My Life in China and America

My Life in China and America (1909) is the autobiography of Yung Wing, written in English near the end of a long and remarkable life. It opens with his boyhood near Macau and his enrollment, at the age of seven, in a mission school — the encounter with Western education and Christianity that would set the course of everything after.

The book follows him across the Pacific, where he became the first Chinese graduate of an American university, taking his degree at Yale in 1854. He describes his years of study and his return to a China in turmoil, including firsthand impressions of the Taiping Rebellion and the political world of the late Qing period.

Its final concern is his life’s work: the Chinese Educational Mission, the project through which he brought young Chinese students to be educated in the United States. Part conversion narrative, part record of a pioneering life between two civilizations, the memoir is the personal testament of a man who spent himself trying to join the best of both.

Yung Wing wrote his memoir in English, and our public-domain edition presents his own words in a clean, readable modern format with clear type, with a link to a free source as well.

This is a clean reading edition of My Life in China and America, the memoir Yung Wing published in 1909, at eighty-one. The text is in the public domain and we set it from the Project Gutenberg transcription.

Yung Wing (1828–1912) was taken as a boy from a village near Macao into a missionary school, carried to New England by his teacher, and in 1854 became the first Chinese graduate of an American university. He was baptised while at Yale. The rest of his life was an attempt to join the two worlds that had made him: he bought the machinery for China's first modern arsenal, he went to Peru to investigate what was being done to Chinese labourers there, and he founded the Chinese Educational Mission that sent a hundred and twenty boys to be schooled in Connecticut — until it was recalled, and he watched it undone.

A note on what we changed. The transcription was clean, which is what a transcription should be, so there was very little to do. We broke his longest paragraphs at sentences he had already ended: he wrote at a median of 131 words to the paragraph, which is a wall of type to a reader today, and the median here is 70. The pass that makes those breaks adds and removes nothing but a blank line, and it checks, chapter by chapter, that the words and their order are exactly what they were. We removed Project Gutenberg's licence, which is not Yung Wing's, and the index, which indexes the pages of a printing you do not have.

We corrected three slips of transcription: Tiensin to Tientsin and Kianksu to Kiangsu, both spellings the book itself uses elsewhere, and forwarned to forewarned.

What we did not change matters more. His transliterations are his own and they stay: the Tsung Li Yamun, the Emperor Khang Hsi, the Emperor Kwangsu, Tong Chik, Yung Yune Foo. A checker proposed "correcting" every one of those into some other name that appears more often in the book, and every one of those corrections would have been wrong. A nineteenth-century Chinese name spelled in a nineteenth-century way is not a misspelling.

The free transcription is linked from this book's page.