Coming to America: The Lives of Three 19th Century Chinese Students Who Stayed Behind
2022 marks the 150th anniversary of the Chinese Educational Mission (CEM) which brought the first group of Chinese students to America and CHSNE is kicking off our initiative on the 150 years of Chinese students in America with a webinar which explores the lives of three CEM students who stayed in the United States and the accomplishments they made despite of the discrimination they faced during the Chinese Exclusion Act era.
Panelists Professor Gabriel “Jack” Chin of the UC Davis Law School, Professor Mike Duvall of the College of Charleston and Edward Rhoads, retired professor of Chinese history at University of Texas at Austin will discuss the lives of lawyer Hong-Yen Chang, author Yan-Phou Lee and diplomat Yung Kwai respectively.
Hong-Yen Chang ( 張康仁 , 1859-1926), educated at Phillips Academy Andover, Yale and Columbia Law, Class of 1886 – the first Chinese immigrant to practice law in the United States.
Yan-Phou Lee (李恩富, 1861-1938), educated at Hopkins School and Yale, Class of 1887 – the first Asian author to publish a book in English in the United States.
Yung Kwai (容揆, 1861-1943), educated at Springfield High and Yale, Class of 1884 – freelance writer and reporter, diplomat with the Chinese Legation in Washington, D.C.
Panelists
Gabriel “Jack” Chin is a teacher and scholar of Immigration Law, Criminal Procedure, and Race and Law. His scholarship has appeared in the Penn, UCLA, Cornell, and Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties law reviews and the Yale, Duke and Georgetown law journals among others.
He teaches Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, and Immigration, and is Director of Clinical Legal Education. He also works with students on professional projects. His efforts with students to repeal Jim Crow laws still on the books includes a successful 2003 petition to the Ohio legislature to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, 136 years after the state disapproved it during the ratification process. He and his students also achieved the repeal of anti-Asian alien land laws which were on the books in Kansas, New Mexico and Wyoming. For this work, “A” Magazine named him one of the “25 Most Notable Asians in America.” In connection with classes with a practical component, he has tried felony cases and argued criminal appeals with his students.
Professor Chin earned a B.A. at Wesleyan, a J.D. from Michigan and an LL.M. from Yale. He clerked for U.S. District Judge Richard P. Matsch in Denver and practiced with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom and The Legal Aid Society of New York. He taught at the Arizona, Cincinnati, NYU and Western New England law schools before joining the UC Davis faculty.
Mike Duvall has been a member of the faculty of the College of Charleston since 2005. He teaches and writes about the literature and culture of the United States. Along with first-year writing, his recent teaching has included American Literature to the Present, upper-division courses in the literature of assimilation and Americanization from the turn of the 20th century, American realism, American regionalism, and Mark Twain. He plans to add to his courses in spring 2022 a course in 19th African American novels. His current research interests include literary representations of socialism in American fiction at the turn of the last century and Yan Phou Lee’s When I was a Boy in China, the first book published in the United States by an Asian American.
Edward Rhoads is a historian of modern China. He taught for more than three decades at the University of Texas at Austin; he now lives in Philadelphia, where he is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Born and raised in China, he has also lived and studied in Taiwan and in Beijing. His research interests lie in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His publications include two studies of the 1911 Revolution: China’s Republican Revolution: The Case of Kwangtung [now Guangdong], 1895-1913 (Harvard University Press, 1975) and Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861-1928 (University of Washington Press, 2000); the latter book won the 2002 Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies as the best book on 20th-century China. Other publications have focused on the history of Chinese in the United States, including Stepping Forth into the World: The Chinese Educational Mission to the United States, 1872-81 (Hong Kong University Press, 2011). He has also written on the history of the bicycle in China, He is currently researching the history of his family in China.
