By Gabriela Flores
Dr. Betty Lee Sung was a pioneer that accomplished many firsts as an activist, CUNY professor, and scholar who actively addressed Asian American and immigrant issues throughout her lifetime. On Thursday, Jan. 19, Sung died in her Maryland home. She was 98.
“Betty Lee Sung can only be described as a force. She defied traditional cultural and familial expectations as a woman, and broke Asian stereotypes, paving the path and opening doors to Asian American studies for so many who came after her,” wrote Joyce Moy, former executive director of CUNY’s Asian and Asian American Research Insititute, in the organization’s obituary.
Born in 1924 in Baltimore, Maryland, Sung was the daughter of two Chinese immigrant parents. As a Chinese American scholar, Sung’s research on Chinese American history led her to write countless publications and nine books.
One of her earlier books, “Mountain of Gold,” became the first documentation of Chinese American history by a Chinese American when it was published in 1967. Asian Americans and other students of color used “Mountain of Gold” in their activism and demand for ethnic studies, according to the Museum of Chinese in America. Sung’s book held a decade’s worth of research that described Chinese immigration and subsequent assimilation in the United States. Much of its research content was drawn from Sung’s travels and interviews of Chinese Americans around the country for her show on Voice of America, a state-owned international broadcaster, where she worked as a scriptwriter.
By 1970, she taught City College’s first full-time course in Asian studies, later founding its Asian American studies program. The program was a first on the country’s east coast, The New York Times reported. She taught at City College for 22 years, eventually leading the program as chairperson, before retiring in 1992.
Sung’s decades-worth of research centered around employment inequality, bigotry, and other issues that affected Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans, while actively challenging the stereotypes posed against her community. Years before her monumental strides in CUNY as a professor, she was raised with four other siblings, and eventually moved to China with her parents during the Great Depression in 1934 when she was 9. Her father soon returned to the States with one of her brothers, and her mother and another sibling died in China. Sung and her two remaining siblings later sailed internationally to their father’s Washington home, escaping Japanese invaders in 1938.
During World War II, Sung earned a scholarship to the University of Illinois after working with the Library of Congress for Chinese translation work. There, at the university, she earned her bachelor’s in sociology and economics. She later moved to New York and earned her master’s degree in library science at Queens College in 1968. Twenty-eight years later, she received an honorary doctorate from SUNY Old Westbury in 1996.
Sung’s imprint on CUNY and Asian American studies did not end with her retirement. In 2001, she co-founded the university’s Asian and Asian American Research Institute. By 2015, she published her ninth and final book, a memoir entitled “Defiant Second Daughter: My First 90 Years,” later going on to receive the 2016 CUNY Award from the Graduate Center. In 2017, she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Association for Asian American Studies. She then continued her work, creating a $100,000 endowment at CUNY for AAARI to fund research on Asian American topics.
Beyond her mark at the university, Sung also played a significant role in archiving the voices, documentation, and rich history of Asian Americans in the United States. She ensured that the Library of Congress had its own Asian American section, where many of her published works are housed under the “Betty Lee Sung Collection.”
A memorial service will be held on Jun. 11 at the Museum of Chinese in America. Her funeral is set for Saturday, Feb. 18 at the Hines-Rinaldi Funeral Home in Maryland.