Stanford Today Edition: November/December, 1996 Section: Features: A Personal Journey WWW: A Personal Journey

A Personal Journey
Biographer Gordon Chang feels a kinship with his subject

By Diane Manuel

AS HE READ THE SINGLE-SPACED, four-page letters that Yamato Ichihashi typed from the Tule Lake Relocation Center to his colleagues back on the Farm, Gordon Chang began to identify with the personal and professional dilemmas the Japanese professor had faced.



A lanky young professor with an easy laugh, Chang is a fourth-generation Chinese American who can trace his California roots on his mother's side back to the 1880s. He once considered writing a social biography of his aunt, the first Chinese American school teacher to be hired in San Francisco, and he could compose equally moving profiles of other members of his distinguished family. His mother was a multilingual graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, who met his father, artist Shu-Chi Chang, during the latter's 1940 visit to the United States as a goodwill ambassador for Chiang Kai-shek. They were married in 1947 and Gordon was born the following year in Hong Kong, where his father had been invited to exhibit his famed watercolors of flowers and birds. After living in Nanking for several months, the family returned to the U.S. and settled in Piedmont, California. Chang grew up there, graduating as valedictorian and student body president of his high school.


Chang went East for college and majored in history and East Asian studies at Princeton, where he was one of five Asian Americans in a class of 800 men. After becoming active in the anti-war movement, he came to Stanford in 1970 to study the early history of the communist movement in China with Lyman Van Slyke ­ and to push for more Asian American history and culture in the curriculum. He picked up a master's degree, taught briefly at Berkeley, and then spent 10 years teaching American studies and Chinese history at Laney Community College, where he was chair of the Asian Studies department.




Under the guidance of Barton Bernstein, professor of history, Chang examined the history of United States policy toward the Sino- Soviet alliance. His dissertation, published by Stanford University Press, drew on three months of research at the University of Beijing and was titled Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948-1972.

Today Chang is developing a course on the future of the United States in the Pacific and investigating the international dimensions of the Asian American experience, including perceptions of Chinese Americans during the Korean War. As Asian American studies programs continue to expand nationwide ­ 26 colleges and universities now offer programs and another seven institutions are developing them ­ Chang has become a key player on the Stanford campus. He was a member of the planning committee that drew up recommend ations for the new program in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. He also was appointed to the faculty search committee of the political science department that hired the first tenured faculty member to teach in the program, scheduled to begin in winter quarter.



As he continues to pursue his own research interests in diplomatic history and issues surrounding nuclear stability, and also teaches Asian American courses half time, Chang ­ like Ichihashi before him ­ often finds himself torn in several directions.

