Wen Hui Chung Chen

Wen Hui Chung Chen is a Chinese-American college professor and sociologist. Wen-Hui Chung was born June 6, 1903 in Fujian, China, part of a family of 8 children, of whom 4 lived to be adults. After the death of her parents, she was raised by her brother and his wife. She went to school (very unusual for Chinese girls at that time), graduating from high school in Fujian and then attending Yenching University (Yan Jing Da Xue) in Beijing for her college degree. In 1932 she married Theodore Chen, a professor and dean at the Fukien Christian University in Fujian. In 1937, the Chens and their two daughters moved to America so that Mr. Chen could pursue PhD studies at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Wen-hui completed a Masters and PhD in sociology at USC and became a lecturer at the Department of Asiatic Studies. Her husband has become the first Chinese-American professor in southern California in 1939, and later became the head of the Asiatic Studies department. The couple authored an "Elementary Chinese Reader and Grammar" in 1945; Wen Hui wrote "Chinese Communist Anti-Americanism and the Resist-America Aid-Korea Campaign" and "The Family Revolution in Communist China", two pamphlets published by the Air Force in 1955. The Chens returned briefly to China in 1946-7, as Mr. Chen had been asked to become the president of Fukien University; they left as the Communists were approaching the city.

Mrs. Chen has endowed a fellowship at USC which helps support Chinese graduate students there. In 1995 she gave the keynote address at the annual convention of the Phi Lambda fraternity, a national Chinese student fraternity. As of May 2007 she is still alive and active.

External links

* [http://www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/trojan_family/winter06/China_Dragons.html USC's ties to China, with paragraph on Chens]
* [http://texts.cdlib.org/view;jsessionid=hyys41qL4QfGExdv?docId=kt4n39q271&chunk.id=admininfo-1.2.2 Chinese American Oral History Project - includes interview with Wen-Hui Chen]