Philip Choy

Who is Philip Choy?

Philip P. Choy is a retired architect and renowned historian of Chinese American studies. He is the author of San Francisco Chinatown: A Guide to Its History & Architecture, Canton Footprints: Sacramento’s Chinese Legacy, and The Coming Man: 19th Century American Perceptions of the Chinese. Choy has been a community activist known for landmark preservation in San Francisco.

Choy was born in San Francisco on December 17, 1926. He grew up in San Francisco Chinatown and he was the fourth in an family of five children with three older sisters and a younger brother. During high school, Choy enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He attended San Francisco City College during World War II until he was called to active duty for basic training in Biloxi, Mississippi. There, in the south, he decided to become an activist after witnessing first-hand the influence of segregation.

After the war, he earned a degree in architecture from UC Berkeley and was involved in residential and commercial design for 50 years. During the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, Choy became president of the Chinese Historical Society of America and in 1969, he teamed up with historian Him Mark Lai to teach the first-ever Chinese American history course at San Francisco State University in 1969.