Boxer Indemnity Scholars and me
Dec 17, 2016 9:40:47 GMT -5
Post by chujun on Dec 17, 2016 9:40:47 GMT -5
Hello again! My name is Sarah - Chinese name 徐珊珊 - and I've been researching my Chinese ancestry since 2014. It all started with my great-great-grandfather . . .
His name was 徐振, but I think from a very young age he used the name Edward or Eduardo. He was born in Macau and therefore was able to claim Portuguese citizenship. He came to the United States in 1912 along with a wave of other Chinese students studying in US universities at the time, most under a scholarship program that came from monies from the Boxer Indemnity payments. He himself was not a Boxer Indemnity Scholar though.
He went to Auburn first, which at that time was called Alabama Polytechnic Institute. I think he chose there because a professor there, Dr. Wannamaker, had also taught at Canton Christian College in Canton, China, and Edward followed him back to his home institution. He later changed majors - from engineering to law - and schools - from API to Albany Law School. In his third year at Albany, he took classes at Fordham in New York City, which is where he met my great-great-grandmother, a local German-American girl.
They got married very quickly and returned to China early in 1918, so Edward never finished his schooling. They moved to Shanghai and they both worked for the telephone company there. They had 5 kids in total, the second-oldest of whom was my great-grandmother (Grandma Levchenko). As my name for her suggests, she eventually married a Russian man whose family had fled Russia in 1917 for supporting the Mencheviks during the Revolution. They were married in 1941/2, right before things got hairy in Shanghai.
Edward died around 1948, and the rest of his family all came back to the US separately. Despite having an American mother, only one of his children were considered American: the daughter that had been born when the family was on vacation in Rochester in 1927. Grandma Levchenko claimed Portuguese heritage and got a passport to flee to Brazil. Grandpa Levchenko and their daughter (my grandmother) got UN Refugee Passports in Hong Kong to go with her. They stayed in Brazil for a year while my great-great-grandmother worked in America to get them to come. They finally arrived in 1955 and became US citizens in 1960.
My grandmother had a child very early, so she gave him up for adoption. My dad was adopted by two white Methodist ministers and never knew he was anything other than white until, in the search for his birth family, he found a copy of his original birth certificate and it read "Theodore Konstantin Levchenko" (his adoptive parents gave him the name David). We were able to meet Grandma and Grandpa Levchenko before they died, and now with the Internet I've been able to find out way more.
Unfortunately, I seem to have hit a wall. I only know romanizations for Edward's parents (Wing Pao and Soo Pan), and that his father was living in a hotel in Shanghai when Edward left in 1912. With no Chinese characters for them, I'm stymied at finding a zupu. I have no village information, except that they probably lived in either Macau or Canton. I also have no real way to guess accurately at their Chinese names because "Wing Pao" is clearly a Cantonese romanization and I only speak Mandarin. So right now I'm stuck.
Glad to have found this community!
- 徐珊珊
His name was 徐振, but I think from a very young age he used the name Edward or Eduardo. He was born in Macau and therefore was able to claim Portuguese citizenship. He came to the United States in 1912 along with a wave of other Chinese students studying in US universities at the time, most under a scholarship program that came from monies from the Boxer Indemnity payments. He himself was not a Boxer Indemnity Scholar though.
He went to Auburn first, which at that time was called Alabama Polytechnic Institute. I think he chose there because a professor there, Dr. Wannamaker, had also taught at Canton Christian College in Canton, China, and Edward followed him back to his home institution. He later changed majors - from engineering to law - and schools - from API to Albany Law School. In his third year at Albany, he took classes at Fordham in New York City, which is where he met my great-great-grandmother, a local German-American girl.
They got married very quickly and returned to China early in 1918, so Edward never finished his schooling. They moved to Shanghai and they both worked for the telephone company there. They had 5 kids in total, the second-oldest of whom was my great-grandmother (Grandma Levchenko). As my name for her suggests, she eventually married a Russian man whose family had fled Russia in 1917 for supporting the Mencheviks during the Revolution. They were married in 1941/2, right before things got hairy in Shanghai.
Edward died around 1948, and the rest of his family all came back to the US separately. Despite having an American mother, only one of his children were considered American: the daughter that had been born when the family was on vacation in Rochester in 1927. Grandma Levchenko claimed Portuguese heritage and got a passport to flee to Brazil. Grandpa Levchenko and their daughter (my grandmother) got UN Refugee Passports in Hong Kong to go with her. They stayed in Brazil for a year while my great-great-grandmother worked in America to get them to come. They finally arrived in 1955 and became US citizens in 1960.
My grandmother had a child very early, so she gave him up for adoption. My dad was adopted by two white Methodist ministers and never knew he was anything other than white until, in the search for his birth family, he found a copy of his original birth certificate and it read "Theodore Konstantin Levchenko" (his adoptive parents gave him the name David). We were able to meet Grandma and Grandpa Levchenko before they died, and now with the Internet I've been able to find out way more.
Unfortunately, I seem to have hit a wall. I only know romanizations for Edward's parents (Wing Pao and Soo Pan), and that his father was living in a hotel in Shanghai when Edward left in 1912. With no Chinese characters for them, I'm stymied at finding a zupu. I have no village information, except that they probably lived in either Macau or Canton. I also have no real way to guess accurately at their Chinese names because "Wing Pao" is clearly a Cantonese romanization and I only speak Mandarin. So right now I'm stuck.
Glad to have found this community!
- 徐珊珊