Betty Lee Sung
Betty Lee Sung was born on October 3, 1924, the youngest daughter of Chinese immigrants from Taishan, China. It was her experiences as a Chinese American woman and the youngest daughter of Chinese immigrants that shaped her work as an activist, scholar, professor, and pioneer of Asian American Studies in the Eastern United States. At nine, Sung's father briefly took their family back to Taishan, where they lived until 1938 before escaping China and moving to Washington D.C. before the Japanese captured the region they lived in during the Second World War. (1)
As she and her family began to try and rebuild their lives in Washington, she not only faced the racism typically felt by all minority groups in America but also an intense level of disdain or rather indifference from her mother and her father. A New York Times article is reported to have stated: “As the youngest girl, I always knew I was the least important person in our family,” she wrote. “I did not feel less important, and I found it difficult to act so.” (3) Luckily, she did not let these feelings stop her from pursuing her education. After working at the Library of Congress translating Chinese maps for the Army during World War II, she received a full-ride scholarship to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she was awarded her bachelor's degree in economics and sociology in 1948. Soon after graduation, she met and married her first husband, Hsi-Yuan (Bill) Sung, on February 22, 1948, and moved to New York. Over the course of their marriage, they had four children before divorcing in 1966. (1,2)
Two years after her divorce in 1968, Sung received her master's of science in Library Science from Queens College. During this period, she worked as a secretary briefly before being fired for being deficient in shorthand at the Queens Borough Public Library and then as a scriptwriter for Voice of America. She was tasked with writing scripts for a program called "Chinese Activities." This program was intended to inform the public about Chinese life and culture in America. However, she found that much of the information disseminated to the public was inaccurate. This inspired her to write her first book Mountain of Gold: The Chinese Story in America, to combat this misinformation. She would not know this at the time, but with the publication of her first book, she had launched herself into the academic and most prominent section of her career. (1)
In 1970, Sung was invited to teach an Asian American Studies course at the City College of New York, where she eventually founded the school's Asian American Studies program, the first of its kind on the east coast of the United States. She taught at the City College of New York for the next twenty-two years, eventually becoming chair before her retirement from teaching in 1992. (1,2)
Throughout her career as an academic and activist, Sung authored The Story of the Chinese in America, Survey of Chinese Manpower and Employment, and “Chinese American Intermarriage,” Defiant Second Daugther: My First 90 Years, completed a genealogical database of Chinese immigration records and founded the Asian American/ Asian Research Institute at the City University of New York. She was also a member of the Committee of 100 and has been honored by the Organization of Chinese Americans, the American Library Association, Asian American Higher Education Council, and the New York Historical Society. She also received an honorary doctorate degree from SUNY Old Westbury in 1996. (1)
Betty Lee Sung passed away at the age of 98 on January 19th, 2020. She is survived by four of her eight children and six grandchildren. (3)