“God Called Me to the Land of My Forefathers”: A Chinese American Teacher in China During the First Half of the 20th Century

From 1912 to 1949, many educated American-born Chinese returned to their ancestors’ motherland. Their American educational background enabled them to serve in Chinese secondary and tertiary schools. They were motivated by several factors, like Chinese exclusion in North America and Christian missionary spirits. Joining the Inquiries of Jennifer Bond, Charlotte Brooks, and Daniel H. Bays, I will re-examine the experiences and legacy of American teachers with Chinese ancestry in Republican China. Using family papers, oral sources, and university archives collected in the United States and China, I tentatively argue that Chinese American teachers contributed to the intellectual exchanges between America and China. Their worldviews differed from either returned Chinese international students or white American teachers in China. Transnational mobility reshaped returned Chinese Americans’ multiple national identities. Their home-returning routes inspired by the republican government’s propaganda shaped Chinese modernization narratives with a stigma of racial discrimination overseas. Racial discrimination and foreign invasion co-constructed the duality of Chinese modernization.