Students from a different shore

Pictured from left, Reimi Okuyama (Anthropology ’07) and W. William Yen, one of the first Asian students to attend U.Va., pictured here in a photo published in the U.Va. alumni magazine in the 1940s.
Photo of Reimi Okuyama by Eric Kelley.

The story of how I discovered the first Asian students to attend the University of Virginia is also a story of a personal awakening. Attending the American School in Tokyo, I rarely thought about my Japanese-ness in that all-American setting. Despite living in Japan, I was a minority at school and amongst my friends. Ironically, being a minority there made me forget that I was one when I came to U.Va. in 2003.

As a first-year, I mostly befriended non-Asian students, just like I did back home. Maybe I was scared that, by meeting other minorities, I would be branded as a minority as well. But during my second semester, something changed. I felt more open about my identity and made friends with a few Asian women in my class. By the end of the year, I joined the Asian American interest sorority, alpha Kappa Delta Phi. 

Around this time, a new minor, Asian Pacific American Studies, was being formed. I took one of its first classes with former anthropology professor Pensri Ho, and eventually ended up joining the minor. Later, I found myself interning for Daisy Rodriguez, then the assistant dean for Asian/Asian Pacific American students. “Dean Daisy,” as students called her, soon became my role model.

It was Dean Daisy who indirectly led me in the direction of my discovery. While working with her to analyze a survey of current Asian American students and their needs, I began to wonder when Asian students first came to U.Va. By chance, I also started working at U.Va.’s Special Collections Library, and came across a list of students from the 1800s. I browsed the list, curious to see if I would find any Asian names. To my surprise, I did! The earliest student I saw was Japanese — Jiro Itami, who studied law in 1889. Even now, there are relatively few students from Japan at U.Va. — only 20 a year, at most. I wondered if Itami felt as I did, traveling so far from home and being one of the few Asian students in his environment.

I forgot about Itami until after I graduated this spring. This summer, I met up with Sylvia Chong, my former advisor for Asian Pacific American Studies. She encouraged me to go back and find out more about these students. With the help of Calvin Hsu, the East Asian librarian at Alderman, I tracked down more students of Asian descent in the student records and also found out more about their lives. The majority were from China and Japan, although a few came from India and the Philippines. Most returned to their countries of origin after a few years of study.

The most prominent student I found was W. William Yen, also known as Yan Huiqing. He served as premier of the Republic of China five times, between 1921 and 1926. Later, he spent many years in diplomatic work, and was China’s first ambassador to the Soviet Union and a delegate in the League of Nations.

Another alumnus that caught my attention was Dr. William Sumner Appleton Pott (Philosophy ’12, AM ’13, PhD ’22). The son of a Chinese mother, Pott came to the University as an undergraduate in 1908. He eventually earned all three of his degrees here, and even taught in the philosophy department until 1927.

Unfortunately, after 1924, the number of Asian students dropped to almost nothing, due to the Asian Exclusion Act that ended all immigration from Asia. However, since the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which abolished the 1924 immigration restrictions, there has been an ever-increasing number of both Asian international and Asian American students at the University. Today, these students account for almost 11 percent of the undergraduate population.

One of my favorite things about the University is its long and colorful history. After discovering other Asian students who were here over a century ago, I now feel that I fit into this history. As much I would have liked to continue this research, my time in Alderman has come to an end. I hope that other curious students will pick up where I left off and fill in the blanks of the history of Asian Americans at U.Va. 

For further reading, please see Ronald Takaki’s “Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans” (Boston: Little, Brown, 1998).