As a scholar of Asian American literature, assistant professor of English Lamyu Maria Bo centers her classes around three keywords: “diaspora,” “translation” and “multilingual.”
Much of Bo’s teaching is rooted in personal experience. Growing up, Bo would travel back and forth from Singapore and Malaysia to the U.S. Her family permanently settled in Pleasanton when she was 11, where parents started a Chinese restaurant where she was in charge of running the boba counter.
“We were surrounded by whiteness,” Bo said. “If a free boba came with their lunch special, customers would throw it away and ask ‘Why is there food inside?’” So Bo drew a poster to teach people how to eat boba.
At school, Bo’s friends had trouble understanding her because of her accent, she said. The experience is one that she has “not forgotten” and also an experience “embedded” in her family.
It was not until the end of undergrad that Bo got introduced to Asian American literature by a “particularly direct invitation” from her senior seminar professor at the time.
The professor tasked her with 12 books by Asian American authors to check out, read and come back to speak about with her in a month, Bo said.
Since then, Bo has found herself particularly drawn to two aspects of Asian American literature, what she calls “indeterminacy” and “intimacy.”
Indeterminacy, according to Bo, involves figuring out what “counts” as Asian American literature. “The porousness is part of what makes it valuable,” she said. “The deeper question here is we’re still trying to figure out how we’re defining America and how we’re defining Asia.”
In terms of its intimacy, most English majors are “looking for some dimension of themselves,” Bo said. In comparison, it’s often more “explicit” for students drawn to Asian American literature classes where “they are looking for themselves and they are looking for their parents.”
Bo teaches ENGLISH 12F: Introduction to English III: Introduction to Asian American Literature: Fantastic Fictions and ENGLISH 128: Asian Myths, Modern Retellings, while also designing a few new courses. One is on Asian American speculative fiction. Another is on Asian diasporic communities in the Americas – Canada, Mexico and South America – as well as in the Bay Area.
Currently, Bo is also finishing a book on literature translated between the U.S. and China during the Cold War.
“The more I wrote the book, the more I realized that actually this isn’t about the U.S. or China as entities so much as it is about the diasporic Chinese communities that both of these centers were trying to target,” Bo said.
Bo is working on a second book exploring global Asian exports — K-pop, K-drama, anime, Chinese sci-fi, Taiwanese boba and more — in relation to Asian-American culture.
Bo’s personal experiences have helped her play an important role among the Asian American student community at Stanford.
Assistant professor of English Roanne Kantor told The Daily that one thing that “really jumped out” about Bo’s work was her “capacity to work in many languages and locations.”
“I think it is really resonant with the personal experiences or the family experiences of a lot of our students,” Kantor said.
Kantor also noted Asian American Studies as a role “particularly needed and missed among undergraduate students.”
Phong Nguyen ’25 took ENGLISH 12F with Bo last fall, which he described as “life changing,” being “introduced to a whole new set of literature that [he] had been yearning for all [his] life.”
Nguyen is now closing out his Stanford journey with ENGLISH 128. “Asian myths is also just something that is so special to a lot of us kids and young people who grew up wanting to understand the context behind our familial traditions and stories,” he said. “To have a professor who does this research and shares it with their students is such a wonderful thing.”
Andrew Song ’25 told The Daily that Bo “makes [students] feel like colleagues” when sharing how lost she was on campus her first year and asking for places around town to check out with her family.
“Every bit of knowledge that we share ourselves, she accepts with so much kindness and treats us as if we were also lecturers in the classroom,” Nguyen said. “The professor can learn from their students and the students can learn from the professor.”
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated Roanne Kantor’s role in the search committee for Lamyu Maria Bo and misquoted Kantor’s note of the role of Asian American studies. The Daily regrets this error.