金韵梅：将豆腐带到西方的中国医生

Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.

自1851年以来，《纽约时报》的讣告一直以白人男性为主。我们推出了“被遗漏的”(Overlooked)栏目，补上一些离世时未获得时报关注的非凡人物的故事。

In 1917 Yamei Kin, a Chinese-born doctor then living in New York, visited her homeland to study a crop that was virtually unknown to Americans: the soybean.

1917年，在中国出生、当时住在纽约的医生金韵梅(Yamei Kin)回到故乡，研究一种几乎不为美国人所知的农作物：大豆。

By this point she had become something of a celebrity dietitian. For years before the mission she had been telling women’s clubs that tofu and other soy products were nutritious alternatives to meat that required fewer resources to produce. She liked to say that they tasted “a little like brains and a little like sweetbreads.”

在当时，她已经是有名的营养师了。在接受这次使命之前，她一直告诉妇女俱乐部，豆腐和其他豆制品是肉类的营养替代品，而且前者所耗费的生产资源很少。她喜欢说，它们的口感“有点像脑子，也有点像胸腺”。

“She was many decades ahead of her time in terms of promoting tofu to a wider American audience,” said Matthew Roth, the author of the book “Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America (2018).

“向美国民众大力推广豆腐方面，她领先于时代好几十年，”《魔豆——大豆在美国的崛起》(Magic Bean: the Rise of Soy in America，2018年)一书的作者马修·罗斯(Matthew Roth)说。

The United States Department of Agriculture approached her with the mission of going to China to study how the soybean could be used in America. The government saw her research as part of a wider effort to develop new sources of protein for its soldiers during World War I.

美国农业部找到她，请她去中国研究美国可以如何利用大豆。政府当时正在为参加第一次世界大战的士兵开发新的蛋白质来源，金韵梅的研究属于其中的一部分。

Kin had a laboratory at the U.S.D.A., where she tested what the department called “Chinese soybean cheese,” and she presented soybean seeds to the department’s Bureau of Plant Industry. In addition, Roth said, some of her recipes were likely included in “The Soybean,” a landmark study published in 1910 by the U.S.D.A. officials William J. Morse and Charles V. Piper.

金韵梅在美国农业部有一个实验室，她在那里对该部所谓的“中式大豆奶酪”进行测试，并把大豆种子交给该部的种植业局。罗斯说，她的一些食谱很可能收录在1910年由农业部官员威廉·摩尔斯(William J. Morse)和查尔斯·派珀(Charles V. Piper)发表的具有里程碑意义的研究报告《大豆》(The Soybean)中。

“Americans do not know how to use the soybean,” Kin, then in her early 50s, told The New York Times Magazine in 1917 as she set out for China on her mission. “It must be made attractive or they will not take to it. It must taste good. That can be done.”

“美国人不知道怎么利用大豆，”1917年，50出头的金韵梅在前往中国前，告诉纽约时报杂志。“必须要让它变得有吸引力，否则他们就不会接受它。它一定要好吃。这是可以做到的。”

A 1918 report in The San Antonio Light newspaper offered this description of her lab:

1918年，《圣安东尼奥快报》(The San Antonio Light)的一篇报道这样描述她的实验室：

“On a long table was a row of glass jars filled with what looked like slices of white cheese. It was soy bean cheese. A jar was filled with a brownish paste. It was soy beans. There were bottles filled with the condiment we get with chop suey. That, too, was made from soy beans. Talk about dual personalities! The soy bean has so many aliases that if you shouldn’t like it in one form you would be pretty sure to like it in another.”

“长桌子上放着一排玻璃罐，里面装满看起来像是白色奶酪片的东西。那是大豆奶酪。有一个罐子里装满褐色的糊状物。那是大豆。有些瓶子装满我们吃杂碎时会遇到的佐料。那也是大豆做的。真可谓双重人格!大豆形式多变，如果你不喜欢这种形式的大豆，也一定会喜欢另一种。”

In essays and correspondence at the time, U.S.D.A. colleagues expressed glowing praise for Kin’s work.

在当时的论文和信函中，美国农业部的同事对金韵梅的工作赞赏有加。

“Very interesting,” Frank N. Meyer, a department botanist, wrote in 1911 in response to one of her letters. “There probably will come a time that soy beans are also given a nobler use in the United States than mere forage or green manure.”

