金韻梅：將豆腐帶到西方的中國(guó)醫(yī)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年以來(lái)，《紐約時(shí)報(bào)》的訃告一直以白人男性為主。我們推出了“被遺漏的”(Overlooked)欄目，補(bǔ)上一些離世時(shí)未獲得時(shí)報(bào)關(guān)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，在中國(guó)出生、當(dāng)時(shí)住在紐約的醫(yī)生金韻梅(Yamei Kin)回到故鄉(xiāng)，研究一種幾乎不為美國(guó)人所知的農(nóng)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.”

在當(dāng)時(shí)，她已經(jīng)是有名的營(yíng)養(yǎng)師了。在接受這次使命之前，她一直告訴婦女俱樂(lè)部，豆腐和其他豆制品是肉類(lèi)的營(yíng)養(yǎng)替代品，而且前者所耗費(fèi)的生產(chǎn)資源很少。她喜歡說(shuō)，它們的口感“有點(diǎn)像腦子，也有點(diǎn)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).

“向美國(guó)民眾大力推廣豆腐方面，她領(lǐng)先于時(shí)代好幾十年，”《魔豆——大豆在美國(guó)的崛起》(Magic Bean: the Rise of Soy in America，2018年)一書(shū)的作者馬修·羅斯(Matthew Roth)說(shuō)。

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.

美國(guó)農(nóng)業(yè)部找到她，請(qǐng)她去中國(guó)研究美國(guó)可以如何利用大豆。政府當(dāng)時(shí)正在為參加第一次世界大戰(zhàn)的士兵開(kāi)發(fā)新的蛋白質(zhì)來(lái)源，金韻梅的研究屬于其中的一部分。

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.

金韻梅在美國(guó)農(nóng)業(yè)部有一個(gè)實(shí)驗(yàn)室，她在那里對(duì)該部所謂的“中式大豆奶酪”進(jìn)行測(cè)試，并把大豆種子交給該部的種植業(yè)局。羅斯說(shuō)，她的一些食譜很可能收錄在1910年由農(nóng)業(yè)部官員威廉·摩爾斯(William J. Morse)和查爾斯·派珀(Charles V. Piper)發(fā)表的具有里程碑意義的研究報(bào)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.”

“美國(guó)人不知道怎么利用大豆，”1917年，50出頭的金韻梅在前往中國(guó)前，告訴紐約時(shí)報(bào)雜志。“必須要讓它變得有吸引力，否則他們就不會(huì)接受它。它一定要好吃。這是可以做到的。”

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

1918年，《圣安東尼奧快報(bào)》(The San Antonio Light)的一篇報(bào)道這樣描述她的實(shí)驗(yàn)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.”

“長(zhǎng)桌子上放著一排玻璃罐，里面裝滿(mǎn)看起來(lái)像是白色奶酪片的東西。那是大豆奶酪。有一個(gè)罐子里裝滿(mǎn)褐色的糊狀物。那是大豆。有些瓶子裝滿(mǎn)我們吃雜碎時(shí)會(huì)遇到的佐料。那也是大豆做的。真可謂雙重人格!大豆形式多變，如果你不喜歡這種形式的大豆，也一定會(huì)喜歡另一種。”

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

在當(dāng)時(shí)的論文和信函中，美國(guó)農(nóng)業(yè)部的同事對(duì)金韻梅的工作贊賞有加。

“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，”農(nóng)業(yè)部植物學(xué)家弗蘭克·N·梅耶爾(Frank N. Meyer)在1911年的一封給她的回信中說(shuō)。“也許有一天，大豆在美國(guó)會(huì)得到更高尚的應(yīng)用，而不只是飼料或綠肥。”

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

時(shí)報(bào)雜志提到，金韻梅的研究是美國(guó)首次“有華人得到如此高的權(quán)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.

