William Tang

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.

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.