Baseball & the Chinese Educational Mission of the 1870s

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app so you never miss an episode, and please tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers to listen too. In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln appointed Anson Burlingame, a former Republican representative to Congress from Massachusetts, as the US Minister to China. When his term ended and he was ready to retire and return home in 1867, the Chinese government asked Burlingame to lead a Chinese diplomatic mission to Europe and the United States. It was in this capacity that Burlingame negotiated a treaty with US Secretary of State, William H. Seward, that granted the Chinese people the right to immigration and travel in the US, along with access to education and schooling when living in the United States. It was under these conditions that Yung Wing organized the Chinese Educational Mission. Yung himself studied at Yale. He was the first known Chinese student to graduate from an American university in 1854, and he then convinced the Chinese government to send groups of Chinese boys to the United States, specifically to New England, to study science and engineering, so that he could help, "the rising generation of China enjoy the same educational advantages that I had enjoyed."  The 120 boys who came to the United States from China, starting in 1872 and over the next decade, continued lessons in Chinese language and culture. However, they also naturally, adopted many American customs. For Yung, who had become a naturalized American citizen in 1852, and who married an American woman named Mary Louise Kellogg in February of 1875, that outcome may have been not just expected, but welcomed. As Yung later wrote in his memoir, "Now in New England, the heavy weight of repression and suppression was lifted from the minds of these young students. They exalted in their freedom and leaped for joy. No wonder they took to athletic sports with alacrity and delight." One of the athletic sports to which they took with alacrity and delight, was baseball, which they played at their prep schools like Phillips Andover Academy and Phillips Exeter Academy, and at colleges like Yale. By the mid 1870s, baseball players from the Chinese Educational Mission formed a semi-pro baseball team. Their official name was the Orientals, but they preferred the name the Celestials. They played other New England teams on a regional circuit and boasted a star pitcher named Wu Yangzeng, of whom a classmate said,  He was a great pitcher, impossible to hit." At the same time that the 120 men of the Chinese Educational Mission were enjoying the benefits of China's most favored nation status with the United States and becoming Americanized in the process, activists like Denis Kearney were leading a growing anti-Chinese movement in the United States. Kearney, a California labor leader, regularly gave long speeches at a spot near San Francisco City Hall known as the Sand Lot. In front of crowds of up to 2000 people, he would rally the people against the greed of industrialists, eventually becoming the leader of the Working Men's Party of California. Although Kearney was an immigrant himself, having arrived in the US from Ireland in 1868, he blamed the plight of the poor working class on Chinese immigrants, ending all of his speeches with, "And whatever happens, the Chinese must go." In July, 1877, some people in San Francisco took those words literally, leading a violent riot against the Chinese population, killing four people and destroying over $100,000 worth of property. By spring of 1882, the steady drumbeat of Chinese hatred led the United States Congress passing the Chinese Exclusion Act, which President Chester A. Arthur signed into law. The act fully banned Chinese laborers from entering the United States. Chinese immigrants already in the US could not become citizens, and they had other restrictions placed upon them. Even before the act was passed, though, the US government broke promises it had made to support the Chinese Educational Mission, refusing admission of CEM students to Annapolis and West Point. As Yung later put it, "The Burlingame Treaty of 1868 was, without the least provocation, and contrary to all diplomatic precedence and common decency, trampled underfoot, unceremoniously and wantonly and set aside as though no such treaty had ever existed." In response, the Chinese government ordered Yung and the students to return to China, separating Yung from his American wife and their children. In the summer of 1881, Yung and the students headed from New England to San Francisco, where they would board a steamship that would take them back to China. While in California, though, the Celestials had the opportunity to play one final baseball game as a team, when a local Oakland baseball team challenged them to a game. The Oakland team assumed they would, as one of the students later wrote, "have a walk over," but the Celestials triumphed, winning 11 to eight. Even after that victorious moment, though, the Celestials and their colleagues in the China Educational Mission had to say goodbye to their adopted home and returned to China, where they were questioned by the Chinese government. Yung yearned to return to the US, even after his wife died, a few years after he left. However, in 1902, he was informed that his US citizenship had been revoked. He did somehow manage to enter the US, to see his youngest son graduate from Yale, and he may have remained with his sons, as according to his New York Times obituary in 1912, Yung died, "at his home in Hartford," leaving 12,000 volumes of his own library to Yale.

