Chinese traditional virtues including being family-loving and patriotic, self-effacing and persevering, hard-working and thrifty. Hwa-Wei has succeeded as an exemplary Chinese American on both personal and professional levels.
The stories about Hwa-Wei’s childhood are quite absorbing. Through them, the readers of his biography will get to know more about the misery and chaos of the wars endured in mainland China from the 1930s to 1949. The Lee family’s landing at the airbase in Hsinchu, Taiwan, in an air force transport plane is truly legendary.
The vividly narrated chapters on Hwa-Wei’s striving to create a life in the U.S. and to successfully blend into American society are inspiring. Prior to the 1950s, Asian immigrants were often unfairly treated in the U.S. Many Chinese Americans suffered racial discrimination, making their lives difficult. However, Hwa-Wei, only twenty-six when he arrived in this foreign country, soon won the love of Mary, an American girl. They were married in 1959 and have been happily living together for over fifty years—having recently celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary—and have been blessed with many children and grandchildren. They were also blessed with Hwa-Wei’s successful career. Shortly after his retirement from Ohio University as the dean of Libraries, Hwa-Wei was invited to work as the chief of the Asian Division of the Library of Congress and was thus able to extend his contributions to the field of librarianship.
I personally got to know Hwa-Wei in the 1990s. Back then, the National Commission of Education, now the Ministry of Education, had received a loan from the World Bank for a development program on teacher education. A total of 128 teacher colleges participated in this program. A series of trainings, involving library directors from these colleges, was arranged in order to meet one of the requirements of the World Bank loan. Due to his reputation and the success of his previous international exchange activities, Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee was hired as a foreign expert and conducted two fascinating library seminars: one at Northeast Normal University in 1995, and the other at Sichuan University in 1996. His book, Modern Library Management, was well-received at both seminars. As his full-time companion, I learned a lot from Hwa-Wei’s lectures and follow-up discussions. It was a pleasant and exciting experience that I still benefit from today.
Through this biography, we can learn more about Dr. Hwa-Wei Lee—his personal and professional growth, his development as an individual, and his achievements in the world of libraries.
Zhejiang Dong
Former Head of Library & Information Bureau
Department of Development and Planning
Ministry of Education
Beijing, China
September 2011
FOREWORD V
LATE IN 2007, I was invited to apply for the dean of Libraries vacancy at Ohio University. As I had researched the history of the library and asked senior colleagues about what they knew about Ohio University and the Vernon R. Alden Library, one name always came up: Hwa-Wei Lee. Everyone within the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) community knew him. Hwa-Wei, they told me, helped form OhioLINK, brought modern library technology and practices to Ohio University, earned entrance into ARL for Ohio University, amassed nationally recognized international collections, created the Shao You-Bao Overseas Chinese Documentation and Research Center, and even built a high-density storage facility that now carries his name. It was hardly surprising everyone within ARL spoke so admiringly of Hwa-Wei. And it was, frankly, an intimidating legacy for a first-time dean to follow.
Not long after coming to Ohio University, a note came from Hwa-Wei asking if we could meet for dinner. He and his wife Mary were planning a trip from their home in Florida to Ohio, and they planned a stop in Athens. And, so, on a warm July evening my wife and I met Hwa-Wei and Mary for the first time. In a small, charming restaurant tucked in the Athens countryside, we talked for hours. Instead of the distant and intimidating figure I was expecting, Hwa-Wei proved to be friendly, unassuming, and helpful. It was the first of many long conversations Hwa-Wei, Mary, and I would have. Not only were their help, perspective, and advice invaluable, the scope of all they had done for Ohio University began to become apparent.
But it wasn’t until I traveled to Hong Kong, China, and Japan that I began to understand the extent of their contributions and kindness. At alumni events, library conferences, and university campuses across Asia, I met dozens of former Ohio University students, visitors, and librarians who had benefited from Hwa-Wei and Mary’s generosity. So many of our international alums, who had stayed with Hwa-Wei and Mary for weeks, depended upon them for advice and looked to them as a connection to their homes that were so far away. Librarians told me of how they would visit Ohio University—sometimes for months and without adequate funding—to learn the best practices and the latest technologies in libraries. Many of those librarians are leaders in academic libraries throughout Asia today. It’s hard to exaggerate, then, the influence Hwa-Wei has had on modern Asian librarianship.
His many accomplishments at Ohio University, and then at the Library of Congress, stand for themselves. More importantly, though, are the number of lives he and Mary have touched. They are both testaments to how libraries are much more than collections of books, and the power each of us has to change lives through our generosity.
Scott Seaman
Dean, Ohio University Libraries
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio, U.S.A.
FOREWORD VI
DURING THE fifty years of my library career, especially before my retirement from Ohio University, many of my library friends in China urged me to write a biography in order to share my experiences, not just about my own life, but also about the drastic changes taking place in the library profession both in the U.S. since the 1960s, and in China since the 1980s, in which I have been personally involved almost every step of the way. I consider myself very fortunate to have spent fifty years of my career during the most vibrant time in modern library history. More changes have taken place in these fifty years, than in the past five hundred years. These changes have made my work most exciting and full of challenges. My humble experience, which reflected an epoch-making transformation in modern librarianship, is most memorable and worth being recorded. The key reasons that I did not follow their suggestions were due mainly to my heavy workload, a lack of time for an in-depth evaluation of my own involvement and contributions, and my hesitancy in writing my own autobiography.
In 1997, a good library friend in China, Ms. Wanping Zhang, director of Wuhan Regional Library and Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Science, sent a librarian to Ohio University as a library intern with a special assignment to collect materials in preparation for writing my biography. The librarian, Ms. Hong Lu, an excellent writer, diligently collected much of my personal information including my writings, photographs, and recorded lengthy interviews. After the completion of her internship, Ms. Lu got a job with a Chinese newspaper in San Francisco and decided to stay in the U.S. During her work in San Francisco, she wrote many articles in Chinese about me that were published in Chinese newspapers and journals. Owing to her special talent in writing and hard work, Ms. Lu has published several full-length novels and other books. She has been the editor of the literary journal Chinese Literature of the Americas and serves as the deputy chair of the Association of Chinese American Literary Writers.
In 2008, about the time of my retirement from the Library of Congress, a former graduate student at Ohio University, Ms. Yang Yang, who was also my student assistant during the time that I was the dean of Libraries
