January 4, 1847. The Whampoa anchorage, downriver from Canton.

A sailing ship called the Huntress, loaded with a full cargo of tea, was about to weigh anchor for New York. Her captain was named Gillespie. She belonged to the three Olyphant brothers of New York, who were giving three Chinese boys free passage.

The youngest of the three had just turned eighteen. His name was Yung Wing.

He had no money, and neither did his family. His mother, in a small village across the water from Macao, had cried when she agreed to let him go.

He did not know that he would be gone for eight years. Still less did he know that half a century later the country he had chosen for himself would write that it could not recognize him.

I. The First One on His Feet

It began the year before.

In 1846, at the Morrison Education Society School in Hong Kong, the principal, the Rev. Samuel Robbins Brown, Yale class of 1832, had been in China for seven years. He had come out with his wife to run this school that taught in English. Now his health was poor, his family's too, and he had decided to go home.

Four months before he left, he told the whole school. At the end he said he would like to take a few of his old pupils to America to finish their education. Those who wished to go with him should stand up.

A dead silence fell over the room. For days afterward the boys talked of nothing but Brown's leaving.

Yung Wing was the first one on his feet. Wong Foon was second, Wong Shing third.

Brown sent them home to ask their parents. Yung's mother consented with great reluctance, and only after his earnest pleading, and not without tears. He comforted her: she had two other sons and a daughter, and his elder brother was engaged, so there would soon be a daughter-in-law in the house.

Years later he admitted that on their own resources none of the three could ever have come to America. They were all poor. The money came from a few merchants in Hong Kong, among them Andrew Shortrede, owner and editor of the China Mail, a Scotsman and an old bachelor. They paid the boys' expenses in America and provided for their parents at home for at least two years.

Two years was all the patrons had in mind.

II. The Gleaner Who Spoke "Red Hair Men" Talk

Yung Wing was born on November 17, 1828, in the village of Nam Ping, four miles from Macao across a channel half a mile wide.

When he was seven his father took him to a foreign school in Macao run by Mrs. Gutzlaff, the English wife of the missionary Charles Gutzlaff. She was the first Englishwoman he had ever seen: tall, blue-eyed, in a full white dress with two great globe sleeves. He trembled all over and clung to his father.

Why had his parents not sent him to a proper Confucian school, as they had his elder brother? It remained a mystery to him all his life. He could only guess that, with foreigners arriving in growing numbers, they wanted one son to learn English and become an interpreter, with a better start in business or diplomacy.

In the fall of 1840, while the Opium War was still going on, his father died, leaving four children and a mother with no means of support.

His brother went fishing, his sister helped in the house, and Yung, about twelve, rose at three every morning to hawk candy through his village and the next, coming home at six in the evening with twenty-five cents for his mother. When winter came and no candy was made, he went into the rice fields with his sister to glean after the reapers.

One day his sister told the head reaper that her brother could speak, read and write English.

The reaper was curious. He called the boy over and asked him to talk some "Red Hair Men" talk. He had never heard such a thing in his life.

Yung was bashful. His sister prompted him: the reaper might give him a big bundle of rice to take home. The reaper took the hint. If the boy would talk, he said, he would give him a bundle heavier than he could carry.

So, standing in mud and water almost to his knees, Yung recited the alphabet.

The reapers and gleaners stood open-mouthed, grinning with delight. He was rewarded with several sheaves, more than he and his sister could carry, and had to find two other boys to help lug them home.

Later he folded printed sheets for a Catholic priest's press in Macao for $4.50 a month. Board and lodging cost $1.50; the other three dollars went to his mother every month. After four months, the medical missionary Dr. Benjamin Hobson sent for him. Mrs. Gutzlaff's last message before she sailed for America, Hobson said, had been to find this boy and put him in the Morrison School as soon as it opened.

In 1841 he entered Brown's school, the youngest of the first class of six.

III. Fire on the Mastheads

The northeast trade wind carried the Huntress strong and steady from Whampoa all the way to St. Helena.

The only trouble came as they doubled the Cape of Good Hope. On a pitch-dark night the wind howled behind them like a host of invisible Furies. Balls of electricity tipped the mastheads and yardarms, dancing back and forth like infernal lanterns in the black night.

The ship pitched and groaned. He felt no danger at all. He enjoyed the wild and weird scene hugely.

On St. Helena they visited Napoleon's empty tomb, with a great weeping willow sweeping over it. They cut a few twigs and kept them alive all the way to America. Brown later planted them by his house in Auburn, New York. When Yung visited Auburn in 1854, they had grown into fine, handsome trees.