Kelly Therese Pollock  9:46  
Joining me this week to discuss the Chinese Educational Mission, baseball, the Celestials, and their final game, is Dr. Ben Railton, Professor of American Studies at Fitchburg State University, and host of, "The Celestials' Last Game: Baseball, Bigotry, and the Battle for America."

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:18  
Hi Ben, thanks so much for joining me today.

Dr. Ben Railton  11:20  
Hi Hi, Kelly. I'm really glad to be back. This is, this is stuff I've been thinking about a lot, and there's no place I'd rather be talking about it right now.

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:28  
So I'm really excited to be learning about the Celestials. So I want to hear a little bit about why you're deciding to tell this story. As you said, this is obviously a story you've been thinking about for a while, and why specifically you wanted to do this in podcast form.

Dr. Ben Railton  11:48  
Absolutely. And there's kind of two levels to the why this story, and then and the podcast is a third question that I'll get to in a second. So the baseball game, "The Celestials' Final Game," that is the title of the podcast, that is the kind of culmination of the story, is the single American story that I've kind of wanted to figure out how to tell more fully for the longest. I first learned about it at least 15 years ago, probably longer than that now, and I just knew that it kind of summed up so many of the things that I am interested in and care about, from the best of us, like amazing sports moments to the worst, like the reason it was their last game, that they were being forced to leave the country by this xenophobic, racist moment that they were living in. So it's just this individual story of the game is has been like by kind of white whale of American stories that I've wanted to figure out how to better connect to and share. And so that's just been a lifelong or career long question for me. But there's no doubt that the more I learn about it, and the more I learn about the levels of it, it really does connect to the kind of phrase that I see as the heart of what I do and what I've been trying to do for a long time, which is the worst and best of America. And I capture that in different kind of particular concepts over the years. But at its heart, that's really what I'm particularly interested in, is trying to think about not just overall, but kind of in the same moments, in the same communities, in the same histories and stories, this duality of us, these two sides of us, and as we all have been living with that's become, I think, just the defining 21st century question is not just these different sides, but like, how do we figure out who we are and how we move forward in a moment where we're surrounded by these questions? So it's felt more and more timely, the more I've learned about this history and how much it really seems to me to capture some of the most inspiring kind of things I can imagine and some of the most tragic things I can imagine in the same community and moments in history. And so I've just come even more fully to feel like this is a story that I wanted to find a way to share now, even though I had been thinking about it for so long, and that really connects to then how and why it ended up being in a podcast form, although there's a second layer that I'll mention too. One of them is just that I wanted to tell the story, and I hadn't figured out how to crack it in a book form that was gonna work or that was landing. And I just realized, as you have proven for a long time now, Kelly, that there's no one way that we have to tell these stories or think about these histories. And I was wedded to the idea of a book, maybe because that's been my arc earlier in my career. But as soon as I started thinking outside that box, I realized the second layer, which is that there are things in this particular story that are much better suited, I think, for the narrative history podcast form, because I have to kind of imagine some things. I have to fill in some some gaps in the historical record that I think are just permanent gaps. I don't think we're ever going to learn much more than we know for absolutely certain about the game, for example. There's a tiny bit of information, and there's a lot that we don't know. And I don't think we're likely to ever, ever learn more in any absolute historical record kind of way. So the second layer of telling the story for me was giving myself a little bit of space to figure out, how can I fill in those gaps? How can I do some imaginative storytelling that can complement what we do know and all those contexts for the histories that I believe are so vital. But with this other layer, this layer of reconnecting to these figures and this team and this moment, which for some very specific exclusionary reasons, were, there's a lot we don't know, there's a lot we don't have, and and the podcast has allowed me, I hope, to do that in ways that I don't think I could have been writing in a book form, in the same way. So it ended up being the perfect fit. It started by necessity, in some ways, but I think it became a different kind of of writing that that I really want to keep thinking about going forward as well.

