Betty Lee Sung is an activist, author, and professor emeritus of City University of New York. As a scholar of Asian American studies, her several publications on Asian American race issues have been recognized as an influential force in advancing the rights of Asian Americans and immigrants in the United States. Sung holds an honorary doctorate from the State University of New York Old Westbury.
Biography
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Sung's interest in the history of Chinese Americans is shaped by her own experience as a child of Chinese immigrant parents. When Sung was nine, her father briefly took the family back to their hometown, Taishan, but the family returned to Washington D.C. before Guangdong was captured by the Japanese during World War II. While growing up in Washington D.C., Sung and her family faced discrimination as Chinese immigrants. The treatment towards Chinese people in the United States was so severe that Sung recalls how her family largely avoided public areas like the movies or swimming pools. On February 22, 1948 she married Hsi Yuan Sung, but they divorced in 1966. Her second married to Charles Chung took place on July 23, 1972. He filed a Petition for Dissolution of that marriage in California Superior Court in 2013. She has four children from her first marriage. Sung moved to New York and worked as a script writer for the Voice of America, where one of her programs was focused on Chinese culture in the United States. While working there, Sung was struck by how American culture held inaccurate and often stereotypical assumptions about Chinese culture. This inspired Sung to write her first book, Mountain of Gold: The Story of the Chinese in America. After publishing Mountain of Gold, Sung was invited to join the Asian American Studies program at The City College of New York in 1970, where she advanced to the Chair of the Department of Asian Studies. She held this position until her retirement in 1992. In 1994, Sung completed a database of the Chinese immigrant records in the New York Region National Archives with grants from the Chiang Ching Kuo Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The database was featured by the New York Times, and enables scholars to conduct genealogical research and recreate the early history of Chinese immigrants in New York. In 2001, Sung and Thomas Tam co-founded CUNY's Asian American / Asian Research Institute, a university-wide scholarly research and resource center on policies and issues that affect Asians and Asian Americans. In 2017, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Sung is also a member of the Committee of 100, an organization committed to addressing Chinese American issues.
Adjustment Experience of Chinese Immigrant Children in New York City
Chinese American Intermarriage
, published by a vanity book publisher, Advantage Media Group, a company the webpage of which proclaims that, using that company, one can "create, publish, and market best selling books in less than 24 hours of your time".
