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Return to topMadeline Hsu's life, like her scholarship, bridges the United States and Asia. Hsu, a professor of Asian American studies since 1996, researches Asian immigrants to the United States, particularly those who came from China or Taiwan. It's a topic of great professional and personal interest to Hsu, who traces much of the inspiration for her work to her grandfathers and their tales of life as immigrants.
"I would hear these stories in my family for as long as I could remember," Hsu says. "I imagine that many other Chinese Americans may have heard the same stories, but we didn't learn much about the hardships both economic and emotional that they faced."
Hsu's maternal great-grandfather Wai G. Chun emigrated to the United States in the 1920s. He set up a grocery store in Arkansas that mainly served an African American clientele. Hsu's grandfather later joined Chun in the business, but it wasn't until the U.S.' strict immigration laws were relaxed that he was able to bring Hsu's grandmother and mother over.
On the other side of the family, Hsu's paternal grandfather Hsu Fu-kuan, a neo-Confucian philosopher, fled to Taiwan after World War II. Her father left Taiwan to attend graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis where he met her mother.
Hsu, 34, grew up in Missouri, moved with her family to Taiwan and later Hong Kong, where she attended an international high school. When it came time for her to return to the U.S. for college, she applied to West Coast universities and ended up attending Pomona College in Southern California.
At Pomona, Hsu found her calling when she took a general education course in history. Her professor was acquainted with the scholarly work of Fu-kuan. This professor had "great faith in genetics" as Hsu puts it, and he encouraged her to pursue history.
"I was the first in my family after my grandfather to be interested in studying Chinese culture and society," Hsu says. "The rest had gone into the sciences."
After finishing undergraduate work at Pomona, Hsu began a doctoral program in Chinese history at Yale. She intended to study medieval Chinese women's history, but soon turned to an interest born out of her family history -- Chinese emigration.
"I was somewhat of an anomaly at Yale," Hsu says. "The university was strong in Chinese history and in American studies, but there wasn't anyone specifically working on Asian American studies."
As a result, Hsu developed a strong background in both Chinese history and American studies, which served her well when it came time to write her dissertation on the migration of men to America from Taishan, a coastal province of China. Until 1965, more than half of all Chinese in America came from Taishan. These men, like Hsu's maternal grandfather, left their wives and children behind because of U.S. immigration laws, and soon "bachelors' communities" were formed.
Hsu conducted research on the West Coast and in China, combing through Chinese language gazetteers, newspapers and magazines. She also interviewed men in both countries about the trials of long-distance marriages. Her research led to her dissertation, a 2001 book Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home and her position at SFSU.
"I personally recruited Madeline to San Francisco State when she was finishing her dissertation," says Marlon Hom, chair of the Asian American Studies Department. "I found her work extremely conducive to what were trying to accomplish as a department."
Hom said Hsu's strong bilingual skills and knowledge of Chinese history fit the profile of the type of scholar needed in Asian American studies, where faculty members often don't have a background in Chinese studies.
Hsu agrees.
"I think the department is a good fit for me. In many other programs there's tension if your ties to Asia are too strong," she says. "Here I can let my work on China and other Asian countries inform my work on Asian communities in the U.S."
Now that her work on Taishan is complete, Hsu is looking forward to starting other projects. She plans to continue working on the "bachelors' communities" in America, and in spring 2003, she will take a sabbatical to begin research that relates to her father's side of the family -- Taiwanese-Americans and the consciousness of exile.
"My father's side of the family is part of the wave of mainland Chinese who fled communism to Taiwan. Many of their generation re-emigrated to the U.S. and remained conscious of the desire to reconstitute some sort of Chinese cultural space and identity," she says.
And for the moment Hsu is also enjoying one of her "unsung projects," her 6-month-old daughter Isabella.
-- William Morris
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