America’s civil rights movements have all had their Martin Luther Kings, their César Chávezes and their Gloria Steinems. But to whom can Chinese Americans point? More than 70 years before Dr. King dreamed of an America that judged people according to the “content of their character,” Wong Chin Foo (王清福, 1847-1898) defied those who wished to exclude Chinese by declaring that only “character and fitness should be the requirement of all who are desirous of becoming citizens of the American Republic.” His story is a forgotten chapter in the struggle for equal rights for all in America.
Wong’s biographer, Scott D. Seligman, who studied Chinese at Middlebury in the summer of 1973 under Mrs. Lin’s tutelage, will discuss Wong’s remarkable life and achievements, which include coining and defining the term “Chinese American,” founding America’s first association of Chinese voters and New York’s first Chinese newspaper, besting the standard bearer of the “Chinese Must Go” movement in a public debate, and testifying before Congress – the first Chinese ever to do so – in support of Chinese citizenship rights.
Please join us for this timely talk, as those of us in the United States witness a rise in anti-Asian violence, a result of terms like “kung flu” and blame on China for the pandemic having amplified racial stereotypes and exacerbated longstanding anti-Chinese and anti-Asian attitudes in the US.
Scott is an award-winning writer, a historian and a former corporate executive who holds an undergraduate degree in American history from Princeton and a master’s degree from Harvard. Now based in Washington, DC, he spent much of his career in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, is fluent in Mandarin and reads and writes Chinese. He has worked as a legislative assistant to a member of the U.S. Congress, lobbied the Chinese government on behalf of American business, managed a multinational public relations agency in China, and served as spokesperson and communications director for a Fortune 50 company. He has taught English in Taiwan and Chinese in Washington.
Scott has written four books on early Chinese-Americans and co-authored a Chinese cookbook and a Chinese phrasebook for travelers. His 2018 work, The Third Degree: The Triple Murder that Shook Washington and Changed American Criminal Justice, about a young Chinese man accused of murdering three of his countrymen in Washington, DC in 1919, won the gold medal in history in the 2019 Independent Publisher 2019 Book Awards, and his most recent work, The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902, was a finalist in the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards.
