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High Noon For Higher Education | Alumni Interview | Class Notes Profile

ALUMNI INTERVIEW — March/April 2006

Don't let her quiet elegance fool you - nothing could stand in Betty Lee Sung's way as she wrote the record of her people

By Beth Finke

Fifty years ago Betty Lee Sung '48 LAS decided to do some research on the history of the Chinese people in America. She figured the task would be easy.

"I had the best libraries," said the East Coast resident.

"I had the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, I went to the Yale Library, I went to the Princeton Library," said the spunky 81-year-old, still exasperated by the memory. "I found nothing! Well, nothing except real derogatory stuff about what bad people the Chinese were."

Determined to set the record straight, Sung wrote "Mountain of Gold: The Story of the Chinese in America" (Macmillan, 1967), among the early published histories of the Chinese in the United States written by a Chinese-American. Sung's landmark book, which played a role in the Asian- American consciousness-raising movement of the 1960s, became part of the initial efforts that built the field of Asian- American studies, where it became a standard text in those fledgling courses.

The book's success prompted administrators at the City College of New York to ask Sung to start a new department there. The CCNY program she established in 1970 was the first Asian-American studies program east of California.

Being among the "first" or "only" was nothing new to Sung. Her teen-age job interpreting Chinese maps for the U.S. Army map service was hardly typical for a 17-year-old girl in 1942. "It was during the war years," explained Sung, seated comfortably in the office/bedroom/multipurpose room of her apartment in Manhattan's Chinatown. "Very few people who knew Chinese and English were in the United States at the time."

Fluent in both languages, Sung was born and raised in Washington, D.C. She was 9 when her Chinese-born father decided to relocate the entire family to Guangdong, China, during the U.S. Depression. Four years later, Japan invaded China, and the family returned to the United States.

Betty Lee Sung, second from right, pals around in 1944 with her Lowry Lodge housemates on campus. Photo courtesy of Betty Lee Sung

Back in Washington, D.C., the Army map service job paid well enough for Sung to save a little money and eventually announce she wanted to attend college. Her father had other ideas.

"My father said he'd find a nice husband for me, and I'd get married," she said. If she disobeyed him, he'd disown her.

Sung's older sister, Rose, had followed orders, but Sung had ideas of her own. "I told him I was going to college anyway," she said. "[Tuition] was $80 a year, but I couldn't afford even that. I knew I had to figure out a way." After applying to a number of colleges, Sung accepted a four-year scholarship to the University of Illinois.

When she stepped off a bus in 1944 and took her first look at the sea of students milling about the campus, Sung found only one other face that looked anything like hers.

"I was one of only two female undergraduates with a Chinese background. There were about a hundred overseas Chinese male students at University of Illinois, along with two or three American-born Chinese," she said with a mischievous laugh. "I had a lot of dates!"

Her voice still rings with the enthusiasm of the rebellious young girl who packed her bags for Urbana 62 years ago.

"I had a lot of fun in Illinois," she said, explaining that racial prejudice had kept her from going to movies or other public events in her hometown. "Washington, D.C., was still segregated back then," she said, "but Urbana was a college town. They were a little bit more open-minded."

Sung said her memories of the University are all fond ones, even though much of her time there was spent washing dishes and cleaning toilets in exchange for room and board.

"That was the beginning of my life," said Sung, who graduated in three-and-a-half years with a Phi Beta Kappa key. "That's how I got started."