We love Lucie
Lucie Cheng / Publishing a work that ends up becoming required reading for budding minds is an academic’s dream. For Lucie Cheng, who passed away Jan. 27 in Taipei at the age of 70, the book Labor Immigration Under Capitalism, co-authored with Edna Bonacich, along with several other of her works, became that reality, cementing the University of Hawaii alum’s legacy as a pioneer in Asian American studies.
“The most serious students and scholars in Asian American studies turn to that work because it helps to shape certain questions about how and when Asians arrived,’” says Theodore S. Gonzalves, associate professor of American Studies at UH–Manoa. “It wasn’t the result of simply individual choices to ‘take jobs in the U.S.,’ but rather it was part of a global system incorporating the cheapest and, in many cases, most vulnerable forms of labor from Asia, Latin America and Africa. As students and scholars, we learned that Asians were part of a much larger story that linked with groups who seemed equally clueless about our presence in ‘the new world.’”
Cheng’s 1979 article, “Free, Indentured, and Enslaved: Chinese Prostitutes in 19th Century America” also paved the way for new thinking in sociology in terms of gender and immigration.
Cheng cut her academic teeth at UH, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1962, followed by master’s degrees in library science in 1964 and sociology in 1968, and finally a doctorate in sociology in 1970. She moved on to become the director of UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center, where she helped to develop a strong master’s program. Cheng was also the founding director of the center’s Center for Pacific Rim Studies. After her departure from UCLA in the mid-’90s, Cheng moved back to Taipei, where she became the founding dean of Shih Hsin University’s Graduate School for Social Transformation Studies.
John M. Liu, a senior lecturer in Asian American Studies and Sociology at UC Irvine and part of the first generation of Asian American Studies scholars, says Cheng was a terrific mentor. “I was one of her first [students],” he says. “I wouldn’t have been able to achieve as much as I did without her.”
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