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, his early schooling in the Chinese classics, and his enrollment 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 conversion, 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 (1828–1912) was a Chinese-born educator and reformer and a pioneering figure in the meeting of China and the West. Raised near Macau and educated first in the Chinese classics and then in a mission school, he converted to Christianity and traveled to the United States, where in 1854 he became the first Chinese person to graduate from an American university, at Yale.

He devoted much of his career to bridging the two countries, most notably through the Chinese Educational Mission, which sent groups of young Chinese students to study in America. His life ran through the great disruptions of nineteenth-century China, including the Taiping Rebellion, and his memoir stands as one of the earliest first-person accounts in English by a Chinese Christian convert.