Remembering People's Historian Him Mark Lai

To listen to this edition of the Subversity show, click here: .

Fresh from the Association for Asian American Studies conference in Austin, Texas that ended Saturday 10 April, 2010, we bring Subversity listeners portions of the tribute to Him Mark Lai, the "Dean" of Chinese American History, who died in May 2009. Bilingual in English and Chinese, Him Mark Lai forged a pathway to today's Chinese American -- and Asian American -- studies by researching and documenting life in Chinese America over the decades. The panel discussion at AAAS included colleagues and friends of Him Mark Lai as well as those mentored by him. Chairing the April 8, 2010 session was Prof. Madeline Hsu (University of Texas, Austin), who has edited a collection of Him Mark Lai's publications, many never widely distributed before. The new work, out later this month, is Chinese American Transnational Politics from University of Illinois Press.

Speakers at the session whom we aired included Emeritus Prof. L. Ling-chi Wang (UC Berkeley), Poet and Amerasia Journal editor Prof. Russell Leong (UCLA) and Prof. Jack Tchen (New York University).

The show airs from 5-6 p.m. 12 April 2010 on KUCI, 88.9 FM in Orange County, California, and is simulcast via kuci.org. Podcast will be posted later on.

We dedicate this show to radical actor Corin Redgrave, who died a week ago, and whom we interviewed back in 1999 at the Toronto Film Festival, where he was appearing in a movie that screened there. Redgrave played a white gay communist who helped smuggle Nelson Mandela back into South Africa at the start of the underground struggle against the then-Apartheid regime, in "The Man Who Drove with Mandala." In our 1 June 1999 interview then, he discussed his father's bisexuality, the ruling class, socialism, and his own (and sister Vanessa's) involvement in the Marxist Party in Britain. The segment introducing his interview begins at 10:10 minutes of the audio: .