“Fortunate Sons” told the story of the first group of 120
young boys to be sponsored by the Manchu government in Beijing and entered the
U.S. for a western education. The first cohort rode on the newly completed
transcontinental railroad from San Francisco to Hartford Connecticut in 1872.
These boys grew into adulthood in America and played important roles the early
bilateral relations between China and the U.S.
Sending boys to America for a western education was Yung
Wing’s idea. He had undergone just such an experience, becoming the first
Chinese to graduate from Yale in 1854.
When he went back to China, he eventually met and became a
trusted assistant to Zeng Guofan, the most powerful official at the imperial
court. Zeng felt the sting of Western imperial powers and the unequal treaties
imposed on China. He asked Yung for his ideas on modernizing China, Yung
proposed sending boys to the U.S. for further education.
By the time Yung accompanied the first of three batches of
40 boys to America in 1872, Zeng had died and succeeded by Li Hongzhang, who
became Yung’s chief patron in court. Li shared Zeng’s desire to modernize
China.
With the help of Yung’s friendship and connection with the
Christian missionaries, the boys were dispersed to families in Connecticut to
attend schools preparatory to entering leading universities in America.
By and large these boys, at ages of 12 and 13, adapted to
American life and quickly became fluent in English. Some even excelled in
baseball and all worked diligently to get to the top of their class. Anti
racist bias had not yet found their way to the eastern parts of the U.S. Their
female classmates found the Chinese boys exotic and more attractive than their
more ordinary white classmates.
The first group of students graduated from high school in
1876 and they were accepted into such elite schools as Yale, MIT and other Ivy
schools. The race riot that rampaged through Chinatown of San Francisco incited
by Dennis Kearney was a year away in the future.
By 1881, Li Hongzhang came under severe political pressure
at the imperial court and was forced to abort the mission to educate the boys
sent to the U.S. Only two had completed their college education and received
their degrees. Over 60 of them were sprinkled in various colleges; Yale had the
most with 22, MIT with 8, Columbia with 3 and Harvard 1.
The last contingent was to return to China in September
1881. Before boarding ship in San Francisco, the now young men challenged the
local team to a baseball game. The local team couldn’t hit against the
lefthander on the Chinese team and lost.
Some of these men found positions in the government. Others
built some of the first railroads in China. Others found schools and
universities. Among the more notable were Tong Shaoyi and Liang Dunyan.
Tong was one time the right hand man under Yuan Shikai
before becoming disillusioned by Yuan’s greed for power. He led a delegation to
Lhasa and successfully negotiated a treaty with the Brits that gave possession
of Tibet back to China.
Liang was the southpaw pitcher who became Minister of
Foreign Affairs. He convinced America to use some of the indemnity funds to
send Chinese students to America. He started Tsinghua prep school to prepare
the student before sending them overseas.
The book was as much devoted to the life of Yung as the boys
he brought to America. By accident, he became the hero of his Yale freshmen
class by scoring the equivalent of the winning touchdown in the traditional
annual scrum between the freshmen and sophomore class.
Yung met or intersected with the lives of many historical
figures. Besides Zeng and Li, Yung met some of the leaders of the Taiping
Rebellion and flirted with the idea of joining them. In the U.S. he met Mark
Twain and shook the hands of President Ulysses Grant.
Yung was to cross the Pacific numerous times in the service
of the Chinese government. On March 2, 1875, he married Mary Kellogg. By then
he was in his early 40”s, well past the age when Chinese men married for the
first time.
The book did not record whether Yung met Anson Burlingame
during his stay in China. There was no question that he and his charges
benefitted from the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 which respected the sovereignty
of China and stipulated that citizens of each was to protected by the other.
By the time, the last of Chinese mission returned to China,
it was just one year before the Exclusion Act of 1882. It was an America
radically different from the one Yung first entered.
In September 1898, the famous 100 days of reform came to an
end, and Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, the lead proponents of reform had the
escape beheading by sneaking out of China. They did so with Yung Wing’s help.
Yung himself was not so fortunate. His US citizenship was
revoked for no justifiable reason and he had sneaked back into the U.S. He died
penniless and alone in a San Francisco flophouse on May 29, 1912 less than one
year after China became a republic.
