Professor Shaffer Yamada (b. 1949) studied both classical Chinese and Sanskrit languages as an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she received a bachelor's degree in Asian Studies before moving on to the University of California, Berkeley. There she continued her studies in classical Asian languages, adding Tibetan and modern Japanese, in order to pursue a comparative philological analysis of classical texts. From 1979-1986, she lived in Tokyo, Japan, where she studied in the departments of Indian and Buddhist Philosophy (University of Tokyo) and Buddhist Studies (Komazawa University), while working as a consultant for "The Japan Times" book division and NHK, Japan's public television network. In 1985, she received a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1986 returned to her hometown, Los Angeles, with her son, Yuzo (b. 1984).
During the mid-1990s, she also began to study Khmer language and literature, and to archive the cultural history of the Cambodian community in Long Beach. She has recently edited the first anthology of Southeast Asian short fiction in English — Virtual Lotus: Modern Fiction of Southeast Asia(link is external) — a seven year project. Currently, she is editing a companion volume, The History and Cultural Significance of Modern Southeast Asian Fiction. As of summer 2002, she has organized the "Nou Hach Literary Journal," devoted to modern Cambodian literature and cultural studies. Its electronic version is found on the web site http://members.freespeech.org/southeast-asian-literature(link is external). In 2003 funding for this project was received from the Toyota Foundation for 2003-5. It enables a daily radio spot foregrounding Khmer poetry, creative writing workshops, and the publication of the Nou Hach Journal. The Journal is scheduled for publication in Fall 2004. This will be the first literary journal to be published in Cambodia since the 1970s (b. 1984). [home page]
Emphasis: Chinese