Today’s genuinely patriotic American is Yung Wing.
I’ve
written a lot, starting with that linked post (still my favorite blog post to
date) and continuing into my
third book, about Yung Wing’s amazing story and the many significant and
powerful American stories to which it and he connect. Yung’s work founding the Chinese Educational Mission
exemplifies his contributions to American identity on many levels: from the
idea for the school, to bring more than one hundred young Chinese men to
America and help create a trans-national and cross-cultural community through
such connections; to the requirement that the students be allowed to attend
West Point as part of their experiences; to the Celestials, the baseball team
that the students formed and through which some of their most inspiring and
heartbreaking (and profoundly American) moments occurred.
But Yung’s
individual story and life feature many equally amazing American moments, and I
want to reiterate and highlight two here. The first is his attempt to volunteer
for the Union Army at the outset of the Civil War. Yung had been in America for
less than two decades at that time, had graduated from Yale only a decade
before (in 1854), and was still ostensibly a diplomatic representative of the
Chinese government; yet at this moment of extreme national crisis, when many of
his fellow Americans would buy their way out of enlistment, Yung volunteered to
serve. He was turned down, which just goes to show how frequently our official
national narratives (of patriotism and much else) have failed to recognize the
best of what our nation is and can be. But official bigotry shouldn’t and can’t
elide his individual patriotism and courage.
The second
moment I want to highlight came even more directly in response to such official
bigotry. As I traced at length in that blog post, the discrimination leading up
to and culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act destroyed Yung’s American life
on two significant levels: it forced the closure of the Mission and the
departure of its students; and it led to the revoking of Yung’s citizenship and
his own forced exile from America. But when his younger son Bartlett was
graduating from Yale in 1902, the next stage in the family’s multi-generational
American story, Yung returned to attend; he came as a diplomatic guest, but
from what I can tell he then stayed as an illegal immigrant, spending much of
the final decade of his life in Connecticut (with, I devoutly hope, his wife
and family). Am I arguing that an illegal immigration—during the first years
when that concept had any meaning—was an inspiringly patriotic American act?
You’re damn right I am.
Final nominee tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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