San Francisco, California

Lydia Lum is a freelance writer who has worked as a staff reporter at the Houston Chronicle and Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Currently she is a correspondent for Black Issues in Higher Education magazine and contributes to other publications. Over the years, she has written stories about California's 2003 gubernatorial recall campaign, a working-class woman who paid the tuition for more than a dozen disadvantaged black college students, and daily life in Hong Kong after its return to China in 1997. For the project "Angel Island: The Ellis Island of the West," she has collected oral histories from Chinese survivors who were detained and interrogated under an exclusion law designed to protect American jobs. Lydia is working on a book that re-creates the Angel Island ordeal and explains its legacy. She was recognized as Journalist of the Year in 1999 by the Organization of Chinese Americans.

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