Writing about Grinnell College in the Twentieth Century (56), Beatrice and Joseph Wall described China as “the best represented country on campus.” Daniel Kaiser also writes in his blog, “Chinese students came to constitute the largest, most recognizable minority on the college campus” in the years around 1920. Looking back on the first half of the twentieth century, we can see that it was a common trend for Chinese students to matriculate for only one, two, or three years at Grinnell before graduating. They had been educated at a Chinese college prior to Grinnell or came through the exchange program connected with Grinnell-in-China. Most graduated from either Tsing Hua or Nankai, with a few being alumni of both Nankai and Tsing Hua. These students formed tight-knit cohorts at Grinnell, although some, after only one semester or one year at Grinnell, transferred to bigger institutions such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Columbia University, or the University of Chicago. After graduation some went to Europe or to other U.S, universities for graduate work before they returned to China.
After the launch of Grinnell-in-China in 1916, the action on campus concentrated in the second stage of Grinnell College’s interactions with China, from 1916 to 1931, especially the years between 1917 and 1924. In 1922 there were 13 Chinese students enrolled at the college, constituting about 1.8% of the student body, a small but significant percentage that prompted a local newspaper to announce with pride that Grinnell College had the most Chinese students of any schools in the state of Iowa (GR 09/21/1922). The largest cohort was part of the class of 1924, with eight Chinese students graduating that year. Their majors ranged widely, but were weighted toward the social sciences, especially economics, political science, history, and education. A small number majored in humanistic disciplines such as philosophy and English, while the second most popular majors were in the sciences: botany, math, zoology, chemistry, or psychology.
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Residences
Almost all the Chinese students, some of whom boarded with College faculty members, initially lived in town on Park, Broad, West, and Elm Street. After Grinnell completed building dormitories for men, most Chinese students moved into on-campus housing.
Activities On and Beyond Campus
Their extracurricular and cocurricular activities were vibrant and varied. Those ranged from sports and drama to student clubs, especially the Cosmopolitan Club and the Chinese Students’ Club. Chinese students made up the bulk of membership of the Cosmopolitan Club, which automatically accepted foreign-born students and Black American students as members; white American students had to be voted in. National recognition of the Cosmopolitan Club’s Grinnell chapter in 1922 not only raised its profile on campus, earning respect from the student body, according to a past member, but it also served as a rare locus of inter-racial acceptance and social interactions for minority students at a time of segregation and discrimination in the U.S. “It was just including people who were different,” such as “Chinese, Jewish, and Black” students, according to two of its past members. The club also admitted Japanese, Filipino, Siamese, French, Greek, Jamaican, Russian, and African students (Cornwell 42-43).
Club programming included talks by professors, such as Professor Edward Steiner in Applied Christianity and Professor Laetitia Moon Conard in Sociology; the club also engaged in discussions of racial relationships and discrimination in the U.S.
Chinese students actively participated in the on-campus discussions and debates of international affairs, giving talks at clubs and publishing articles in the student newspaper on issues such as the “Shantung [Shandong] Question” and Grinnell-in-China. Off campus they interacted with the clergy and returned missionaries. They participated in YMCA-related activities as well, such as attending conferences in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin in summer 1918 and 1919; Chinese students also hosted outside speakers such as James Chuan, Secretary of Chinese Students’ Christian Association visiting from Chicago in January 1918. One student, Ming Wei Wen, even left his study at Grinnell for a year (1919-1920) to serve Chinese laborers in France who had joined the World War I effort (GH 08/19/1919).
Grinnell’s Chinese students also partook in plenty of social activities. For example, they celebrated the founding of the Republic of China on October 10 and regularly marked the Chinese New Year, but these also served “patriotic” goals. While their parties attracted large crowds, they introduced Chinese culture through “show and tell,” displays of “curios,” and performances, such as singing Chinese songs, playing Chinese musical instruments, and reciting Chinese poetry. As was customary of student life at the time, they also hosted teas and dinners to honor their professors or missionaries going to China, usually at the Quad dining hall or at the Monroe Hotel in town. When in November 1918 the delegation of educators from China came to campus, Chinese students hosted a dinner party in the guests’ honor at the Monroe Hotel.
