Professor Henry Yu was born in Vancouver, B.C., and grew up in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island. He received his BA in Honours History from UBC and an MA and PhD in History from Princeton University. After teaching at UCLA for a decade, Yu returned to UBC as an Associate Professor of History to help build programs focused on trans-Pacific Canada.

Yu himself is both a second and fourth generation Canadian. His parents were first generation immigrants from China, joining a grandfather who had spent almost his entire life in Canada. His great-grandfather was also an early Chinese pioneer in British Columbia, part of a larger network of migrants who left Zhongshan county in Guangdong province in South China and settled around the Pacific in places such as Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, the United States and Canada.

Prof. Yu's book, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2001) won the Norris and Carol Hundley Prize as the Most Distinguished Book of 2001, and he is working on a book entitled How Tiger Woods Lost His Stripes: Finding Ourselves in History. Currently, Prof. Yu is the Director of the Initiative for Student Teaching and Research on Chinese Canadians (INSTRCC) and the Principal of St. John's College at UBC, as well as a Board Member of the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia (CCHSBC).

Between 2010-12, Yu was the Co-Chair of the City of Vancouver's Dialogues between First Nations, Urban Aboriginal, and Immigrant Communities Project, and the Project Lead for the Chinese Canadian Stories public education project. In 2015, Yu was appointed as the Co-Chair for the Legacy Initiatives Advisory Council following the province's apology in 2014 for B.C.'s historic anti-Chinese legislation. He has received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal and the BC Multicultural Award in recognition of his community-based research and leadership.

BOOKS

Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2001)

Journeys of Hope: Challenging Discrimination & Building on Vancouver Chinatown's Legacies (UBC Initiative for Student Teaching and Research in Chinese Canadian Studies, 2018) $50. Edited by Sarah Ling, Szu Shen and Baldwin Wong; translated into Chinese by Szu Shen.

[BCBW 2019]