Kelly Therese Pollock  15:54  
So let's talk about the stuff we do know. Can you talk some about the the sources that we do have? And I'm really interested in this website that you reference a couple of times in your podcast that talks about, actually, the, I think it's 120 students who came over in the mission.

Dr. Ben Railton  16:14  
Yeah, it's a phenomenal resource. Unfortunately, it is kind of way back machine, accessible only now. It's not currently live, and just so people know the website, which is CEMconnections.org, I can't access it on my computer. I have to do it on my phone. So it seems to be somewhat, perhaps appropriately difficult to connect back to, like these histories themselves. It is still available on my phone. I can get to it that way, and it is a phenomenal resource that I hope remains somewhat available to us. It was created by descendants of some of those students, the 120 young men that you referenced to eventually were the four cohorts of Chinese educational mission students in the 1870s who came to Hartford and that institution, and 10 of whom formed this baseball team. And a group of their descendants began to compile information that they had and that they also had connected to in some other sources, many in China, some in in the US, and to build this website about each of those 120 young men and quite a lot of detail for most of them that I'm quite sure would otherwise be lost. And so I really do hope that the site can endure in some form. I'm in some conversation with one of the two folks who mainly started it. His name is Bruce Chen, and I think he's determined to try to keep it afloat in some form, because it is this amazing resource. And we have some specific sources about the students and the team and the game that I reference in the podcast. We have one student's kind of reminiscences in a speech that he gave in the 1920s for example. We have very brief newspaper pieces, but for that fuller info, the website is the only one that I've encountered that really fills in a lot of that, and it's a phenomenal resource that I have learned a lot from. And I doing what I can to try to help keep it moving forward so other people can learn about way more than just the Celestials. There's so many layers to the story of these young men, and each of their stories individually, as well as the collective community. And that website is a great starting point for thinking about those things.

Kelly Therese Pollock  18:11  
Let's talk about why they were here in the first place, why these students came from China to the US in the 1870s. You know, this is in the the wake of the Civil War. The US is still rebuilding. This is not necessarily the most obvious place for China to be sending its students. You might think like places in Europe or something might be more obvious. Can you talk a little bit about the the background, why, how and why this came about?

Dr. Ben Railton  18:41  
For sure, and there's, there's sort of two different answers to that. And the official, the official Chinese government, answer, would be that it was very specifically to try to, as China was just kind of starting to open up a little bit in that second half of the 19th century, to modernize in some ways, from its more traditional first half of the century kind of government and and roots. It was this purposeful attempt to sort of learn from aspects of the United States, including, in fact, its military, that was part of the kind of the goal of the of the mission, but also its educational system and its kind of evolving society. So for the from the Chinese government perspective, it was specifically and an attempt to connect these two nations a little more and specifically to to see what the United States could help China think about as it as it was growing in this part of the century. But to me, the more meaningful origin is the specific person whose idea the mission was, which is a guy who I've always called Yung Wing, but in talking with Bruce Chen, who I mentioned, he's convinced me that that It's Jung Wing is the more accurate way to pronounce it. So um "Jung Wing" is how I'll say it here. And that is a change from what I've said in the past. But Yung Wing really fascinating figure, I'll just do the real quick cliff notes here. He wrote his own autobiography. For people who are interested, it's available online. It's called "My Life in China and America." It's only about 120 pages. Really fascinating guy who became one of the really, first, truly cross cultural Chinese American identities. He maintained a Chinese side of his life, throughout his life as a diplomat, as a person working, kind of in conversation with the Chinese government. But he really developed a Chinese American life in the 19th century. He came here as a teenager. He attended Yale and graduated from there as the first Chinese American college graduate that we know of, anyway. He became a US citizen in the 1850s. He volunteered for the Union Army during the Civil War. He married a woman in Connecticut in the 1870s, had two kids. He has this fascinating Chinese American arc in the 19th century, and his lifelong goal, since he went to college here, was to offer some of those experiences to fellow Chinese young men, to give them a chance to have some of that same journey and some of that same arc. And so he wanted to found a school-like institution since he was a late teenager, early 20 year old. And eventually, in the 1870s, in conversation with the Chinese government and those goals and in conversation with the US government, in an era when, fortunately, it was still possible to gain that support, he opens this school, the Educational Mission in Hartford, to offer that set of opportunities to Chinese young men. And I think just to say one more thing about that duality, a big part of the question of my podcast is, "What could have happened for these young men if they had had the chance to stay here longer?" And it's worth saying that the Chinese government didn't fully intend for that to be the case. They had, it was a long window, but it was something like a 15 year window, 15 to 20 year window, that they imagined these young men would stay in the US maximum. But my argument is that we don't know what would have happened, just like Yung's life evolved so much beyond what he might have imagined. And in fact, some of the students do find ways to stay in the US, even after the closure of the school, and I believe each of them deserved the opportunity to figure that out. So it's worth noting, from an official Chinese sort of perspective, the story didn't end particularly tragically. It just ended early. But I would argue that the tragedy is precisely that we don't know. We don't know what these young men's lives could have been, just like we see in Yung how, in Jung, excuse me, how much their lives could have evolved. So I think that duality really also gets at the heart of different ways to see this story, and how to try to imagine what is not quite in the history, but could be.

