Judy Yung (January 25, 1946 – December 14, 2020) was a historian and professor emerita in American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specialized in oral history, women's history, and Asian American history.[1][2] She died on December 14, 2020, in San Francisco, where she had returned in retirement.[3]
Judy Yung was the fifth daughter of six children born to immigrant parents from China. She grew up in San Francisco Chinatown, where her father worked as a janitor and her mother as a seamstress to support the family. Yung was able to acquire a bilingual education by attending both public school and Chinese language school for ten years. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She also held an M.A. in Library Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in English Literature and Chinese from San Francisco State University.
Prior to entering academia, Yung worked as librarian for the Chinatown branch of the San Francisco Public Library and the Asian branch of the Oakland Public Library, pioneering the development of Asian language materials and Asian American interest collections in the public library to better serve the Asian American community. She also spent four years working as associate editor of the East West newspaper.
In 1975, inspired by the discovery of Chinese poetry on the walls of the Angel Island detention barracks, Yung embarked on a research project with Him Mark Lai and Genny Lim to translate the poems and interview former Chinese detainees about their immigration experiences. They self-published Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 in 1980, and a second expanded edition of the book was published by the University of Washington Press in 2014.
From 1981 to 1983, with a federal grant from the Women’s Educational Equity Program, Yung directed the Chinese Women of America Research Project, resulting in the first traveling exhibit on the history of Chinese American women and the book, Chinese Women of America: A Pictorial History. She then returned to graduate school to hone her research skills as a historian.
Upon receiving her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies, Yung was hired to establish an Asian American Studies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she taught courses in Asian American studies, women's history, oral history, and mixed race until she retired in 2004. She has since devoted her time to writing more books about Chinese American history and serving as a historical consultant with a number of community organizations and film projects.
In 2002, while working on Chinese American Voices, Judy Yung met Eddie Fung, a POW during World War II. They got married a year later and made Santa Cruz their home. After her husband died in 2018, Yung moved back to her hometown San Francisco.
Yung appears in the 2021 documentary The_Six_(film), in which she explains the significance of a Chinese poem written by RMS Titanic survivor Fong Wing Sun, and Chinese poetry written by Chinese immigrants while being held at Angel Island_(California) in the 1920s and 1930s.
She died on December 14, 2020, of complications from a fall at her home. She was 74 years old.[3]
Judy Yung.
Judy Yung.
Judy Yung's contribution to the story of Chinese women in San Francisco took more than a decade of meticulous research and the resulting exhaustive tome was worth the effort.... It is to Yung's credit that she examines this unsavory aspect of Chinese life in the United States unflinchingly and honestly.... Yung's tale describes the strikes, lockouts and blacklistings in the garment industry that inevitably involved Chinese women on both sides of the conflict.