Passing of Ethnic Studies Alum Judy Yung
January 7, 2021
It is with sincere sadness that we report the passing of Judy Yung, an Ethnic Studies Ph.D., a native of San Francisco’s Chinatown, and a pioneering scholar of Chinese American women’s history. Her many awards include being National Women’s History Month Honoree (2015); the 2007, Annie Soo Spirit Award from Chinese Historical Society of America; and the Lifetime Achievement Award, Association for Asian American Studies in 2006.
Her obituary in the https: San Francisco Chronicles –https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Judy-Yung-Chinatown-native-and-early-scholar-of-15823362.php, offers a glimpse of her story and her impact. “As a San Francisco public librarian working in the Chinatown branch during the early 1970s, Judy Yung discovered a major hole in the collection, and in scholarship in general. There were no scholars on the experience of Chinese-American women, in ordinary life. So, Yung quit her job to become that scholar. In her 40s, she went back and got her Ph.D in ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. She then spent two years traveling the country, collecting oral histories, on her way to becoming a tenured professor of American Studies at UC Santa Cruz, where she built from scratch a program in Asian-American studies.”