D. G. Tewksbury

You read that title correctly – today I will be profiling Donald George Tewksbury, who was born in Tung Chow (Tongzhou, a district of Beijing), China on 9 April 1894. I found his name in the 1919 Directory of the Chinese Students’ Christian Journal, and at first I thought this may have been an Elizabeth Cornish situation, where this Chinese student had a Western father and a Chinese mother. But D. G. Tewksbury was actually born to two American missionaries, and his story has so much to do with the Boxer Rebellion I thought it would be interesting to profile him here. I do feel a little weird profiling a Westerner here in this blog dedicated to Chinese voices, and I’ll go into that at the end of this post. Hopefully there’s enough of use in D. G. Tewksbury’s life story to make the profile worthwhile.

H. M. Au (區克明)

I obviously have not started this project from the very beginning, but it’s never too late to go back to the start, is it? So this week I will be writing about Harry Hak-Min Au (區克明, pinyin Ōu KèMíng, Cantonese Jyutping Au1 Haak1Ming4), the first person listed in most of my CSA Directories. Just a brief content warning: this blog post will briefly contain some historical racist language.

L. M. Tsaou (曹麗明)

I decided to profile L. M. Tsaou next thanks to a reader’s comment on my blog post on K. C. Chen. L. M. Tsaou (曹麗明, pinyin Cáo LìMíng) was another Massachusetts student who became ill during the influenza pandemic and died in the US. His story was similarly tricky to sort out, thanks to the lack of descendants, but I was able to gather a good amount of information on the short life of this Boxer Indemnity Scholar.

C. H. Chu (朱兆莘)

Sometimes I choose a student to profile simply because I run across some really interesting information about them while I am elbow-deep in a box of old records. This is the case for C. H. Chu, whose alumni card I found a few weeks ago in the Columbia University Archives. He’s not connected to any other student I’ve profiled to this date, but he sure has a heck of a story.