“To understand an Asian American experience, one needs to understand history, society, sociology, culture, religious ideas — that’s what constitutes Asian American studies,” Gordon Chang M.A. ’72 Ph.D. ’87, history professor and the Olive H. Palmer Professor in the Humanities, told The Daily. 

For Chang, studying history is also personal. “It places individual experiences in a broader continuum and context,” he said. “That’s why I would recommend everybody study their own history to have an understanding of what comes before us, why we wind up where we are, who we are.” 

Born in Hong Kong, Chang was raised in Oakland’s Piedmont neighborhood. After studying history and East Asian Studies at Princeton, he came to Stanford for his graduate degrees in history. Chang returned to Stanford to teach in 1990, focusing on race and ethnicity, diplomatic history and Asian American history.

Chang’s interest in the field is rooted in his family. His family’s public engagement as Asian Americans has provided him with a valuable model, he said.

Chang’s father was a Chinese artist who immigrated to the United States during World War II. “He was always involved in trying to promote the relationship between the East and the West, so that always intrigued me,” Chang said.

His mother was a third-generation Chinese American who grew up in California. Members of his maternal family were “involved in different civic organizations and pioneering as Chinese Americans in different fields,” he said.

Chang’s aunt, for example, was the first Chinese American school teacher in San Francisco to teach speech therapy. “She became very well known as a civic leader but also as an educator,” Chang said. “Today she has a school named after her: Alice Fong Yu Alternative School,” the nation’s first Chinese immersion public school, established in 1995.

“I’m very proud of their accomplishments and their pioneering spirit. Because of them, I was always interested in US-Asia relations and Chinese American history,” he said.

Attending school during the years of the Vietnam War was another “transformative experience” for Chang, sparking his interest in U.S.-Asia relations further.

Chang directed Stanford’s Asian American Studies Program from 1996 to 2002 and the Center for East Asian Studies from 2012 to 2016. In 2012, he created and co-directed the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America at Stanford Project, recovering the history of an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 Chinese migrants who constructed the first transcontinental railroad between 1863 and 1869. From 2019 to 2022, Chang was also the senior associate vice provost for undergraduate education.

History professor Albert Camarillo, who has known Chang for almost 40 years and collaborated with him to build the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), wrote that “Gordon is one of a small group of faculty who have successfully bridged the gap between the University and the broader public by bringing humanities research to the Asian American community and beyond.”

Last year, Chang also co-founded the Asian American Research Center at Stanford (AARCS) with music professor Stephen Sano and psychology professor Jeanne Tsai. Chang currently serves as the inaugural director of AARCS.

Tsai wrote that Chang’s “genuine knowledge, expertise, warmth, level-headedness, inclusiveness, trustworthiness [and] generosity” sets him apart from most in the field.

“He is the perfect person to lead AARCS, especially at this moment in time, when we need leaders who we can admire and trust to do what’s best for our communities,” Tsai added.

Growing up, Asian Americans were “relegated to spots here and there, very much marginal — invisibly, culturally and politically,” Chang said.

His high school in Piedmont had two non-white students — Chang and a Japanese American classmate — out of a graduating class of 200. At Princeton, among his class of 800, Chang recalled three Chinese Americans, two Japanese Americans, 15 Black Americans and one Puerto Rican student.

While at Princeton, Chang took to the East Asian studies program and Chinese history — especially the imperial era before Sun Yat-sen and the republican era — because of personal ancestry and his curiosity about post-revolutionary, communist China.

“China was a big unknown. This is now post-revolutionary China — communist China — and in the news there was so much worry of war between the United States and China. I really wanted to know a lot more about it,” he said.

While Chang was a student, however, Chinese history post-1945 “didn’t exist academically,” he said. Because of a lack of available documents about communist China, history departments felt it was difficult to understand contemporary China, much less teach it. Seeing this, Chang decided to pursue his graduate studies at Stanford because of history professor emeritus Lyman Van Slyke, who studied the Chinese communist movement.

When Chang first went to college in the early 1970s, he saw a “dismissive attitude” toward ethnic history, which included Asian American history. “There was a prejudice that said ‘there’s really not much to study [and] Chinese Americans are not much of a topic,’” he said.

“Government records and other historical records are overwhelmingly populated by material generated by the white population,” Chang said. “People just didn’t think non-whites were very important, so we didn’t have that collection of material.”

“But that was all very wrong, and that’s what I’ve faced over these years being a faculty member — locating primary materials, source material and writing,” he said.

In his scholarship, Chang has sought sources including biographical records of Chinese immigrants from immigration services on Angel Island, records from the Chinese American Civic Alliance organization in San Francisco (now stored at Green Library) and diaries and letters that regularly turn up.

Camarillo wrote to The Daily that Chang’s “public history work in the telling of the story of Chinese railroad workers of the 19th century is a good example of how he has wonderfully promoted public history.”

Lately, Chang has seen growing interest in the academic field in Chinese American history in America, as well as overseas and diasporic Chinese history in China.

“So many people left [China], and the lives they led overseas in Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Europe, United States, Africa, all attracted a lot of interest,” Chang said. “There’s a lot more effort to recover that history, so I think there’s certainly much more activity around studying Chinese American history than in the past.”

For Chang, seeing this growth of interest in Chinese American history, for example in curricula of American history, “has been encouraging.”

Chang’s latest step in his Stanford career has evolved with his daughter, Chloe Chang ’25. “It’s been fun for me to hear from her what her life at Stanford as a student is like,” he said. “It’s very different. I see Stanford from being a professor, a teacher and … an administrator, but now I understand it as a parent.”

Chloe and her sister Maya Chang, a junior at University of California, San Diego, wrote to The Daily, “our dad has always been pretty humble and has high standards. When I was young, I didn’t realize how much work he did, or how famous he was. As I got older, I would casually mention that my dad was Professor Gordon Chang and people would be shocked! People always say things like ‘you do know that your dad is a real rockstar right?’”

“I see him talking to his students, and I can tell he really cares about them and their work and learning… I run into him a lot on campus and it’s always really funny, but nice to see him. I surprised him by showing up to one of his classes the other week just to say hi,” Chloe wrote.

“We jointly mentored several grad students over the years, so I witnessed his insightful and supportive approach to training young scholars,” wrote Estelle Freedman, history professor emeritus.

As a pioneer in Asian American Studies and Asian American History, Chang “has played a pivotal role in building the Asian American community at Stanford and beyond through his support of generations of Asian American faculty, students and staff,” Tsai wrote.

“I think all roads lead to Gordon — everyone knows and loves him as a colleague, scholar, teacher, mentor and friend,” Tsai wrote.

“He is an academic at heart, always analyzing situations and his sources. We know he is becoming even more recognized for his work … because he has done a lot that has gone unnoticed or unappreciated,” Chloe wrote.