Kelly Therese Pollock  18:43  
All right, so let's get to the baseball, of course. And I think it's important that we understand what baseball was like in New England at the end of the 19th century. So you talk a lot about in the podcast, about semi-pro baseball, and that's not a thing I think we think as much about now. We've got, you know, we're talking right now as the World Series is happening, and so we think about professional baseball. These are baseball players who are paid a ton of money. This is not the kind of baseball that we are talking about these young men playing. So what is semi-pro baseball? What does this look like? What? What is it that these players are playing?

Dr. Ben Railton  23:06  
Yeah, and that's what I've learned the most about in researching and thinking about and writing and sharing this podcast, is the 19th century landscape of baseball, which is, as I think we all have a rough sense of the kind of oldest, uniquely American sport, hence the national pastime as it evolves to be known as. But I agree, I think for the most part, our narratives of it still are very much connected to professional baseball, for better and for worse, because that also includes, for example, the segregated nature of it in the first half of the 20th century, and the need for the Negro Leagues as a result, for example. Those are all stories, of course, well worth telling and remembering, even better than we do. But in the 19th century, even though at the very end of the century, you start to have the first national leagues, the first professional leagues, this is a sport that is deeply, deeply local and communal and regional. It's really developed out of particular towns and communities that that not only are playing the sport, but are forming the sport. So like there's a set of rules in the 1840s and 50s called the Massachusetts game that evolve that are really different from the New York rules, the Knickerbocker rules, as they're known. The New York ones are more like what eventually evolve into the professional baseball that we know today. But that's only much later in the century. For the whole of the 19th century, as the sport is developing, there's competing rules, there's competing communal versions, and really what that reflects is how local it is and how much the game is about these groups of folks who are coming together to play it. And that starts to include a little bit of college. It starts to include the pros, eventually. But really it happens in this way that that I and others would call semi-professional, meaning that these are teams made up of people who do other things, who have day jobs, who are, you know, young people attending school, as was the case with many of the Celestials, but who want to play other baseball players, who want to form teams so that they can travel their local area, their regional area, and compete, you know, in their in their off time, in their in their somewhat leisure time. There begins to be a sense of compensation possible, which is why there's the pro and the semi-pro, particularly when they are able to sell tickets, for example, as these regional leagues start to do. But these are not paid professional athletes. It's not their day job. It's not their life arc, although some of them could have, and certainly a couple of the Celestials, I think, could have been pro had they had that opportunity and inclination. But these are people who, again, are sort of building their American communities and lives, and that are finding a way to make baseball part of it. And that's how baseball really develops from the 1830s or so, when it is is invented as we as we see it, through the 1880s and 90s, at least, and certainly in the era of the Celestials in the 1870s and early 1880s. And among other things, what that means is that it has the possibility of being more integrated. It has the opportunity to have teams that are made up of Chinese American young men, to have Black players, to have a very prominent Native American player in the 1890s, at least in part because we don't have these much more kind of regimented and pretty quickly segregated professional leagues that that form, particularly in the early 20th century. And so just that local, regional, communal side of it that I think semi-pro captures meaning again, teams that are really about their local community, formed out of it, traveling to other communities, engaging with these other these other communal experiences of the game. That's where baseball starts. And that opens up these opportunities for what it means that if we just focus on the professional side, I think it's really hard to remember, and the Celestials are such a great example of that, in their in their New England regional league, where they form, and then when they go to Oakland, when they go to San Francisco to play this other semi-pro team in their last game, really represents that local, communal and at least potentially inclusive version of the sport.

