But most Chinese Americans ultimately became fully acculturated, she said — although she saw limits to that process. “I think the Chinese will never be fully assimilated as long as there is physical identity or physical differentiation,” she said.
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Betty Lee Sung, Pioneering Scholar of Chinese in America, Dies at 98
U.S.-born, she lived for a time in China and then fled as Japan invaded. She later broke academic ground in New York in the study of the Asian American diaspora.
Dr. Betty Lee Sung teaching at City College in New York in 1972. She was the founding professor in its Asian Studies program.Credit...Jack Manning/The New York Times
Betty Lee Sung, an American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants who was taken back to China by her parents during the Depression, escaped the invading Japanese as a teenager and then made her way back to the United States, where she pioneered research into the Asian diaspora, died on Thursday at her home in Silver Spring, Md. She was 98.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter Cynthia Sung.
In 1970, Dr. Sung founded an Asian American studies program at the City College of New York, billed as the first in the Eastern United States. She was the chairwoman of the department of Asian studies there when she retired in 1992.
She was also the author of nine books, from “Mountain of Gold” (1967), a historical account of Chinese immigration and assimilation in the United States, to a memoir, “Defiant Second Daughter: My First 90 Years” (2015).
“As the youngest girl, I always knew I was the least important person in our family,” she wrote. “I did not feel less important, and I found it difficult to act so.”
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