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Melody Yunzi Li

Dr. Melody Yunzi Li is currently an Assistant Professor of Chinese at University of Houston. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis, an MPhil degree in Translation Studies at the University of Hong Kong, and a BA in English/Translation Studies from Sun Yat-sen University, China. Her research interests include Asian diaspora literature, modern Chinese literature and culture, migration studies, translation studies and cultural identities. She is working on her manuscript on literary cartography of home in Chinese diasporic literature. She has published in various journals including Pacific Coast Philology, Telos and others. Besides her specialty in Chinese literature, Dr. Li is also a Chinese dancer and translator.

“We Are Not A Virus”: Challenging Asian/Asian American Racism in the 21st Century

The first time I collaborated with U.S. Studies Online: Forum for New Writing was when serving on a panel discussing Asian American historian Gordon H. Chang’s book Ghosts of the Gold Mountain in November 2020. [1] Sitting in front of my computer and seeing my colleagues from afar, I find the discussion nonetheless intimate and moving. We mourn my Cantonese ancestors who migrated to the West Coast in the 1800s—who worked hard to build the railroad yet were never recognised until recently—as Asian American scholars work together to exhibit the stories through online archives, documentaries, and books. And Gordon Chang is one of them. As a Cantonese person who grew up hearing the Gold Mountain myth, their works deeply touch me and are among the reasons I am a researcher in Asian American studies. But the content of the work is not all that moves me. The community the panel […]