“Education has always been a great bridge builder. We forget – we think it’s a recent thing,” says Alice Mong, director of the Museum of Chinese in America, as she shows a visitor around an exhibition charting the century-long history of the Yale-China Association.
The black-and-white images of Yale’s missionary brand of educational exchanges fill one room of a slick new building, dedicated to the history of the Chinese-American diaspora, from early traders and 19th-century railway builders to Steven Chu, US energy secretary, and Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo.
Mong’s own journey to the heart of Manhattan’s Chinatown took her through another pioneering cross-cultural programme. In 1998, she joined the inaugural class of the Kellogg-Hong Kong University of Science and Technology executive MBA programme, set up by Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and the HKUST’s Business School.