VHS Talk: Prof. Henry Yu on the Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of Pacific Vancouver January 25, 2007

Each month, the Vancouer Historical Society presents a talk of historical interest at the Vancouver Museum in Vanier Park. These events are free, and all are welcome.

Prof. Henry Yu will speak on the year 2007 which marks a series of anniversaries of watershed moments in Vancouver's relationship to Canada and the Pacific world. By charting each of these crucial moments - from the 1907 anti-Asian riots through the 1947 Citizenship Act, the 1967 Immigration Act, and the 1997 Hong Kong handover, we can re-imagine both the local history of Vancouver and its place as a global city.

This talk kicks off a year-long series of commemorations of the profound historical changes that have taken place since the city's founding.

Prof. 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 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, Hawai'i, 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 currently working on a book entitled How Tiger Woods Lost His Stripes.

Official Website: http://www.vancouver-historical-society.ca/events.htm