News

King-Kok Cheung is a UCLA research professor of English and professor emeritus of English and Asian American studies. A member of the UCLA faculty since 1984, she was honored in 2023 with a lifetime achievement award from the Association for Asian American Studies. The following is adapted from an article she wrote for the journal Literature, which she co-edited with former doctoral students Robert Kyriakos Smith and Hannah Nahm.

My sinuous life as an omnivorous humanist traversing disciplinary, periodic, geographical and national borders has yielded palpable wonders, the most wonderful being the opportunity to live and connect many lives.

Though I was born accidentally as a left-handed black sheep, I was made bilingual, bicultural and cosmopolitan in colonial Hong Kong, a classicist at Pepperdine, a Renaissance scholar at Cal, a multicultural and intersectional Americanist at UCLA, and a transnational and interdisciplinary comparatist by the University of California Education Abroad Program. The many splendors of literary America unraveled by Bruins of disparate stripes has driven me to herald the variegated beauty of Chinese American heritage — martial arts and Cantonese opera included — at UCLA.

I have gone from being an outsider, a suspect even, in both English and Asian American studies to being a resource and a brash maverick.

Read the full Faculty First Person column.

Photo of King-Kok Cheung: Evans Chan