Him Mark Lai was honored for his contribution to Chinese American history with a luncheon at the Empress of China in San Francisco's Chinatown on Oct. 28. An engineer by trade, Lai began his career by writing for East-West, the preeminent bilingual weekly published from 1967 to 1989.
Lai's first book, A History of the Chinese in California, was co-authored with Phil Choy and Thomas Chinn, and published in 1969, the same year he and Choy taught the nation's first course in Chinese American history at San Francisco State University. Other books by Lai include
Becoming Chinese American, Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Present, as well as the 2004 documentary Him Mark Lai: The People's Historian. (Ssource: AsianWeek, Nov 9, 2007).