“非常有意思，”农业部植物学家弗兰克·N·梅耶尔(Frank N. Meyer)在1911年的一封给她的回信中说。“也许有一天，大豆在美国会得到更高尚的应用，而不只是饲料或绿肥。”

The Times Magazine noted that Kin’s research mission was the first time the United States had “given so much authority to a Chinese.”

时报杂志提到，金韵梅的研究是美国首次“有华人得到如此高的权威”。

Kin did not live to see the soybean become popular in mainstream American society, and historians say the precise impacts of her tofu advocacy in the United States are hard to measure. But she was apparently the first person inside the federal government to promote the bean outside Asian immigrant communities — cultural eons before veggie burgers and soy lattes were fashionable.

金韵梅生前没有看到大豆在美国主流社会中流行，而历史学家说，她的豆腐倡导活动在美国造成的确切影响很难衡量。但她显然是联邦政府内第一个在亚洲移民社区之外推广这种豆类的人——在素食汉堡和大豆拿铁成为时尚之前很长的文化实践。

Kin’s U.S.D.A. assignment was just another chapter in a lifetime of professional trailblazing. Historians say she was among the first female students in the China’s modern history to study overseas and earn a medical degree in the United States. Later, when she moved back to China, she ran a women’s hospital, founded a nursing school and reportedly even served as the family physician to a president of the young republic.

金韵梅一生中不断开辟新的职业，农业部任务只是其中一章。历史学家说，她是中国现代史上第一批到海外学习并在美国获得医学学位的女学生。回到中国后，她经营了一家妇女医院，建立了一所护理学校，据说甚至在刚刚成立不久的共和国担任了一位总统的家庭医生。

Kin’s career is remarkable partly because it unfolded against such a noisy backdrop: The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, as well as political turmoil in China surrounding the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912.

金韵梅的职业生涯非常引人注目，部分原因在于它有着极为嘈杂的背景：1882年的《排华法案》(Chinese Exclusion Act)，以及1912年清朝覆灭时期中国的政治动荡。

“That she shows up in so many places doing so many different things is very resonant,” said Madeline Y. Hsu, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin who studies migration between China and the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“她出现在很多不同的地方，做了各种各样的事，这一点非常感人，”德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校研究19世纪末20世纪初期中美之间的移民问题的历史学家徐元音(Madeline Y. Hsu)说。

“It’s a really, really transnational story,” she added.

“这真的、真的是一个跨国故事，”她补充道。

Yamei Kin was born in 1864 in the eastern Chinese city of Ningpo, now called Ningbo, to a Chinese pastor and his wife, according to an annotated bibliography of Kin’s life that was published in 2016 by the SoyInfo Center in California. 根据加利福尼亚州大豆信息中心(SoyInfo Center)2016年发表的一份注释版金韵梅生平文献目录，金韵梅于1864年出生于中国东部城市宁波一个中国牧师家庭。

When Kin was 2, her parents died of cholera during an epidemic, and she was adopted by Divie Bethune and Juana McCartee, an American missionary couple. She was raised in China and Japan, where her adoptive father worked for the Education Ministry.

金韵梅两岁时，她的父母在疫病流行期间死于霍乱，她被美国传教士夫妇麦嘉缔(Divie Bethune)和胡安娜·玛蒂尔达奈特(Juana McCartee)收养。她在中国和日本长大，她的养父在教育部工作。

Her parents moved to New York, and she went to high school for a year in Rye, N.Y. At 16, Kin enrolled in the Women’s Medical College of New York under the name Y. May King, according to Roth’s book.

她的养父母搬到了纽约，她在纽约州拉伊市就读了一年的中学。罗斯的书中说，16岁时，金韵梅以Y·May King的名字被纽约女子医学院(Women’s Medical College)录取。

Researchers believe she altered her name to hide her ethnicity because she was frequently reminded that she was one of few Chinese women studying in the United States at the time.

研究人员认为，她改变了自己的名字，以便隐藏自己的种族，因为她不断认识到，自己是当时在美国学习的少数华人女性之一。

“Workmen in the street would often hurl abuse at me, and even my fellow woman students were not particularly enthusiastic about me,” she was quoted as saying in “My Sister China” (2002), a memoir by Jaroslav Prusek, a Czech Sinologist who knew her in the 1930s.

“街上的工人经常辱骂我，甚至我的女同学对我也没什么特别的热情，”从1930年代就认识她的捷克汉学家雅罗斯拉夫·普实克(Jaroslav Prusek)在回忆录《我的姊妹中国》(My Sister China，2002)中引用她的话说。

She graduated in 1885 at the top of her class, however, and published an article two years later in the New York Medical Journal that extolled the perks of “photomicrography,” or photography through microscopes, for medical research.

