When I Was a Boy in China

When I Was a Boy in China (1887) is Yan Phou Lee’s short autobiography of his childhood, written in English for American readers. It gathers vivid recollections of a Chinese boyhood — the home and family, games and food, schooling in the Confucian classics, religion, and the customs of daily life — offered as a window into a world most of his readers had never seen.

Lee was raised in a scholar-official family and steeped in classical Chinese education before his life turned westward. The book ends with the journey that changed everything: his coming to the United States as one of the students of the Chinese Educational Mission, the same program that carried Yung Wing’s dream across the Pacific.

Brief and accessible, the book stands as a companion piece to Yung Wing’s fuller memoir. It is remembered too as a landmark of Asian American letters, often called the first book published in English by an Asian American, and its author went on to convert to Christianity and graduate from Yale.

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

This is a clean reading edition of When I Was a Boy in China, published in 1887. The text is in the public domain and we set it from the Project Gutenberg transcription.

Yan Phou Lee (1861–1938) was sent from Xiangshan to America at eleven, one of the hundred and twenty boys of the Chinese Educational Mission that Yung Wing had founded and that Yung Wing watched undone. He boarded with a New England family, was baptised in Massachusetts, and was recalled with the rest of the Mission in 1881; he came back on his own account and graduated from Yale. He wrote this book at twenty-six. It is generally reckoned the first book published in English by a Chinese author in the United States, and it was written to explain a country its readers knew mostly through caricature.

A note on what we changed. The transcription kept the line breaks of the printed page, so 172 paragraphs arrived as columns of short lines; we joined them back, which is whitespace and nothing else. We broke his longest paragraphs at sentences he had already ended — the median was 87 words — and the pass checks chapter by chapter that the words and their order are unaltered. We removed Project Gutenberg's licence, which is not his.

We corrected nothing. A checker proposed no changes at all, which is unusual and is to the transcriber's credit.

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