Kelly Therese Pollock  26:54  
And for the players on the Celestials, most, or maybe all of them, had played at something before, right? Like they had played at Yale or at Andover or something before. And so they had all played, presumably, on some sort of mixed race team before they played on this Chinese American Celestials team.

Dr. Ben Railton  27:14  
Absolutely yes. And and again, I think one of the things that's really fascinating about that is that this team as an embodiment of the Chinese Educational Mission, as an embodiment of baseball in the late 19th century, and of the America that I want to make the case for as always existing but so easily excluded, not just literally, but from our memories as well. It is both sort of deeply rooted in this one particular American community, but it also cuts across so many different lines. And a great individual example of that I like to highlight is that one of the most prominent advocates for both the educational mission and its students, and also an owner of a baseball team in Hartford, was Mark Twain. After he moved to Hartford, he became fascinated with baseball. He eventually owns a Hartford team, and he's a huge fan and advocate of the educational mission and its students. So as much as they're part of this one really interesting community, they also represent how much those lines between communities were not as hardened as things like the Chinese Exclusion Act wanted to portray them to be, and as, perhaps even our collective memories have sort of made them out to be, that there's a lot of opportunity for different forms of integration, at different forms of movement across and between different communities and and identities in the late 19th century in America. And I think the Celestials in their individual stories, and then as a team, kind of help us remember that too.

Kelly Therese Pollock  28:43  
So the Chinese Exclusion Act, of course, did not just like pop up one day out of nowhere. And so you talk in the podcast about the the growing anti-Chinese movement with people like Denis Kearney. Could you talk a little bit about that, how and why that starts to to develop in the United States, eventually leading to this moment in the 1880s that you know, is so devastating for people like the students who are forced to then go back to China?

Dr. Ben Railton  29:16  
Absolutely. And the two histories that I think are particularly worth highlighting, you know, there's a an undercurrent that, if we haven't already all been familiar with, we are being reminded of all the time, all around us right now, which is our ability as a collective community of Americans to continually find other American communities who we want to see as others and discriminate against and seek to exclude in that in that way. The last couple months, it's been Haitian Americans to name just one example. So that undercurrent is a constant, unfortunately, in American history, and this is a moment where that that force turns toward the Chinese American community in the 1860s and 70s into the 1880s. That's an undercurrent that is a long standing and a continuing one. But there are two specific things that I think are worth mentioning too, and that are a little bit different in what they help us remember, I would say. One is that the sort of the conflict over what a place like California specifically is going to be, because, as I talked about it in one particular inning of the podcast, it's probably the most diverse place in the growing United States, when the US moves into California, already long existing, of course, as a place in a set of communities. It's got this incredibly diverse range of people, including Chinese communities, predating the US arrival there. So it's a hugely diverse place. But then the first laws, basically, that are passed by the new state legislature when it is a state in the United States in the early 1850s are exclusionary ones, or white supremacist ones, or ones that immediately seek to define, for example, non white people as as foreign, in something like the Foreign Miners Tax. And so just the conflict over a place like California, is it going to kind of keep evolving as this diverse place, or is It going to become a sort of a white supremacist, a staunch part of a white America, of a white supremacist vision of the United States? And that conflict is really evolving as California evolves and the Chinese American community there get caught up in that as a kind of central target for those narratives of California as this, this white supremacist place, rather than that diverse community that had included them for decades by the 1860s and 70s. So that's one set of histories that I think just really reflect how much this is about the different narratives and the different ways that we see ourselves, rather than simply just, you know, like an undercurrent of xenophobia, which, again, has been here too. And California embodies that. And unfortunately, the Chinese American community there become the targets of those forces, beginning in the 1860s and then really growing in the 1870s, especially in a place like San Francisco. And then the second level of what of the forces that contribute to this moment, and it's even more fraught and also important to remember, I think, is the way that the labor rights movement and the labor movement in a place like California evolves, because most of those Chinese Americans, the Chinese Educational Mission students, are relatively privileged in some ways. Most of the Chinese American community are very working class, are you know, railroad workers, are miners, are workers in the food industry in California and the laundry industry, are very working class. And yet the labor movement as it evolves, with people like Denis Tierney in San Francisco, himself, a former laborer turned kind of business owner and labor leader, that labor movement evolves to see the Chinese American community as a threat, rather than as as part of their community, not fellow laborers, not solidarity, but an outside set of of threats to the white labor movement. And again, that's related to what's happening in California. It's related to xenophobia, but it's also just related to how we see who is us, right, who's a part of a community, and unfortunately, led by people like Kearney, the labor movement in the 1860s and especially the 1870s overwhelmingly comes to see Chinese American workers again as a foreign adversary. And all of those forces come together to really build to this national movement to expel this community, not just to exclude future arrivals, but to expel the existing Chinese American community, which is over 100,000 strong by 1880, to expel them from the US, because of all those kind of combination of forces. And that all comes to bear on these amazing individuals and communities, like the educational mission students, 3000 plus miles away as they are, more than that, many 1000s of miles away, as they are on the East Coast, originally, they get enfolded into all those those histories as well.