Without a doubt, the Chinese students on campus were influenced by socio-cultural trends in China. For example, after the Versailles Treaty was signed following the end of World War I, the May Fourth Movement broke out in China. Participants promoted anti-colonial and anti-imperialist messages, especially by focusing on the issue of Shandong province, which the Paris Peace Conference transferred from Germany, a defeated nation, to Japan, an ally of the victors. The news provoked an uproar back home and gave rise to widespread demonstrations, strikes, and a boycott of Japanese goods. These events found an echo on Grinnell’s campus, where between 1919 and 1920 a series of articles with similar sentiments appeared in the Scarlet and Black (SB); the newspaper even devoted a whole page titled “Grinnell-in-China Is the Child of our Grinnell-in-America.”
Fan Yi Kung, from Shandong and reportedly a direct descendant of Confucius (GR 02/02/1920), published an article in the Scarlet and Black titled “China’s Friendship Unharmed by Japan” (10/18/1919), emphasizing the friendship promoted by Grinnell-in-China between the two peoples despite President Wilson’s support of Japan’s seizure of Shandong at the Paris Conference. In 1920 Chung I Tseng gave a talk on this topic at the first meeting of the newly organized Jesse Macy Club on campus (SB 04/24/1920), defending Chinese rights and sovereignty while trying to appeal to the American love for democracy. Some of the Chinese students, such as K. C. Wu, and his contemporaries, including K.C. Tsai, had participated in the May Fourth demonstrations before they came to Grinnell.
Grinnell Ecosystem
The Chinese students’ experiences were also shaped by the ecosystems of both the town and the College. At the College they were befriended by professors who were proponents of the Social Gospel Movement and denounced socio-economic and racial inequalities in the U.S., such as Professor Steiner and Professor Stoops.
They reciprocated by holding teas and dinners in their teachers’ honor, socializing with those faculty members outside the classroom. The Chinese students noted a generally friendly atmosphere on campus, though some also commented on the superficiality of and utilitarian motives behind such polite demeanor (Tsai 667).
The town was a little different. Touted by Leonard Parker in 1911 as the “chief city of Poweshiek County, a busy industrial and manufacturing place” (365), the town of Grinnell also boasted an abolitionist legacy inherited from the founders, including Josiah Bushnell (J.B.) Grinnell, after whom the town and, later, the College was named. J. B. Grinnell advertised for kindred spirits to come build a town with “the school and the church paramount and attractive,” in 1858 successfully luring the College (then called Iowa College) to move from Davenport to Grinnell. Many town residents, especially the local clergy, established congenial relationships with the Chinese students. Some of the Chinese students spoke at church events, while others socialized with missionaries who used to serve in the China field and with other residents who had connections to China. They even taught town residents how to play Mahjong (GR 12/13/1923). The local newspapers showed great interest in the Chinese students, reporting on their comings and goings, awards won, performances put on, fund-raising dinners held, graduate schools attended, and even their illness and family deaths. All the same, the tone of some items published in Grinnell Herald and the Grinnell Register, especially dubious “cultural trivia” on Chinese history, culture, and traditions, registered ignorance, prejudice, and a sense of American cultural superiority.
Because of the decline of Grinnell-in-China amid the Great Depression, the ending of the Boxer Indemnity Fund program in the early 1930s, World War II, and the ensuing Cold War, the number of Chinese students studying at Grinnell dropped precipitously during the third stage of Grinnell’s interactions with China. Their number did not increase again until the late 1970s, following a thaw in official diplomatic relations between the two nations after President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. The more recent upsurge of Chinese students to study at Grinnell, and in the U.S., reflected another wave of nation-wide enthusiasm to learn from the U.S. to strengthen China and marks the latest stage of Grinnell’s exchange with China.