Fortunate Sons by Liel Leibovitz

Author:Liel Leibovitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393080339
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

On July 9, Twichell wrote in his journal, “Another dispatch from China received yesterday removes all doubt. The Mission is doomed. After all that has been done to save it, it must die ultimately and all its glorious promise fail. Alas. Alas. The disappointment of all its friends is extreme. Poor Wing, it is heaviest of all upon him. God sustain him. It is apparently, or in my judgment, the result of his separation from it. That gave the opposition a chance which has been abundantly improved. Surely ’tis a strange Providence.”30

At the time of the mission’s closure, over sixty of the students were enrolled in American institutions of higher education. Of that number, twenty-two were at Yale, eight at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, three at Columbia, one at Harvard, and the rest at disparate colleges and technical schools throughout the Northeast. Another five years in the United States would have been enough for all of the mission’s students to graduate according to Yung’s original plan. Only two students—Ouyang King and the brilliant Jeme Tien-yau—had had a chance to graduate, receiving their degrees a few months before the mission was recalled.

By the time the emperor’s decision made its way to Yung Wing, the students, having only recently wrapped up the year’s classes, were enjoying a well-deserved summer vacation together at Bantam Lake, Connecticut. Yung solemnly arrived at the lake to tell them the sorry news. The boys, who had been preparing a celebratory picnic, were stunned. They walked slowly back to their tents and packed up their belongings.

Some students of the mission, however, had a year earlier resolved never to return to China. Tan Yew Fun and Yung Kwai, the student who had dared to question Woo’s authority, had both converted to Christianity while living in America and had been ordered by an incensed Woo to return home in the fall of 1880. As they passed through Springfield, Massachusetts, on their way to the Pacific coast, where a ship would be waiting to deliver them to the certain punishment they would face from Qing officials, both boys decided to take their chances and jump off the train, eventually making their way back to Hartford. There, Twichell wrote, they “went into concealment, and remained behind.”31

Yung Kwai, although continuing to be comfortably supported in America by his uncle Yung Wing, nevertheless retained bitter memories about the management of the mission during his years of study. He still reviled Woo, who fought with him at every turn and instituted policies designed to stifle any sort of original thought. Writing of his uncle’s co-commissioner, Yung Kwai rhetorically asked, “What else could have been expected from a man brought up to shut his eyes to everything not Chinese for fear that his relish for the dry husks of Confucian classics might be spoiled thereby?”32 He explained his decision to stay in the United States with a simple metaphor: “A bird born in captivity cannot appreciate the sweet odor of the woods, but let it once have free space to exercise its wings, off it flies to where natural instinct leads.

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