Reverend Huie Kin, founder of the First Chinese Presbyterian Church in New York City’s Chinatown, was born in 1854 (the fourth under Emperor Xianfeng of the Qing Dynasty) in Yongning Village, Taishan – the famous hometown of overseas Chinese in Guangdong, China. His ancestors worked in the agricultural field. As a child, he went to private school, and had the ambition to travel across the ocean to see the new world.
Tung Gay Yee was born in Taishan, Guangdong, China. In 1951 he and his brother Tung Park Yee, who was one year junior, came to the United States from Hong Kong to join their U.S. citizen father.
Few people knew that the Chinese had served in the American Civil War. We would like to honor the Chinese people who fought for freedom for their host, in this new country, the United States of America. Dr. Thomas P. Lowry did research on Chinese fighting the Civil War in the Army, and met Edward S. Milligan doing research on Chinese fighting the Civil War in the Navy, in the National Archives. They joined forces, and in April 1999, printed their joined written article in North and South Magazine. In the present article “Chinese Servicemen in the American Civil War” by William Tang, the author narrates the achievements of Lowry and Milligan’s research and gives brief accounts of 37 Chinese servicemen’s lives.
2018, as a result of Congress passing and the President signing Public Law 115-337, the Congressional Gold Medal, our nation’s highest honor, will be presented to these individuals of Chinese ancestry who served honorably at any time during the period December 7, 1941, and ending December 31, 1946. The Chinese American WW II Veterans Recognition Project seeks to recognize, honor, and celebrate these largely forgotten men and women who served our country with great dignity and pride. Please ask the veterans or their descendants to register at www.caww2.org so they may be considered for the high honor.
This paper tells the heroic yet little known stories of some Chinese women who served in the US army during WWII and after.
Donaldina Cameron (July 26, 1869-January 4, 1968) was a Presbyterian missionary in San Francisco’s Chinatown, who rescued more than 3,000 Chinese immigrant girls and women from indentured servitude. She was known as the “Angry Angel of Chinatown.”
Huie Kin, the first ordained Chinese pastor in Chinatown, New York, married Louise Van Arnam, the daughter of a Dutch-American manufacturer from Troy, New York, in 1887. They had three sons and six daughters. The three Huie sons married American women and worked in the U.S. in engineering or publishing. All six daughters married Chinese students and went to China in educational, religious or medical work.
Tang Xinyuan (1916-2001) was from Wuxi, Jiangsu, China, and he was born into a textilist family. According to the Piling Tang Family Tree, he was the nineteenth generation descendant of Tang Shunzhi — a scholar, military strategist, author of prose, mathematician, and an anti-Japanese hero of the Ming Dynasty. Tang Xinyuan was the chief engineer of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
At the beginning of the 1990’s, I had the honor of meeting the revered literary figure Qu Zhengmin, who became my invaluable mentor and helpful friend in the next twenty years.
Those who went to high school or college in mainland China and loved studying English will remember Deng Yanchang’s frequent articles on oral English in the magazine English Language Learning. Professor Deng Yanchang, born in Phoenix, Arizona, was a very distinctive figure of the Deng family.