On April 12, 1847, they landed in New York, after ninety-eight days of unprecedented fair weather.

New York then had perhaps 250,000 or 300,000 people.

Two years earlier, at the Morrison School, he had written a composition titled "An Imaginary Voyage to New York and up the Hudson." He had never imagined he would see it for himself.

IV. A Dollar and a Quarter a Week

They went by boat to New Haven, saw Yale College, and were introduced to President Day. Yung had not the remotest idea that he would one day graduate from it.

Then by rail to East Windsor, Connecticut, home of Mrs. Brown's parents. On their first Sunday the three Chinese boys sat in the pastor's pew, to the left of the pulpit, in full view of the whole congregation. They were the cynosure of the church. He doubted that much attention was paid to the sermon that day.

A week later they reached Monson Academy in Massachusetts. Brown put them in the care of his own mother.

Board and lodging, fuel, light and washing came to $1.25 a week each. They cared for their own room and, in winter, sawed and split their own wood. Their lodging was half a mile from the academy; they walked it three times a day, with the snow three feet deep.

The principal, Charles Hammond, a Yale man and a lover of Shakespeare, cared more about the beauty of a sentence than about grammatical rules. Through him Yung came to Addison, Goldsmith, Dickens, Scott, Macaulay and Shakespeare.

V. The Pledge He Would Not Sign

In the fall of 1848, Wong Shing, the eldest of the three, went home to China in poor health.

That left Wong Foon and Yung. By the original plan, they too were to go home at the end of 1849. They talked it over again and again and decided to stay. But who would pay after 1849?

The patrons in Hong Kong replied: if the two would go to Scotland and take a professional course at the University of Edinburgh, they would support them to the end.

Wong Foon thought long and accepted. He went to Edinburgh in 1850, became a doctor, and in time one of the ablest surgeons east of the Cape of Good Hope.

Yung said no. He wanted to stay in America and go to Yale.

Where the money would come from, he had no idea. He threw his anxieties to the wind, he said, trusting Providence to care for his future as it had cared for his past.

The academy's trustees did hold a fund for poor students. There was one condition: the recipient had to sign a written pledge to study for the ministry and go back to China as a missionary.

The trustees met him at the parsonage. They would be glad to help him, they said, if he would sign.

He would not, and he gave them three reasons.

First, it would handicap him. To do the greatest good in China he needed the utmost freedom of action, even to create new conditions if the old ones stood in his way.

Second, a missionary's calling was not the only way to do good in China.

Third, such a pledge would keep him from seizing any opportunity that might arise in the life of a nation like China to do her a great service.

"For these reasons," he said, "I must decline to give the pledge and at the same time decline to accept your kind offer to help me. I thank you, gentlemen, very much, for your good wishes."

He wrote later: I was poor, but I would not let my poverty gain the upper hand and make me barter away my convictions of duty for a mess of pottage.

Just then Brown came back from visiting his sister in the South. In Savannah, Georgia, he had told the members of a Ladies' Association about Yung. They had agreed to help him through college.

VI. Midnight Oil

In 1850 he went down to New Haven for the entrance examination.

He had had fifteen months of Latin, twelve of Greek and ten of mathematics. A railroad being built beside the academy had broken up its classes. Compared with nine-tenths of his classmates, he was far behind.

How he got in, he said, he did not know. But he passed without condition.

His recitations soon showed how unprepared he was. All through freshman year he sweated over his books until midnight, took almost no exercise, and broke down. He had to take a week's leave and rest in East Windsor.

In sophomore year he loathed calculus, fizzled and flunked so often that he expected to be dropped, and somehow squeezed through with a mark so low he was afraid to ask about it.

What saved him was English composition. That year he won first prize in his division in both the second and third terms, and became something of a celebrity in college and beyond. He took no pleasure in it. He knew how poor his scholarship was.

Money stayed tight. Near the end of sophomore year he became steward of a boarding club of twenty, doing the marketing and serving at table, and so earned his board for the rest of college. Remittances came from the Ladies' Association in Savannah and from the Olyphant brothers. He was paid as librarian of the debating society Brothers in Unity, thirty dollars in his senior year. Some ladies sent him shirts and stockings.

In 1854 Yale graduated ninety-eight men. He was the first Chinese known to have gone through a first-class American college.

VII. "What Am I Going to Do with My Education?"

All through his last year, the condition of China weighed on him.

In his despondency, he said, he often wished he had never been educated. Education had widened his mind and conscience and shown him responsibilities that the sealed eye of ignorance never sees, sufferings to which a callous nature is never sensitive. The more one knows, the more one suffers.

