Prior to her coming to California in April 2002, Marjorie had been in academic librarianship for the past thirty some years at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She was born in China and graduated from National Taiwan University and received her MA degree from the University of Chicago in 1968. Aside from her professional duties as a librarian, she has been for many years a strong advocate for the arts, in particular folk art. She believes that the arts and cultural activities can be more powerful than other means to mobilize and energize the Asian American communities.

Marjorie has also extensive non-profit organizational experience. She is the current Asian American Advisory Committee member of the Oakland Museum as well as the newly appointed board member of the Oakland Asian Cultural Center. In New Jersey, she was appointed by former Governor Christie Whitman for a two-year term as the first Asian American member of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She was also Chair of the Middlesex County Cultural and Heritage Commission from 1997 to 2002.

She has made a positive impact on the communities that she has served both in New Jersey and in Oakland, CA. In New Jersey her interest in promoting Chinese folk arts began with receiving a small grant from the Middlesex Cultural and Heritage Commission and eventually becoming a major grant recipient for more advanced cultural arts projects, such as the present one on Chinese Knotting.

In Oakland, she successfully organized a Teens Photography Project in the summer of 2002 as a meaningful way to document life in the Asian American community in Oakland as part of Oakland’s 150th Anniversary Celebration. She brought the Japan-town based Ikenobo Society over to Oakland for a workshop on Japanese flower arrangement. Her most recent event was a book-talk featuring Iris Chang on her new book Chinese in America: A Narrative History of the Past 150 Years. (Vintage, Penguin, 2003).