and to try to have as understandable relationship as possible. This is important for the two countries and for the future of Chinese Americans and at the same time is the domestic agenda which we also pursue.

So that's that's pretty much what we talk about. We don't we don't meet every day or every week or every month, but this is as a service organization, it does have a staff. It does issue public statements which reflect the general consensus of the organization. And it is an organization I'm very proud to be a part of. And I think it does great work and it tries to understand and help to educate others further in the FBI, in the State Department, in China. And it has to be a sort of a bridge or facilitator to, have dialog and to learn about other sides, other points of view.