Amy Ling
(1939–1999)

Chinese American author and educator Amy Ling made it her life's work to promote the work of women and ethnic minorities into the American literary canon. Born in Beijing, China, Ling and her family immigrated to the United States when she was six years old. Inspired by the Civil Rights and Women's Liberation Movements of the late 1960s and 1970s, she was one of the first scholars in the 1980s to research Chinese American writers. She pioneered and headed Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Ling's major work, Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry (1990), is an account of Chinese American women's contributions to the literary world. She also wrote Chinamerican Reflections (1984) and edited numerous anthologies of Asian American work, including Asian Americans: Comparative and Global Perspectives (1991), Reading the Literature of Asian America (1992), and the Oxford Companion to Women's Writings in the U.S. (1994).

Ling was invited to universities such as Harvard and Tufts to speak about her research in Asian American Studies. Known internationally, her speaking engagements took her around the world to such places as Russia, Portugal, Spain, and Taiwan. She completed her last work, Yellow Light: The Flowering of Asian American Arts, while on medical leave in 1999. Shortly afterward, she died at the age of 60 after a long battle with cancer.

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