A 150-year-old friendship

Courtesy Sam Wong ’89MBA

Sam Wong ’89MBA and Claire Archer ’26 met—-where else?—-at the statue of Yung Wing, Class of 1854, in Sterling Library. View full image

When they retired, Julia and Jay Filley turned over their farm to their son and moved into a “side-by-side” in Hartford. Julia’s diaries up until then had “told of the hard life of a farmer’s wife,” says her great-great-granddaughter, Caroline Filley Archer, on a Zoom call with me in January. 

But that was about to change. 

Julia’s new neighborhood encompassed the church run by the Rev. Joseph Twichell ’59. He, in turn, was friend to two important local figures: Mark Twain and Yung Wing, Yale class of 1854, the first Chinese student to graduate from a US university. 

Wing opened the Chinese Educational Mission, the first official US school for Chinese boys, in 1872. As the Filleys were settling into the neighborhood a few years later, so was Kuang Qizhao, the school’s second translator and a distinguished lexicographer. However improbably, Julia and Qizhao became friends. 

Julia started teaching English to the school’s staff, a description that sent Caroline into historical research mode. “I learned so much about the group of young boys that came to the East Coast and what an adventure they were on, my gosh,” Caroline says. “And then, how the families got together and how Julia loved seeing the clothes everybody wore, and the exchange of gifts.” 

Julia and her Hartford circle were not in tune with national sentiment. The economy was in decline and populists blamed the Chinese for taking American jobs and lowering wages. Amid escalating national violence, the students were recalled; a year later came the 1882 passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. 

But it was still 1877 when Julia made an unusual—even risky—decision. Qizhao’s wife had died, and he asked Julia to help with his infant son. 

“She thought about it and thought about it,” says Caroline. “She was 68 and had a couple of grandchildren of her own. She told him yes, but she figured it was only for a month.”

In the end, both Qizhao and his son moved in, and Julia raised the boy until he was three or four.

“Remember Huckleberry Finn?” asks Sam Wong ’89MBA on the same Zoom call.

Sam is Qizhao’s great-great-grandson; he and Caroline found each other while researching their family histories. Sam and I, meanwhile, met during my very first Yale Alumni Association Board of Governors session in September, when my chance mention of a Twain story in the works led to him contributing a sidebar, “Twain’s Chinese connections,” to our November cover story. Delivering extra copies to Sam at Assembly two months later, he’d told me about the photo to the left. I’d set up this Zoom because I was dying to learn more. 

“Huck has this moral dilemma because they were about to sell Jim the slave, right? That was the fugitive slave law: You should not be harboring a slave,” Sam continues. “And he thought about it and thought about it. And then he said, I’ll go to hell because I’m going to save Jim. This woman, Julia, who was contemplating what to do . . . History tells us that she was actually going to die in about three years. It was hard work to take care of a little baby, not even of your own race.

She had to be thinking of the morality of it. She was deeply religious.”

Qizhao returned to China after Julia’s death. In Connecticut, Julia’s daring act of generosity was lost to time; Caroline was surprised to learn the story from Sam. But the things Julia and Qizhao learned from each other were not lost. 

“My ancestor, he went on to promote women’s rights” in China, says Sam. There, “when racist Chinese threatened to kill white missionaries, Kuang used his newspaper’s influence to prevent a massacre.” 

As for Julia’s descendants: “Coming from the West Coast to Yale, I didn’t think I had connections to Connecticut,” says Claire Archer ’26, Caroline’s granddaughter.

The four of us were talking from Seattle, San Francisco, Hong Kong, and New Haven, on the eve of Claire’s last semester. 

“It’s amazing how paths can cross in unexpected ways across the generations,” Claire adds. “I mean, Sam’s son and I both ended up at Yale.” (Sam’s son, Brian Wong ’25, and Claire connected before Brian graduated; once Claire does, she’ll coincidentally be moving to the same city as him.) 

As for Claire and Sam, they met for the first time last November (at left). “It was as if we were renewing a friendship between our families after 150 years,” says Sam. “This is the beauty of a diverse Yale. In a divisive world, it brings together people from all over the world, and in doing so, helps us understand, like Twain did, our common humanity.”

“Sam, you’ve gotten me hooked on this idea of shared histories and new connections,” says Claire. “Who knows how this will play out in future generations?”