Lucie Cheng, former director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and a professor emeritus of sociology. She served as the first permanent director of the center, from 1972 to 1987.
Cheng received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Hawaii, Manoa, in 1970. She came to work at UCLA as an assistant professor of sociology that same year. Two years later, she took the helm of the Asian American Studies Center, which had been created in 1969, succeeding the center's interim director, Harry Kitano, another Asian American studies pioneer. She developed key areas of the center's programming and structure, including the master of arts program. The program has since produced hundreds of scholars, writers and community leaders throughout the United States.
During Cheng's tenure, the center produced various publications that served as curriculum material for Asian American studies courses. They included "Roots: An Asian American Reader" (1971), edited by poet Amy Uyematsu and other scholars, and "Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America" (1976), edited by Emma Gee.
As a sociology scholar, Cheng was a pioneering social scientist who helped place the field of Asian American studies within a trans-Pacific context. Among her many publications, she edited, along with UC Riverside sociologist Edna Bonacich, the classic "Labor Immigration Under Capitalism" (University of California Press, 1984), which situated the study of early Asian Americans within the context of international labor migration. With Ong and Bonacich, she also edited "The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring" (Temple University Press, 1994).
She went on to serve as founding director of the Center of Pacific Rim Studies at UCLA from 1985 to 1990.
Cheng also grounded her research in the local Los Angeles community. She was an active presence at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, working with others to support programming and publications. Along with several UCLA Asian American Studies Center staff members, she produced a pathbreaking publication on Chinese American women in Los Angeles, "Linking Our Lives" (1984). In the book, Cheng portrayed the courage of these pioneering women, who overcame geographic, political and cultural adversity to settle and build their communities.
After leaving UCLA in the mid-1990s, Cheng remained an active scholar on both sides of the Pacific. She served as founding dean of the Graduate School for Social Transformation Studies at Shih Hsin University in Taipei in 1997 and worked as a publisher and journalist for two newspapers in Taiwan, including the Lipao Newspaper, which had been founded by her father, Cheng She-Wo. In 2006, she established the Cheng She-Wo Institute for Chinese Journalism at Shih Hsin University, an archive dedicated to the history of journalism in China.
Cheng officially retired from UCLA in 2001. (Source: Letisia Marquez, UCLA Newsroom news release, Feb 8. 2010).