Then he called that a low view of life, a cowardly feeling.

He asked himself: What am I going to do with my education?

Before graduation he had his answer. The rising generation of China should have the same education he had had; through Western education China might be regenerated, enlightened and made strong.

That became the guiding star of his life.

In truth he wanted to stay. He had just begun surveying at the new Sheffield Scientific School and longed to take a scientific course. But he was poor, and his friends feared that the longer he stayed, the more likely he would stay for good, and China would lose him altogether.

In 1878 his Hartford friend the Rev. Joseph Twichell described that moment. At graduation, Twichell said, Yung was as tempted as he could be. He had been here long enough to become thoroughly at home; he was, in fact, a citizen. His tastes and feelings belonged here. China was like a strange land to him; he had almost entirely forgotten his native tongue. To go back was to go into exile.

He wanted immensely to stay.

But one verse of Scripture, he told Twichell, followed him like the voice of God: if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel. By "his own," he understood the nation he was born into.

The verse carried the day.

Two years earlier, on October 30, 1852, at the start of his junior year, Yung Wing had taken the oath as a naturalized citizen of the United States. Now the new citizen was going back to China.

VIII. The Pilot and the Mother

November 13, 1854. The East River, New York.

The clipper Eureka rode in midstream. The day was bleak and bitingly cold. No handkerchiefs fluttered from the shore, no voice called a good voyage. A tug towed her out to Sandy Hook and left her. There were only two passengers: Yung Wing, and the Rev. William Allen Macy, who had once come out to the Morrison School to take Brown's place.

The ship was empty, without even ballast, and reeled like a sailor who had taken a nip before sea. In the dead of winter she went by the Cape of Good Hope, straight into head winds. The captain, a Philadelphian with a bad stutter and a quick temper, paced the quarterdeck every morning, glared at the quarter the wind came from, clutched his hair, gnashed his teeth, stamped, and stammered curses at the Almighty.

In the Macassar Strait they beat about for nearly two weeks. Within Macy's hearing the captain said his bad luck came from having a Jonah on board.

Yung remarked, just loud enough for the captain to hear, that if he had charge of the ship he could take her through in less than ten days.

After 154 days, Hong Kong came in sight. A Chinese pilot came aboard. The captain asked Yung to find out whether there were dangerous rocks and shoals nearby.

Yung could not for the life of him recall the Chinese.

The pilot understood English. He became Yung's first Chinese teacher at home, supplying the words for rocks and shoals. The captain, Macy and the others had a laugh: a Chinese who could not speak Chinese.

He hurried to Macao to see his mother. He was in Western dress, with no chance to change, and he had grown a mustache, which by Chinese custom no unmarried young man should wear.

At first neither of them could speak. When they were composed, she stroked him all over, ten years of longing in her hands.

He told her about America, about Yale, and about his degree, something like the Chinese title of xiucai, inscribed on a sheepskin.

She asked, naively, how much money it conferred.

None at once, he said, but it would let a man make money faster and more easily, and give him influence. Knowledge, he told her, is power, and power is greater than riches. He was the first Chinese to graduate from Yale, so she was the first and only mother among the countless millions of China who had such a son.

She was very pleased. Then she looked at him with a meaningful smile.

"I see you have already raised your mustaches. You know you have a brother who is much older than you are; he hasn't grown his mustaches yet. You must have yours off."

He obeyed at once. When he came back clean-shaven, she smiled with deep satisfaction. With all his foreign education, he thought, she could see he had not forgotten to obey his mother.

IX. Years Later

In the spring of 1864 he was back in America, buying the machinery for a machine shop for Zeng Guofan. It was the last year of the Civil War. In Washington he called on General Barnes of the Volunteer Department and said that, as a naturalized citizen, he wished to serve six months as a volunteer courier, equipping himself, to show his loyalty to his adopted country.

The general thanked him. "Well, my young friend, since you are charged with a responsible trust to execute for the Chinese government, you had better return to Fitchburg to attend to it. We have plenty of men to serve, both as couriers and as fighting men to go to the front."

In 1872 he brought the first thirty students sent by the Chinese government to America. The plan called for 120, in four groups. In 1881 they were called home.

In the fall of 1898, a coup in Beijing ended the reforms. The next year, advised to change his residence for his own safety, he went to Hong Kong and placed himself under British protection.

