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Reunion unearths lost history
By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Contributor
It took more than 20 years for Richard Lee to learn about his Chinese heritage, but he's been making up for lost time ever since.
Richard Lee organized a reunion for
descendants of the Chinese Education Mission, which sent Chinese boys to study
in the U.S. more than 100 years ago.
PHOTO: KEVIN FRYLING
Lee, a professor of medicine, pediatrics and obstetrics in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, organized a reunion last month at the University Inn that welcomed descendants from the Chinese Education Mission, an organization that sent Chinese boys to study in the United States more than 100 years ago.
In the 1870s, Lee explains, the Chinese government sent 120 boys to the U.S. to attend American schools. These children were the first Chinese citizens sent to learn in the United States. Lee's grandfather, Yan Phou Lee, was one of those boys. He came to the U.S. in 1873, and after seven years of education at schools including Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven, Conn., entered Yale College in 1880.
"The Chinese Education Mission was buried for a long time, even in China," said Lee, who several years ago edited and had republished a book his grandfather wrote in 1887 entitled, "When I Was a Boy in China." Lee also wrote an introduction to the book that addresses the mission.
Lee said the Chinese Education Mission was controversial because the Chinese government pulled the plug on the program in 1881 after it decided the boys had grown too Westernized. Most had discarded traditional clothing in favor of Western dress and cut off their queues—braids of hair usually worn at the back of the head. Some converted from Confucianism to Christianity.
Within the past five years, however, Lee said there's been a significant surge in interest in the movement, which China now embraces as an early step toward modernization.
In fact, three years ago Lee and Dana Young, whose grandfather also studied in the United States through the mission, were interviewed as part of a "Ken Burns-style" documentary that received a lot of attention recently in China. There also has been a sharp increase in reunions and other events celebrating the mission and its history in the United States and China.
Young was among those at the recent Buffalo reunion. Also in attendance were two other descendants: Bruce Chan of Toronto, an emigrant of Hong-Kong, and Liang Zangxun of Beijing, China. The reunion also attracted two scholars of Chinese history: Bernadette Li, director of the Institute for Asian Studies at St. John's University, and Edward Rhoads, who has taught Chinese history at the University of Texas. Thomas Burkman, director of Asian Studies at UB, and Roger Des Forges, a UB history professor, joined the reunion as well.
Chan, a retired professor of English, said his grandfather, Chung Mun Yew, was in the first detachment of boys to go to the United States with the mission in 1872. He went on to attend Yale College, where he was the first-ever Chinese member of the crew team. When Chan's grandfather returned to China, he served in the government under the Qing Dynasty. He went on to become China's consul general in the Philippines and later achieved an even higher government rank.
Zangxun said his grandfather, Liang Pu Chuew, went to the United States with the second wave of students in 1873, along with Lee's grandfather. Chuew was only 13 years old when he arrived in the U.S. and his brother, Liang Pu Shi, was only 11.
"It was not an easy decision for this family to send their two young sons to a strange country far from China," Zangxun pointed out.
He speculated his family might have had a connection to Yung Wing, the man who founded the Chinese Educational Mission after graduating from Yale in 1853—the first Chinese student to graduate with a degree from a North American university. According to Zangxun, both his great-grandfather and Yung Wing were involved in the tea and silk trade business in Shanghai.
In America, his grandfather lived with a host family and attended eight years of secondary school in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and then studied mining engineering at Columbia College. He went on to become a shipping engineer in China.
Lee explained that after the Chinese government cancelled the program, the students were sent back to China. A number of them, however—his grandfather among them—returned to the U.S. to complete their education. Others stayed and worked to modernize China.
He also cited the long history of prejudice in the United States against individuals of Chinese decent, especially between 1870 and 1950. He pointed out that the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which denied citizenship to Chinese immigrants, was not repealed until after World War II.
In fact, Lee said, as recently as 1960—the year his father finally revealed to him his grandfather's history when Lee was 23—Chinese ancestry remained grounds for discrimination.
Li noted that the generation represented by those gathered at the reunion had seen a true triumph over such prejudice. The men who participated in the mission had the greatest challenge to face, she said, as they often were not accepted by either Americans or Chinese because they were "too foreign."
She added that some have considered the Chinese Education Mission to be a failure because the government cancelled the program. However, she noted, those 120 students contributed greatly to the modernization of China in the 19th and 20th centuries.
"They made marks on history," she said. "There can be no greater success than that."