Yi-fu Tuan

Yi-Fu Tuan (Tientsin, 5 december 1930 – Madison (Wisconsin), 10 augustus 2022^[1]) was een Chinees- Amerikaans geograaf.

Tuan werd geboren in 1930 in Tientsin in China. Zijn vader was actief in de diplomatieke dienst en dit verklaart de voortdurende verandering van woonplaats in Tuan’s jeugd. In zijn autobiografie ‘Who am I’ (1999, p. 4) schrijft Tuan:

’for I am rootless in more than one sense. I never lived in one place for more than five years until, at age thirty-eight, I moved to Minneapolis. Before that, I was constantly changing residence, first as child with my family, then alone as an adult. One city after another was called “home”: Tianjin, Nanjing, Shanghai, Kunming, Chongqing, Canberra, Sydney, Manila, London, Oxford, Paris, Berkeley, Bloomington (Indiana), Chicago, Albuquerque, and Toronto. Fourteen years in Minneapolis and another fourteen in Madison, my current place of residence, are the only source of any rooted feeling I may have. Socially, I am likewise adrift and for a simple reason-I am single. The only portable soil-family-in which an individual is given natural grounding is not available to me’.

1. ↑ Obituary. Gearchiveerd op 12 augustus 2022. Geraadpleegd op 15 augustus 2022.