然而，她于1885年以班级最优秀成绩毕业，并于两年后在纽约医学杂志上发表了一篇文章，该文章宣扬“显微摄影术”或通过显微镜摄影进行医学研究的好处。

During the 1880s and 1890s, she worked as a medical missionary in China and Japan. She married Hippolytus Laesola Amador Eça da Silva, a Macau-born musician of Portuguese and Spanish descent, in 1894.

在1880年代和1890年代，她在中国和日本担任医疗传教士。1894年，她与澳门出生的葡萄牙-西班牙裔音乐家伊波利图斯·拉索拉·阿马多尔·艾萨·达席尔瓦(Hippolytus Laesola Amador Eça da Silva)结婚。

The couple settled in Hawaii, where Kin gave birth to a son. But she later moved to California and separated from her husband.

这对夫妇在夏威夷定居，金韵梅在那里生了一个儿子。但后来她搬到了加利福尼亚，并与丈夫分居。

By 1903, Kin was traveling across the United States to lecture to women’s clubs about Chinese nutrition and other “things oriental,” including the opium crisis in China and the role of women there.

到1903年，金韵梅在美国各地为女性俱乐部讲授中国营养和其他“东方事物”，包括中国的鸦片危机和那里的女性角色。

Kin’s profile was growing in the United States even as Chinese immigrants there were protesting the Chinese Exclusion Act, the country’s first anti-immigrant law that targeted a specific nationality.

金韵梅的名望在美国不断上升，尽管那里的中国移民正在抗议《排华法案》，这是美国第一部针对特定国籍的反移民法。

She was part of a “transnational elite” and would have been exempt from the law, which targeted laborers, said Mae M. Ngai, a history professor at Columbia University and the author of “The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America.”

哥伦比亚大学历史学教授、《幸运者：一个家庭和华裔美国非凡的发明》(The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America)一书的作者艾明如(Mae M. Ngai)说，她是“跨国精英”的一部分，可以免受那部针对劳动者的法律的影响。

In one sign of her elite status, President Theodore Roosevelt himself wrote to Kin in 1904 to express regret that he did not have the power to make her an American citizen. But she was still permitted to stay.

西奥多·罗斯福(Theodore Roosevelt)总统在1904年亲自写信给金韵梅，表示很遗憾他没有权力让她成为美国公民，这是她精英地位的一个标志。但她仍被允许留下来。

In 1907, Kin began running the Imperial Peiyang Women’s Medical School and Hospital in the northern Chinese city Tientsin, now called Tianjin.

1907年，金韵梅开始在中国北方城市天津管理北洋女医学堂和医院。

She later founded a nursing school in the city with funding from Yuan Shikai, a Qing dynasty official who would become president of the new Chinese republic after the 1911 revolution, said Zhou Zhuitian, a historian in Tianjin. Prusek wrote in his book that she also served as the physician for Yuan’s family.

后来她在天津创办了一所护理学校，资金来自清朝官员袁世凯，辛亥革命之后，此人成了新共和国的总统。天津历史学家周缀田(音)说。普实克在书中写道，她还是袁氏家族的医生。

“She is the founder of nursing education in China — the pioneer, the trailblazer,” said Qian Gang, a Hong Kong-based historian.

“她是中国护理教育的创始人——先锋、开拓者，”香港历史学家钱钢说。

Kin returned to China for good in 1920, two years after her son, Alexander, died while fighting in France for the United States in the waning weeks of World War I.

她的儿子亚历山大在第一次世界大战最后的几个星期里，在法国为美国作战时去世，两年后的1920年，金韵梅回到了中国。

She died in 1934 at the age of 70, leaving no survivors. The cause was pneumonia.

她于1934年去世，享年70岁，没有在世的亲人。死因是肺炎。

At her request, she was buried on a farm outside Beijing.

应她的要求，她被埋葬在北京郊外的一个农场。

“Here my dust will blend with soil,” she told Prusek, “and after the pile of clay they will place upon my grave has crumbled as well, I will become a field, a fertile field.”

“在这里，我的骨灰将与土壤融为一体，”她告诉普实克，“他们在我坟头上铺上泥土，之后我的坟墓也将解体，我将成为田地，一片肥沃的田地。”

The land has since been swallowed by the city’s urban sprawl.

这片土地已经被城市扩张所吞没。