Around that time, Secretary of State John Sherman, answering the American minister in China, Charles Denby, set down his government's judgment of its old citizen. Yung Wing appeared to have received his certificate of naturalization before the laws barring Chinese naturalization were passed; to refuse now the rights he had exercised for many years "would on its face seem unjust and without warrant." Nevertheless, in view of how the highest courts had construed the naturalization laws, the Department did not feel it could properly recognize him as a citizen of the United States.

He had married an American woman, who died in 1886 and was buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford. Their two sons grew up and went to school in America.

In 1902 he returned from Hong Kong to the United States to see his younger son graduate from Yale.

In 1909 he published his memoir, My Life in China and America. It tells of the Huntress, the fire on the mastheads, the pledge he would not sign, and the mustache his mother made him shave. Of the State Department's judgment it says not a word.

He died in Hartford on April 21, 1912.

More than seventy years before, a boy standing knee-deep in a rice field had recited the alphabet for a few sheaves of rice. Later he traded that "Red Hair Men" talk for a Yale degree, and tried to use the degree to open a road for 120 Chinese boys.

His mother once asked him how much money the degree was worth.

He spent his whole life answering her. In the end, it could not even buy back his own citizenship.

Sources, versions, and editorial boundaries

1. Principal source: Yung Wing, My Life in China and America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909), chapters I–VI, XIV, XVI, XIX, XX and XXII, and the appendix, an address by the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell before the Kent Club of the Yale Law School, April 10, 1878. Read in full from the Project Gutenberg edition (eBook #54635, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54635). Published 1909; public domain in the United States.

2. Scenes and dialogue: the Whampoa departure, the Huntress, Captain Gillespie, the tea cargo, the Olyphants' free passage, the gale at the Cape, the electric balls, the St. Helena willow twigs, the landing in New York on April 12, 1847, and the ninety-eight-day passage are from chapters II–III (the season plan's "more than a hundred days" is corrected to ninety-eight). Brown's announcement, the invitation to stand, Yung's being first on his feet, and his mother's tearful consent are from chapter II; Brown left China in December 1846 and made the announcement four months earlier. The gleaning scene, the printer's wages and Hobson's message are from chapter I. Monson costs, the snow, Wong Shing's return and the Edinburgh offer are from chapter IV. The refused pledge and its three reasons, the Savannah Ladies' Association, Yale preparation, late nights, calculus, composition prizes, the boarding club, the librarianship, the class of ninety-eight and "What am I going to do with my education?" are from chapter V. The wish for a scientific course and his friends' fear that he would stay are from the opening of chapter VI; the Eureka, the captain, the Macassar Strait, the "Jonah," the pilot, and the meeting with his mother are from chapter VI. General Barnes is from chapter XIV; the 1872 first group and the plan for 120 students in four groups are from chapters IV and XVI; the 1881 recall is from chapter XIX; his wife's death in June 1886 and burial in Cedar Hill Cemetery are from chapter XX; the move to Hong Kong in 1899 and the 1902 return to see his son graduate are from chapter XXII.

3. Secondhand material: his temptation to stay, his near-loss of Chinese, and the verse that "haunted him" come from Twichell's 1878 address, a friend's account given explicitly as what Yung said. In chapter VI Yung himself mentions only the scientific course, his poverty and his friends' advice.

4. Naturalization and its denial: the date October 30, 1852, follows English Wikipedia and James Carter, "The triumphs and travails of China's first American citizen," The China Project, November 1, 2023; the certificate and court record were not examined. In chapter XIV Yung calls himself a naturalized citizen. The State Department's words are quoted from Sherman's letter to Denby as cited in Edmund H. Worthy Jr., "Yung Wing in America," Pacific Historical Review 34, no. 3 (1965): 265–287, at 283, taken here from a study quoting Worthy; the archival original was not seen. Most accounts date the decision to 1898; some say 1902, but John Sherman left the State Department in April 1898, so 1902 cannot be right for a letter from him. The text therefore says "around that time." The memoir does not mention the matter.

5. Omitted: his work in China in the 1850s, his contacts with the Taiping, the details of the Chinese Educational Mission and the reasons for its recall are left for later stories. The year of his marriage to Mary Kellogg varies between accounts and is not given. His death in Hartford on April 21, 1912, follows English Wikipedia.

6. Narrative boundaries: every scene, line of dialogue, number, action and feeling comes from the memoir or its appendix; nothing is invented. "He did not know that he would be gone for eight years" summarizes the fact that he left in 1847 and reached Hong Kong in 1855. Chapter II dates his entry into the Morrison School to 1841, while chapter IV speaks of meeting Wong Foon there in 1840; this story follows chapter II. Pinyin is used for Zeng Guofan; other names follow the memoir's spellings.