The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [58]
In America, Yung resolved to acquire the knowledge he would need to help his homeland. The trustees of the academy offered to fund his college degree if he pledged to become a missionary after graduation, but Yung, both ambitious and stubborn in his convictions, refused to make that commitment. “I wanted the utmost freedom of action to avail myself of every opportunity to do the greatest good in China,” he later wrote of his decision. “To be sure, I was poor, but I would not allow my poverty to gain the upper hand and compel me to barter away my inward convictions of duty for a temporary mess of pottage.” Remarkably, he prevailed. Thanks to his friend Reverend Brown, Yung found several financial patrons in Savannah, Georgia, and with their support enrolled at Yale in 1850. There he impressed his peers by winning first prize in English composition during two collegiate competitions. In 1854, Yung successfully completed his studies and became the first Chinese graduate of a major American college.
He returned to China and, driven by a sense of his own destiny—and by a certain amount of self-importance—told his mother, “Knowledge is power and power is greater than riches. I am the first Chinese to graduate from Yale College, and that being the case, you have the honor of being the first and only mother out of the countless millions of mothers in China at this time, who can claim the honor of having a son who is the first Chinese graduate of a first-class American college. Such an honor is a rare thing to possess.” But as he would soon learn, one man’s American college degree was not enough to bring about massive reform in China.
Readjusting to life in China proved much more difficult than Yung Wing had expected. While living with a missionary in Canton, he witnessed firsthand some of the abuses and corruption of the Qing regime. In the summer of 1855 Yung saw the gory result of Manchu suppression of a local rebellion. The viceroy Yeh Ming Hsin had ordered the decapitation of seventy-five thousand people, most of them innocent, and Yung Wing lived only half a mile from the execution grounds. “But oh! What a sight,” he recalled. “The ground was perfectly drenched with human blood. On both sides of the driveway were to be seen headless human trunks, piled up in heaps, waiting to be taken away for burial.”
His idealism and independence of spirit, no doubt enforced by his exposure to American culture, made it almost impossible for Yung Wing to hold down a full-time job in China. To support himself, he worked first as a secretary to an American, then as a court interpreter in Hong Kong, but later claimed that the British attorneys had conspired to drive him out: “If I were allowed to practice my profession [in law], they might as well pack up and go back to England, for as I had a complete knowledge of both English and Chinese I would eventually monopolize all the Chinese legal business.” After a short time, Yung left the snake pit of legal politics in Hong Kong to move to Shanghai, where he worked for the Imperial Customs Translating Department, only to resign again, after just four months. Disgusted by the systematic bribery at every level of the organization, he decided to leave public service altogether. Soon he became a successful tea merchant.
In 1863 he left his prospering tea business to help Tseng Kuo-fan, a powerful imperial viceroy, with industrial plans to mechanize China. He assisted Tseng in creating