Shuk Foon Sophronia Liu (PhD 2013) was born in 1953 in the New Territories of Hong Kong into a clan that had lived in the area for 700 years. Her father, granted a scholarship to attend a prestigious college, attained the professional class with a position as interpreter and government employee at Queen Mary Hospital. Her mother remained illiterate until the day she died, after bearing and raising their nine children (along with a child born to her husband's second wife, who died soon after the birth).
Unlike her mother, Liu attended school and grew up an avid reader. She dreamed of following her father into college, but he thought higher education wasted on women. At age 20 she left Hong Kong to learn and live in the U.S. She received both a BA (English and French) and an MA (English) from the University of South Dakota. And then, in 1983, she enrolled in the PhD program in English literature at Minnesota to study early modern literature.
Here she met Regents Professor Madelon Sprengnether, a scholar in that field--but a surprising one. "By the early 1980s, I'd become a full-fledged feminist," recalls Sprengnether, "due to the revolution in culture and society sparked by the second wave of feminism. As a result, my students and I would have explored such issues as gender roles and representations of women in the texts we discussed."
Professor Sprengnether had also recently published first collections of her poems and personal essays; she was beginning to teach creative writing for the department's then MA in writing degree (now an MFA). Liu enrolled in one of her literary nonfiction writing classes. "From the moment that I read 'So Tsi-Fai,' a ghost story about a grade school classmate in Hong Kong who committed suicide by drinking pesticide after receiving bad grades, I knew that I was in the presence of a writer of extraordinary talent," Spengnether remembers. "I encouraged Sophie to continue writing, which she did, while completing her coursework for the PhD."
Meanwhile, in 1985, Maxine Hong Kingston, author of the iconic memoir The Woman Warrior, visited the U, and Liu got to meet her. She wrote in her diary: "The experience made me realize that no matter how wonderful other people's stories are, my story is uniquely my own. My mother was unique, and like no other."
Professor Sprengnether remembers: "The 1980s were a time of rapid and exciting change--as early stage feminism expanded to include issues of race, class, and sexuality in addition to gender. Sophie easily embraced these changes, as her own interests shifted from the early modern period to contemporary women authors, Asian-American writers, and the exploration of her own complex history, through creative writing.
"In 1987," Sprengnether continues, "she completed her preliminary oral exam, titled "Female Identity in Five Minority Women's Fictions: Maxine Hong Kingston (The Woman Warrior), Joy Kogawa (Obasan), Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye), Paule Marshall (Praisesong for the Widow) and Gayl Jones (Corregidora). With my encouragement, she decided to write a Doctoral Dissertation with a Creative Component--a formal option offered to specially qualified students in the Department of English."
In the mid-80s, Liu had began participating in local theater, and performed in 1984 in the pioneering play "Neurotic Erotic Exotics" with the women's companies Spiderwoman Theater and At the Foot of the Mountain. When a new group called Asian American Renaissance started in 1990, Liu was in the thick of it. David Mura, Twin Cities author and former Artistic Director of Asian American Renaissance, has noted: "We now have one of the leading Asian American artistic communities in the country, and Sophie's work with the Asian American Renaissance helped make that possible. She was one of those people you never forget. She was never afraid to speak her mind, and she had a large heart and sense of compassion for those marginalized by the more powerful."
Liu became involved with the upstart Asian American company Theater Mu as an actor and a playwright. She led workshops about Asian-American literature with Minnesota teachers and served on several community organization boards. "She also worked with women of color and Asian American women scholars and activists at the National Women's Studies Association," adds Sprengnether, "spear-heading an anti-racism protest and mass walk-out from the organization's national conference in 1990. This involvement, as well as her participation in the 1989 Chinese Student Democratic Movement, led her out of the academy and into a life of community activism."
Unfortunately the PhD was put on hold. But Liu kept writing stories of her family's life in Hong Kong, stories she would send to Sprengnether and also publish--in Colors Magazine, The Asian American Renaissance Journal, Making More Waves: New Writing by Asian American Women, and a number of college anthologies. She took to the stage as a songwriter, solo performance artist, and storyteller. She received writing awards from the Loft and the Playwrights' Center, a grant in theater from the Jerome Foundation, and a 2002 Artist in Residency award from Margolis Brown Theatre Company. In 1993, Arne Carlson's office awarded Liu a Governor's Award for Leadership and Contribution to the State of Minnesota.
But by 2007, Liu felt a calling to return to Hong Kong. She left her adopted state to teach writing in universities there. And to finish that memoir.
Three years later, she was given a diagnosis of stage four ovarian cancer.
"In the summer of 2012, Sophie wrote to me about the difficulties she was having with her treatment for cancer," reports Sprengnether. "At the same time, she sent me her manuscript of stories, A Shimmering Sea, most of which I'd never seen. I was, quite simply, stunned.
"Not only did I want Sophie to receive her PhD degree on the basis of this manuscript, but I also wanted to see this book in print--so that readers other than myself could experience the world of her parents and siblings in Sophie's 1950s' childhood with the intensity that her writing provides, while also experiencing her love for Chinese culture in all its detail, richness, and variety. Sophie has the power to transport her readers across oceans, continents, and cultures and to make them feel what she has felt, as if we shared her exquisite capacity to savor the world."
The collection was indeed published, receiving the International Proverse Prize for unpublished writing in Hong Kong in April 2013. Thanks to Professor Sprengnether's efforts, Liu was awarded her PhD that same spring. Liu did not live long enough to witness either accomplishment: she died January 14, 2013, one day after her 60th birthday.Liu's sister, Stephanie Liu, an artist in New York, writes: "My mother often said, 'If I could read and write, I would fly.' She grew up in a generation where women were deprived of equal opportunities to education, and polygamy was a male privilege and a norm in many Chinese families.
"A Shimmering Sea is not just Sophie's memoir," Stephanie continues, "but a powerful statement in refuting the sexist oppression against us. . . . Sophie translated the agony of our mother and other relatives into positive energy by reclaiming our past and breaking the silence of women in our past generations."
Sophie Liu performed a similar act of translation for members of her greater family in Minnesota, including University of Minnesota alums such as poet Ed Bok Lee and poet-playwright Katie Hae Leo. Leo, an MFA alum, got involved in Theater Mu in the mid-90s: "As a Korean adoptee who was raised in a non-Asian community, this was the first time in my life that I deliberately surrounded myself with other people of Asian descent. Sophie and I acted together in the play Paper Angels by Ginny Lim, which was about Chinese immigrants at the turn of the century who were stuck on Angel Island, waiting to be allowed into the U.S.
"Memories of Sophie are wrapped up with the tremendous growth that characterized that period of my life--learning Asian American history, discovering my own identity, cementing my views on politics, race, and art. But, she is also present in the small moments, like going out for Chinese food after rehearsal or laughing in the dressing room. I remember her fervent views on feminism and patriarchy and how unafraid she was to voice them. And I remember her coaching me on how to speak the Mandarin phrases required of my character, and how terrible I was at it. At one point in the play, I was supposed to say something like, 'I have to ask my father.' During rehearsal one day, I voiced what I thought was pretty darn good Chinese. Sophie laughed out loud, a high-pitched and contagious laugh. 'You just said I have to ask my donkey!'
"We miss you, Sophie."
Professor Sprengnether's recollections are drawn from her preface to A Shimmering Sea: Hong Kong Stories (Proverse, 2013). The book can be ordered through http://sophronialiu.wordpress.com
