The Association for Asian American Studies blog has today sadly announced the passing of Him Mark Lai, the internationally renowned scholar and writer of Chinese American history.
Tag: obituary
A nice tribute to another kind of Victorian
Canadian journalist Tom Hawthorn has written an interesting tribute to John Ko Bong, a native of Victoria, British Columbia and World War II veteran in the Canadian armed forces.
Read John Ko Bong, commando (1912–2008) on Tom Hawthorn’s blog.
The life of Mavis Yen remembered
The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday (18 October 2008) carried an obituary for Mavis Yen (1916–2008).
Born in Perth to a Chinese father and white Australian mother, Mavis spent her early childhood in Australia before her father took the family to China in 1925. After sojourns back in Australia in the 1930s and mid-1940s, Mavis settled in China in 1946. There she worked for the Xinhua news agency and then the Number 2 Foreign Languages Institute until her retirement. She married Jeffrey Yen in 1950.
Mavis Yen was imprisoned for six months during the Cultural Revolution, with a further two years spent on a farm. This experience convinced her that she should return to Australia, which she and her daughter did in 1981. She gained degrees from the Australian National University and worked on an (unpublished) history of Chinese immigration to 19th century Australia.