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For early modern Chinese History, my teacher was Professor David Farquhar. After taking his graduate courses,
I wrote a paper on the guan-da-min-shao system and its influence on the development of Jingdezhen’s porcelain
industry. The paper was later published in English by the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica,

Taiwan. In the field of Asian-American studies, my mentor Professor Lucie Cheng, then Director of UCLA’s Asian
American Studies Center and a sociologist specialized in women and gender studies. At the Center under her
leadership, I was a regular part-timer, being very much inspired by its research culture and colleagues there and
their scholarship on Asian-American and Chinese-American studies. These all had a long-term influence on my
life and work. During the years when I worked there, I assisted Professor Cheng and Professor Charlotte Furth in
compiling Women in China: Bibliography of Available English Language Materials (published in 1984) and was
credited by Professor Cheng as a co-compiler. She not only led me into the realms of women’s history and the
history of overseas Chinese, but also impressed me with her academic integrity and public concerns. Her early

passing has left a big void in me since. In the field of American history, Professor Alexander Saxton, a specialist
in American labour history, alerted me to the issues of class and race. Under his supervision, I wrote a paper on
Chinese agricultural workers in California, which was later translated into Chinese for publication. My interest in
Chinese workers overseas has lasted to this day.

2. Teaching and Research at CUHK

In 1986, I returned to Hong Kong and received an offer at CUHK. Then with the retirement of Professor Hsü
Kuan-san at the History Department, I was appointed to take over the teaching of his two year-courses, “Contemporary

Chinese History” and “Historical Method.” After the University’s switch to the three-year system, “Contemporary
Chinese History” was split into two semester courses, i.e., “Twentieth-Century Chinese Revolution and Modernization”
and “China Today.” I also joined the team teaching the course “Revolutions East and West.” My teaching experience
complemented my research, and thus my research interests now include China’s social revolution. A Direct Grant
supported my research project on China’s revolution and Hong Kong, which resulted in publication of outputs on
Hong Kong as an arena of rivalry among different political forces from the mainland in the 1940s. While teaching
the compulsory course “Historical Method” for years, I have also published on historical methodology. In the mid
1990s, I volunteered to teach a new course “Gender and History,” which was related to a field that, I thought, should

be developed extensively at the University. I have also been actively involved in the development of Gender Research
Centre and Gender Studies Programme at CUHK. As women’s history and gender history began to receive attention
in local academia then, I held that a response from both my teaching and research was called for, so that we could
traverse the gender boundary in methodology and fully explore the complexity of relations between men and women.
At that time, I often travelled to south China for field research because of geographical proximity. In my own native
town of Shunde, I got to know over a hundred zishunü (women who vowed to remain single) who had retired from

Singapore after serving mostly as amahs. To interview them, I launched a year-long oral history project, resulting in
publication of a number of papers on the topic. This research crossed the boundary of social history and cultural
history and covers issues such as the zishu practice, the transformation of marriage customs, popular beliefs, ethnic
acculturation, and so on.

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