Kelly Therese Pollock  29:18  
Then as the Chinese educational admission students are leaving the US, they go by train. We assume they go by train, right? I don't think we know that for sure. From New England, they stop in San Francisco on their way back to China. And this is when they played the last game, which is the title of your podcast. And this is where, as you referenced earlier, we know some about the last game. There are a lot of details we don't know, can't know, but what? What do we know? What can you tell us about? We don't necessarily know why this game happened, but what, what do we know about this game and and what, maybe what it symbolizes?

Dr. Ben Railton  33:48  
Yeah, and each of those moments that you just nicely referenced, we have these little tantalizing snippets. So there's like a newspaper article when they're boarding a train in Connecticut. And so we do know at least that they started on a train, and I believe it was the transcontinental railroad, the newly completed one, that they did travel on. So there is a newspaper article about the tearful goodbye from both their Connecticut and New England friends and hosts and allies and the students themselves. And then we can imagine that that multi-day train trip, that that that that moment originates, and then when they get to Oakland, in those reminiscences that that I mentioned from a student 40 years down the road, he mentions that while they're waiting in San Francisco for their steamship, they're challenged to a game by a local Oakland semi-pro team. Oakland was sort of the center of the semi-pro baseball world. It was where the national kind of championship game of semi-pro baseball had happened just a couple years before. So it's a really prominent place for that part of the sport that is still so central. And so we know that the challenge this guy helps us remember that. And then the day after the game, there's a very short story in the San Francisco Chronicle about the fact that the Celestials won this game. They're portrayed as basically a foreign team in that pretty overtly racist article, but we have this little snippet of info there. And then everything beyond that is is up to us to try to think about, and in particular to think about the setting for it, in San Francisco, just a few years after the massacre of Chinatown there, but with a really substantive Chinese American community still, to think about the team and all that they bring to it from their, as you mentioned, their high school experiences, their college experiences, their communal life, their individual stories, and to think about, as you nicely alluded to, the question of even why they were challenged. And to me, that's another example of that worst and best that I think it's worth remembering both possibilities that very easily it could have been a challenge by this Oakland Semi-Pro Team as an expression of white supremacy. And in his reminiscences, the student Wen Bing Chung says the Oakland men believed they would have a walk over. So he's at least partly alluding to that idea, that there may have been that sense of supremacy involved. But again, semi-pro baseball is deeply local and communal and potentially integrated. And there's this whole idea of barnstorming, where teams go around the country and play other local teams. The Negro League teams would do that extensively in the early 20th century. And I think it's quite possible that the challenge was more of a sportsmanship related one, that even if the Oakland team thought they were better, that's part of sports, of course, is trash talk and the like. But that still, it was an attempt to just play another team, play this traveling team who had come here from some very successful East Coast experiences. And so I think the game pivots in both directions really interestingly. And at the end of the day, despite all that we don't know, we know for sure that, having traveled 1000s of miles after that tearful goodbye, completely disconnected from the homes they had built for the last decade, and with this very uncertain future in front of them, this team won that game against the you know, the local team, the team who were at home, This team that were being forced out of their homes triumphed in that game, and that's kind of where, to me, the heart of this story lies is the the uncertainties and the tragedies, but also just the amazing kind of American moment that those young men helped create in 1881 on that field and and that we do know. We know that they won, and we could start to imagine all that that meant, all that they would lose, but also all that they had with them and carried with them.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:08  
And of course, they go back to China, and they got a hero's welcome, right? No.

