At Yale College in 1854, Yung Wing was the first Chinese student to receive a degree from an American university. Born in a village in Guangdong Province, China in 1828, Yung Wing attended the Macau Missionary School under the tutelage of Yale graduate Reverend Samuel Robbins Brown. At nineteen, Yung Wing arrived in the United States with Reverend Brown to enroll in the Monson Academy, Massachusetts, and eventually Yale College. At Yale, Yung Wing was a member of the choir, played football, was a member of the Boat Club, and won academic prizes for English competition. He is best known for creating the Chinese Education Mission in which 120 Chinese students came to the US on educational exchange in the 1870s. Most of these students who went on to play important roles in China's modernization. The relationship between Yale and China is both historical and intimate and its shared vision of education can be traced back to the work of this student, Yung Wing.
Yung Wing image source: http://library.yale.edu
More on Yung Wing's history: excerpt
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| Lia |
The Asian American Studies Coordinator, Lia Dun (CC '14) collaborate with other ethnic studies groups on campus specifically to expose more of the Yale community to various facets of Asian/Asian American cultural, sociological, and political issues. To achieve this objective, the Asian American Studies coordinators organize an array of events, such as conversation series, faculty dinners, Master's Teas, and non-Yale faculty lectures, that are designed to foster open communication between guest experts, professors, and students. In the Fall semester of 2010, the Asian American Studies Coordinator has invited personalities such as acclaimed dancer-choreographer Peggy Choy, who teaches dance and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She re-envisions what it is to be an Asian American woman dancing in the twenty-first century. The workshop gives students—both dancers and non-dancers—the opportunity to learn about Peggy Choy’sprocess of developing Asian American movement fusing Asian-based martial arts with diverse forms from Asian dance to urban street dance styles. Her dance style fuses elements of traditional Asian dance with contemporary dance moves.
