“It’s quite remarkable to think 125 years and how much the relationship between China and the city of New Haven has grown over those years in large part because of the work of the Yale-China Association...

My hope is that initiatives like the Yale-China Association that have had such long roots in New Haven can play an increasingly important role in helping us understand one another, understand that we’re human beings, connect with one another, and set aside those small differences that we might have. My hope is in the many years to come we continue to foster those kind of relationships and more and more people can experience that connection with one another...

Happy 125th anniversary! It’s an exciting time for our city and we’re so grateful to the Yale-China Association for everything that you have done for our city.

非常感谢雅礼协会为NewHaven所做的一切！”

— Justin Elicker, Mayor of New Haven

Photos courtesy of Ted Falk, grandson of Dr. Edward Hume, selected from the Hume family collection

Bringing a patient to the Hunan-Yale Hospital

Edward Hume taking the pulse of an early patient, a member of Changsha's gentry

The Hsiangya Unit at the fighting front

Hume and two colleagues at the door of the Central Inn, the Yale Court of Medicine – the first hospital

Vegetable peddler on Yale campus, with chapel building in background

“When I reflect on my Yali and Xiuning Middle School experiences, I’m deeply grateful for the transformation and growth I experienced. I can only hope that the impact I had on students and other teachers is a fraction of what I have received. It started with Coach Walter inviting me to practice with the Yali football (soccer) team. Their views of me as a role model on and off the field (华人 (ABC) who played at Yale) forced me to shed my own self-view as a 6-year-retired player who failed to go pro. Besides teaching English and organizing the musicals, I found an embodied purpose serving as their football coach with the responsibility of encouraging the students to strive for more. After moving to Xiuning for the 2nd year, in the absence of a school football team to coach, I returned to playing football myself. What started as just casual play with students and teachers turned into a renewed passion for the game to push past my own previous limits. I stayed in China for 2 more years, continuing to coach, train, and play in Chinese football. I ended up living out a childhood dream of playing professional football by trialing with Chengdu Rongcheng of the Chinese Super League. I’ll be forever grateful for the Yale China fellowship for introducing me to the world of Chinese football and coaching - and showing me firsthand how an educator who believes in their students can really transform their lives.”

— Allen Wang, Yale-China Fellow (Xiuning, Yali 2021-'22)

“In July 2024, I boarded a plane to New Haven for the first time, carrying with me a deep passion for nursing informatics and elderly care. From the moment I arrived at Yale, language became my first real challenge. I started from the very basics — practicing daily greetings, learning how to craft an elevator speech, working through sentence structures and paragraph writing in class, and spending long hours in the library sharpening my listening and speaking skills. Slowly, English stopped feeling like a barrier and became something more — a window through which I could truly feel and understand this new world around me. Every conversation, every lecture, every debate quietly expanded the boundaries of who I was. And through it all, the Yale-China Association made sure I never felt alone. It was through the Association that I found myself hiking through hills blazing with autumn color alongside friends from across the globe, sitting in a chapel letting the resonance of a pipe organ wash over me, and laughing around a dinner table, telling stories of home in my still-imperfect English. These moments may have seemed small, but they were the quiet strength that carried me through my time far from home.”

“Inside the classrooms of Yale School of Nursing, something shifted in me. I audited courses in quantitative research methods and healthcare innovation, attended lectures on NIH grant writing and case analysis, and sat alongside scholars from around the world to discuss how digital health could genuinely serve the needs of older adults. Every discussion felt like a beam of light falling on the question I cared about most deeply — how could technology be made gentle enough to truly understand the lives of elderly people, and how could frontline healthcare workers be given tools that were both intuitive and precise? It was here at Yale that I saw, more clearly than ever before, the vast and promising intersection between nursing informatics and elderly care. The memory of morning sunlight streaming through the nursing school windows, falling across a desk full of lecture notes, still lives clearly in my mind — a reminder of why I had come, and what I had found.”

“When I returned home, I carried that clarity with me. The research I had been developing — a graphical assessment tool for evaluating the capabilities of community-dwelling elderly — moved forward with renewed purpose, nourished by the methods and insights I had gathered at Yale. Then in September 2024, I took what felt like the most meaningful step of my professional life: I formally began my doctoral studies in nursing, committing myself to the deep integration of elderly care and nursing informatics as my academic mission for the years ahead. On the late nights when the research is hard and exhaustion sets in, I find myself thinking of the warmth the Yale-China Association showed me, of the generosity of my teachers at Yale, of the trust Xiangya Hospital placed in me when they let me go, and of my family, waiting quietly for me on the other side of the world. Gratitude, to me, is not something you simply say — it is something you earn, slowly, through every honest step you take forward. One hundred and twenty-five years ago, the Yale-China Association planted a seed of connection across oceans and cultures. One hundred and twenty-five years later, that seed is still growing, still blooming, in the stories of people like me. I am so grateful to be even a small leaf on that tree. May this bond endure, and may it continue to bring warmth to all whose lives it touches.”

— LI Jing, Chia Health Fellow (Yale, 2024-’25)

Li Jing is a supervising nurse at Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, specializing in nursing informatics and elderly care. She visited Yale School of Nursing from July to December 2024.

“In 1984, a young woman named Nina McPherson walked into a classroom at Central China Normal University in Wuhan.

At the time, none of us knew that she represented an organization with a history already stretching back more than eight decades. Nor did we understand that her presence in that classroom was part of a much larger story connecting New Haven and China, Yale and Yali, two cultures separated by oceans and political systems but joined by a quiet belief in the power of education.

