My Life in China and America

Yung Wing was the first Chinese person to graduate from an American university, and the first to discover that becoming a bridge between worlds means belonging fully to neither. This memoir, written in 1909, traces an extraordinary life that began in the fishing village of Nam Ping near Macau and led to Yale College, where he became the first Chinese graduate in 1854. Part one follows his unlikely education under the eccentric missionary Mrs. Gutzlaff, his trans-Pacific voyage as a teenage stranger in a strange land, and his transformation into something neither fully Chinese nor fully American. Part two documents his return to China and the slow unraveling of his grandest dream: a program to send Chinese students abroad for modern education. Wing writes with quiet devastation about watching his life's work collapse amid political treachery and the Boxer Rebellion, yet his love for China only deepens, twisted and strengthened by sympathy rather than diminished by betrayal. This is a document of profound displacement, the memoir of a man who succeeded beyond anyone's imagination and still found himself utterly alone.