Visionary educator

"When you are a lawyer, you represent a client, and you don't advocate on your own beliefs, or what you truly believe," Wu said. "I enjoyed practicing, but I always knew I wanted to be a law professor. I want to change the world."

After having taught at Howard University for nine years, Wu returned to Detroit in 2004 to serve as dean of Wayne State University Law School at age 37, becoming the first Asian-American law school dean and also the youngest law school dean in the country at that time.

"I wanted to go back to Detroit to do something helpful. I enjoyed being in Detroit, which's an important part of who I am," he said.

However, he realized that Detroit has some deep-seeded, structural problems at a time when it continues to decline because American cars aren't as popular as they were.

"If you are a law school dean, and you are good and trying to be helpful, it's very hard to change anything. It takes cooperation and community," he said.

In 2009, a scholarship brought him to teach at the Peking University School of Transnational Law in south China's Shenzhen for the inaugural year as a CV Starr Foundation visiting professor.

Viewing the chance as "an adventure," Wu said he wanted to go to a place where there was a sense of community and mission. "I lived on campus so I got to know the Chinese students much more than I would here (UC Hastings). The students were great. They were so dedicated," he said.

When he took office as chancellor and dean of UC Hastings in July 2010, Wu put forward a plan of rebooting legal education by reducing the overall enrollment while actively recruiting students from China and other Asian countries, to prepare lawyers who function within a global economy with a trans-Pacific emphasis.

Looking out of the window, Wu said, "Twitter opened up about two blocks from here. There are all these tech companies. However, 10 percent of technological breakthrough is based on law."

"If you don't have intellectual protection, if you don't have patent law, you can't say this idea is mine. If you don't have a stock market functioning properly, you can't make an initial public offering and attract investors," he said.

"I believe in the rule of law, which is what makes this democracy great. But that doesn't mean we need this many lawyers. The number of lawyers we have is too many. So I'm trying to get this down to the right number," he argued. "But rebooting legal education is much more than class size, it's about skills training through critical programs. We have clinics where students work with start-ups, non-profit organizations and national security cases."

In January, the college launched East Asian legal studies program which provides the students with a chance to study the laws of China, Japan and South Korea.

According to Wu, graduates have been put into law firms in Tokyo and Shanghai and other major Asian cities. Efforts have also been made to recruit students from there too.

Wu is working on a new book, a sequel to Yellow.

"I want to tell more than the story of the Vincent Chin case. I want to tell stories that capture and represent the time and place that explain how the death of Vincent Chin gave birth to Asian Americans," he said.

Before the case of Vincent Chin, people didn't call themselves Asian Americans, he said. They didn't have a pan-Asian sense and they didn't emphasize American. But the Vincent Chin case pointed out how important it was for people of Asian descent to assert "we are Americans, we've put down roots here".

liazhu@chinadailyusa.com