To us, she was simply Nina.”

A photo of the author taken by Nina Mcpherson in 1985

“Fresh out of Yale University, blonde, energetic, and not much older than many of the students she taught, she became the first foreigner most of us had ever met. China in the mid-1980s was only beginning to open to the world. For many of us who had grown up in small towns and rural villages, the outside world was something we knew only through books, newspapers, and imagination.

Then Nina appeared.

The first thing she gave us was not grammar or vocabulary. It was a name.

On the first day of class, she assigned English names to each student, offering several choices and encouraging us to select one we liked. I chose Tim simply because the first letter of my last name is also T. At the time it seemed like a small classroom exercise. Forty years later, I realize it was much more than that.

That name traveled with me from Wuhan to Beijing, from Frankfurt to Zurich, from Paris to New York. It appeared on business cards, conference badges, and countless introductions. Through it, a young man from rural western Hunan gradually learned to move through an international world.

The name was a gift. But the greater gift was confidence.

Nina made foreignness feel ordinary.

She showed us that people from different countries were not mysterious or frightening. They laughed, made mistakes, shared meals, worried about life, and cared about their students. Through her, many of us began to trust people beyond our own culture. In later decades, Americans, Germans, French, Swiss, Indians, Pakistanis, Vietnamese, Koreans, and Nigerians would become colleagues, partners, and friends. Looking back, I can trace that openness to a young Yale graduate standing in front of a classroom in Wuhan.

Photographs from those years preserve moments that memory alone cannot.”

“In one picture, Nina stands among a group of young men leaning over a balcony railing. Behind them rises a massive red column of the university building, occupying the center of the frame. The students wear expressions that only youth can produce—half confidence, half uncertainty, entirely hopeful. Looking at the photograph today, the red pillar seems almost symbolic. It stands like a bridge between worlds, connecting students who had barely seen beyond China with a visitor who had crossed the Pacific to teach them.

In another photograph, Nina stands among a row of female students. Behind them is a large mural of a young woman’s face, painted in soft yellow tones and decorated with sparkling stars. The image captures the aspirations of an era. China was beginning to imagine possibilities beyond old limitations, and those students, like the figure in the painting, looked toward a future that seemed both distant and luminous.

A third photograph shows the entire class gathered around Nina. Behind them hangs a political slogan familiar to every Chinese student of that generation. Yet what catches the eye today is not the slogan but the people. The future professors, teachers, scholars, businesspeople, and professionals stand together around a teacher who, without knowing it, would become part of their life stories.

Nina’s influence extended far beyond language instruction.

She introduced us to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. For many students, it was the first time seeing Western art. Some still remember their first encounter with nude paintings in a university library under Nina’s guidance. Others remember learning about Monet, Van Gogh, and Cézanne. Several classmates later became university professors and would eventually teach those same ideas to new generations of students.

Her writing classes were equally memorable. She corrected essays with extraordinary care, evaluating vocabulary, sentence quality, content, grammar, and rhetoric separately. She selected excellent phrases from student papers, typed them on a typewriter, and distributed them for discussion. Long before “student-centered learning” became a fashionable term, Nina practiced it naturally.

She taught us how to write. More importantly, she taught us how to think.

Outside the classroom, she embodied generosity.

She lent students her camera for a budget trip to Lushan Mountain. She shared books. She brought chocolates sent by her mother from America—tiny treasures in a China where few students had ever tasted chocolate. She invited students to meals and encouraged conversations that continued long after class ended.

Years later, classmates would remember details that seemed insignificant at the time: a lunch of hot dry noodles, an evening conversation outside her apartment, advice about writing to the university president or the city mayor, encouragement to speak English without fear.

What remains remarkable is not any single memory, but the consistency of them all.

Again and again, people remember kindness.

Again and again, they remember curiosity.

Again and again, they remember respect.

Only later did many of us learn that Nina was part of a much larger story.

She had come to China through Yale-China Association, known in Chinese as the Yali Xiehui.

Founded in 1901, Yale-China has spent more than a century building relationships between China and the United States through education, medicine, public health, and cultural exchange. Its impact can be measured in institutions, schools, hospitals, and programs. Yet perhaps its deepest influence cannot be measured statistically.

Its true legacy lives in human relationships.

History often records organizations through budgets, buildings, and official achievements. But organizations ultimately shape history through people. The influence of Yale-China was carried not only by presidents, scholars, and administrators. It was also carried by individuals like Nina, who entered classrooms, shared knowledge, listened carefully, and built trust one conversation at a time.

One young teacher influenced dozens of students.

Those students became professors, educators, researchers, entrepreneurs, and professionals.

They taught thousands of students of their own.

The circle expanded.

This is how influence moves across generations.

This is how history works.”

The author visited Yale-China Association in April 2026

“When I visited Yale-China’s headquarters at Yale University in 2026, more than forty years after Nina first walked into our classroom, I found myself thinking less about institutions and more about people.

Organizations create opportunities.
People create memories.

Organizations build bridges.

People cross them.

For 125 years, Yale-China has connected two nations not primarily through policies, but through relationships. It has done so through countless individuals whose names may never appear in history books, yet whose quiet actions altered lives.

For our class, one of those people was Nina McPherson.

We remember her not because she represented an institution.

We remember her because she made the institution human.

And perhaps that is the most enduring achievement of Yale-China over the past century and a quarter: transforming distant nations into familiar faces, and turning strangers into lifelong friends.”

— Tim Tang, Ph.D.