[2] Yu was born in 1949 in Rochester, New York, to two recent immigrants from China, Paul N. Yu, a cardiologist who was later elected president of the American Heart Association; and I Ling Tang, a pediatrician.
[5] Yu was dean of humanities in the College of Letters and Science at the University of California, Los Angeles and professor of East Asian languages and cultures from 1994 to 2003.
[6] She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1983) and the American Council of Learned Societies (1983).
[8] She is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society[9] and Committee of 100, the Board of Directors of both the Teagle Foundation and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, and the Kluge Scholars' Council of the Library of Congress.
From 2003 to 2019, Yu served as president of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), an organization created to represent and support scholars and scholarship in the humanities.