Dr. Ben Railton  38:14  
They did not. No, they were, they were imprisoned for some time. They were questioned extensively by a suspicious government, it seems, and their pitcher, who's a guy who I am going to talk about in the final the final inning, the final episode, because his story continues to evolve really powerfully, even post the return to China, and much later in his life, he finds ways to come back to the US. His son stays for a time in the US. He has a really fascinating story. Liang Dunyan is his name, but he gets in a physical altercation with one of the guards because of how upset they are about the way, as Wen Bing Chung put it in his reminiscences, on the contrast with the land of the free, although unfortunately, the land of the free had, of course, only been an ideal, ultimately, and not quite the reality for these young men either. But certainly when they return to China, they experience another kind of oppression and discrimination as well. On both sides of the Pacific, the the official entities in this story embody some of the worst, and these young men in both places, I think, offer a real alternative to that for sure.

Kelly Therese Pollock  39:18  
Well, please tell our listeners how they can get the much more complete version of this story that we have just talked about.

Dr. Ben Railton  39:25  
Thanks. Yeah, the starting point would be the podcast, "The Celestials' Last Game," which is americanstudier.podbean.com, is the link. The ninth inning will have just dropped, if you all are listening to this the week of October 28. It drops on Sunday the 27th. There will be a tenth inning, a kind of like post game press conference episode as well. And that's the full that's the full run of "The Celestials' Last Game." So you'll be able to hear the arc of this story as as I'm hoping we can think about it, although I hope we could keep revisiting these stories down the road as well. And, beyond the podcast, the other thing that I'll say is I really hope people will seek out some of the different sources that I talk about again, the CEMconnections.org website. However, you have to get to that site, please support it, and let's try to help it stay alive. And then the primary sources, like Yung Wing's autobiography, or Wen Bing Chung's reminiscences, are both available online. They're both out there. And I think if there's no other effect of this work that we're doing, I hope at least part of it can be that our collective memories includes all of these folks and all of these layers of this story going forward in a way that makes it harder to keep excluding them. For a long time, they not only were excluded, but had been excluded in a lot of ways. And this moment is a moment where we see what can happen when we kind of give into those narratives. So let's find a way to include all these stories and figures and texts in our collective memories instead. And there's a lot of great starting points for doing that.

Kelly Therese Pollock  40:53  
Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we talk about? 

Dr. Ben Railton  40:56  
Always a good question. There's always more to talk about. I guess the only other thing that I'll say about this is, if you think about the best and worst of us, I think part of what gets really challenging and your podcast, multiple podcasts of yours, but certainly Unsung History has done a phenomenal job highlighting this, is that it's really easy, I think, to see our history as either just the idealized version, or for those of us who want to challenge that, it's really all too easy to think about the worst of our history, the hardest, most painful parts of our histories. And what I really love about the Celestials and their last game is I do think it has both. I think it forces us to confront the worst, but it really allows for the possibility of inspiration from our histories, not just in our future as a goal, but from our histories as well. And this is a team. This is a group of young men. This is a moment that offers inspiration as well as as challenges our ideals. And I think if we can remember those things, that makes it a little more possible to move forward together, but remembering them takes not only history, but a little bit of imagination and storytelling as well. It is a combination to give them their sort of full story and their full humanity. And I hope I've done a bit of that, but there's always more that we can do with that, and I just look forward to being part of that work as we all keep trying to fill in the gaps and remember and then help us move forward.

Kelly Therese Pollock  42:19  
Ben, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast again.

Dr. Ben Railton  42:23  
Thank you, Kelly. I really appreciate it.

Teddy  43:29  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode of suggestions, please email kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!

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