Katherine Wai: Otterbein’s First Chinese Female Graduate by Alan Borer
All exchange students, foreign students, and travelers go through culture shock to some degree. Even if one’s travels take you only to Canada, there is the lingering sense of “they don’t do it that way at home.” And if the language is not English, there is often a low-grade panic that “they won’t understand me.” And while many visitors to the States are likewise hesitant about Americans, one of the most rewarding friendships one can make is one that crosses borders.
In 1918, Otterbein College graduated its first Chinese woman. Her name was Katherine Wai, and she was a native of Guangdong Province in South China. Katherine had a bumpy road to graduation, owing to language problems and financial difficulties. The record of her time at Otterbein is incomplete, and her return to her homeland even more so. As foreign as China would be to modern Americans, Katherine Wai doubtless found World War I era Westerville equally strange.
She was born in 1894, and first shows up in the records in the Census of 1910 as a 16 year old “lodger” in the home of Milton Gantz, a Westerville dentist. Mr. & Mrs. Gantz had two daughters, a two-year-old and a two month old.[i] Did the young immigrant girl babysit the Gantz girls? More importantly, why would a Chinese teenager be living with an American family thousands of miles from home? I suspect that Katherine Wai was an orphan, sponsored by the United Brethren Church in some way. The census showed that Katherine was already ensconced in Westerville before the Chinese Revolution of 1911, and that her immigration predated that political upheaval.
Sometime in the early 1910s, Katherine Wai went to public school:
She spent several years in our public schools in Westerville where we had an opportunity to note her advancement. . .
Katherine must have been a novelty for the native students. Certainly she was hard to categorize for President Walter G. Clippinger. The president’s field was educational psychology, but even with his expertise he was a bit nonplussed by Katherine:
She is not what I would call a brilliant student but I do look upon her as a good dependable student . . . .She is alert, industrious, enthusiastic and courteous.[ii]
Former president T. J. Sanders, who by 1916 had resumed teaching, taught Katherine in a summer school class that year. He too was uncertain as to whether Katherine was of “average” ability or was smarter than her American classmates:
It is pretty difficult for us here. . . to get under the skull of [the] Chinese, and know just what is going on in there. I do not know what other people have stated to you with reference to Miss Wai’s ability. . . . .[iii]
It took Katherine Wai a long time to get through Otterbein. We do not know how proficient she was in English when she arrived in Westerville. We know next to nothing about her life before coming here. We know she had some public school work here, but we also know that she had to take classes in Otterbein’s Martin Boehm Academy, a prep school for potential college students. Katherine attended the Academy for at least the school year of 1915-16.[iv]
Money was also a problem for Katherine. A note to her from President Clippinger dated May 26, 1916, read simply, but alarmingly,
“Please call to see me at your earliest opportunity as I am desirous of talking over with you the matter of your financial obligations to the college.”[v]
Katherine must have been uneasy or at least curious about what the tight lipped president wanted to see her about. The United Brethren Church did help her financially, but the details are lost.
Katherine Wai returned to China after graduating. She married a man named John Siew and raised a family of at least four. Her name popped up in U. B. publications now and then. In 1930, their newsletter, The Watchword wrote:
Maybe Catherine Wai Siew will be there with her big boy, Samuel, and his fat little sister, Josephine. Mrs. Siew was graduated from Otterbein College and talks English as well as you or I.[vi]
In the same publication, in 1933:
“Kathryn Wye [sic] Siew, assists her husband as part-time teacher in a boy’s school where he is principal. They have four beautiful children, all of them Christians, and all together they form another Christian home with grace at meals and regular church attendance.”[vii]
Sometime between this and her death in 1952, Katherine and her family moved to Hong Kong, then a British colony. It was a tumultuous period in the history of her life, or so we can presume. Japan invaded China, occupying Canton, the capital of Guangdong, starting in 1937. Twelve years later, the Chinese civil war, fought between Mao Zedong’s Communists and Chang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, pushed almost two million people out of Canton and into Hong Kong.[viii] The Siew family might have fled from the Japanese, from the civil war, or some other factor.
Katherine Wai Siew may have had a very exciting time in the 30s, 40s, or fifties. Certainly the world of her youth had disintegrated by the time she died. Born a subject of the Emperor of China, she was educated in an America that saw her as somehow the “other.” That she lived as a wife, mother, churchgoer, and teacher, neither confirmed nor denied her status as “special.” That was in its own way a sign of intellect.
- Alan Borer
[i] Census of 1910, Ohio, Franklin County, Blendon Township, sheet 9 B.
[ii] Clippinger to the Chinese Educational Mission, December 19, 1916. Otterbein University Archives.
[iii] Sanders to Mabel Drury, June 8, 1916.
[iv] Martin Boehm Academy , Catalog, 1915-16.
[v] Clippinger to Wai, May 26, 1916.
[vi] The Watchword, March 23, 1930.
[vii] The Watchword, January 29, 1933, p 5.
[viii] Matthew Wills, “Hong Kong Was Formed as a City Of Refugees,” JSTOR Daily, October 1, 2019. [https://daily.jstor.org/hong-kong-was-formed-as-a-city-of-refugees/]