Born in San Francisco Chinatown in 1925, Him Mark Lai was a pioneering self-taught scholar, whose extensive research and archives have been a taproot for generations of students and researchers of Chinese American history. With a mechanical engineering degree from University of California, Berkeley, he worked 30 years at Bechtel Corporation before taking early retirement, turning his history avocation into a full-time vocation. He wrote and edited many books and articles, served on editorial boards for the Chinese Historical Society of America and UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center, mentored scholars, and with Phillip Choy authored pioneering college curriculum.

The child of garment workers, Lai grew up dreaming of building his own library. An inveterate reader and collector, he consolidated a major archive of books, periodicals, newspapers, letters, ephemera, business files, oral histories, and phonograph records. His fluency in Cantonese and Mandarin enabled research that was transnational in practice and content. His writings bridged scholarship based in the US with work overseas as well as; the experiences of first-generation Chinese immigrants with successive US-born generations.

Lai contributed to reclaiming the experiences of people marginalized and excluded from the American historical record. He prolifically contributed to East/West Chinese American Journal as well as Chinese America: History and Perspectives. With his wife Laura Lai, he scoured archives, poured through newspapers, conducted oral histories to pen heavily annotated articles on such topics as railroad workers, language schools, and political groups. His work chronicling community institutions, from benevolent associations to Chinese-language vernaculars, are seminal resources, germane for contextualizing Chinese American social practices and organizational culture.

In the 1970s, Lai worked with Judy Yung and others to research the stories of the Chinese detainees at Angel Island Immigration Station. Featuring Lai’s translation of detainee poetry, their publication won an American Book Award. In his 2011 autobiography, Lai’s description of his Chinatown childhood is vivid with ethnographic detail and is an intricate community cartography that includes Chinese translations for the places and people it maps. 

Lai’s scholarship grew out of his community involvement. He served on the board of the Chinese Culture Foundation, as producer for a Cantonese-language radio show, and co-coordinator of a history program for Chinese American youth. In 2010, the San Francisco Public Library renamed the Chinatown branch for him. The Him Mark Lai Digital Archives, produced by the Chinese Historical Society of America, is an online portal to materials from Lai’s scholarship held in multiple repositories.

Among his writings:

Him Mark Lai: Autobiography of a Chinese American Historian, edited by Judy Yung, Ruthanne Lum, and Russell C. Leong (2011)

Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions (2004) with Genny Lim, and Judy Yung. Island: poetry and history of Chinese immigrants on Angel Island 1910-1940 埃崙詩集 (1991)

Sojin Kim