金韻梅生前沒(méi)有看到大豆在美國(guó)主流社會(huì)中流行，而歷史學(xué)家說(shuō)，她的豆腐倡導(dǎo)活動(dòng)在美國(guó)造成的確切影響很難衡量。但她顯然是聯(lián)邦政府內(nèi)第一個(gè)在亞洲移民社區(qū)之外推廣這種豆類(lèi)的人——在素食漢堡和大豆拿鐵成為時(shí)尚之前很長(zhǎng)的文化實(shí)踐。

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.

金韻梅一生中不斷開(kāi)辟新的職業(yè)，農(nóng)業(yè)部任務(wù)只是其中一章。歷史學(xué)家說(shuō)，她是中國(guó)現(xiàn)代史上第一批到海外學(xué)習(xí)并在美國(guó)獲得醫(yī)學(xué)學(xué)位的女學(xué)生。回到中國(guó)后，她經(jīng)營(yíng)了一家婦女醫(yī)院，建立了一所護(hù)理學(xué)校，據(jù)說(shuō)甚至在剛剛成立不久的共和國(guó)擔(dān)任了一位總統(tǒng)的家庭醫(yī)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.

金韻梅的職業(yè)生涯非常引人注目，部分原因在于它有著極為嘈雜的背景：1882年的《排華法案》(Chinese Exclusion Act)，以及1912年清朝覆滅時(shí)期中國(guó)的政治動(dòng)蕩。

“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.

“她出現(xiàn)在很多不同的地方，做了各種各樣的事，這一點(diǎn)非常感人，”德克薩斯大學(xué)奧斯汀分校研究19世紀(jì)末20世紀(jì)初期中美之間的移民問(wèn)題的歷史學(xué)家徐元音(Madeline Y. Hsu)說(shuō)。

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

“這真的、真的是一個(gè)跨國(guó)故事，”她補(bǔ)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. 根據(jù)加利福尼亞州大豆信息中心(SoyInfo Center)2016年發(fā)表的一份注釋版金韻梅生平文獻(xiàn)目錄，金韻梅于1864年出生于中國(guó)東部城市寧波一個(gè)中國(guó)牧師家庭。

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.

金韻梅兩歲時(shí)，她的父母在疫病流行期間死于霍亂，她被美國(guó)傳教士夫婦麥嘉締(Divie Bethune)和胡安娜·瑪?shù)贍栠_(dá)奈特(Juana McCartee)收養(yǎng)。她在中國(guó)和日本長(zhǎng)大，她的養(yǎng)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.

她的養(yǎng)父母搬到了紐約，她在紐約州拉伊市就讀了一年的中學(xué)。羅斯的書(shū)中說(shuō)，16歲時(shí)，金韻梅以Y·May King的名字被紐約女子醫(yī)學(xué)院(Women’s Medical College)錄取。

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.

研究人員認(rèn)為，她改變了自己的名字，以便隱藏自己的種族，因?yàn)樗粩嗾J(rèn)識(shí)到，自己是當(dāng)時(shí)在美國(guó)學(xué)習(xí)的少數(shù)華人女性之一。

“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.

“街上的工人經(jīng)常辱罵我，甚至我的女同學(xué)對(duì)我也沒(méi)什么特別的熱情，”從1930年代就認(rèn)識(shí)她的捷克漢學(xué)家雅羅斯拉夫·普實(shí)克(Jaroslav Prusek)在回憶錄《我的姊妹中國(guó)》(My Sister China，2002)中引用她的話(huà)說(shuō)。

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年以班級(jí)最優(yōu)秀成績(jī)畢業(yè)，并于兩年后在紐約醫(yī)學(xué)雜志上發(fā)表了一篇文章，該文章宣揚(yáng)“顯微攝影術(shù)”或通過(guò)顯微鏡攝影進(jìn)行醫(yī)學(xué)研究的好處。

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，她在中國(guó)和日本擔(dān)任醫(yī)療傳教士。1894年，她與澳門(mén)出生的葡萄牙-西班牙裔音樂(lè)家伊波利圖斯·拉索拉·阿馬多爾·艾薩·達(dá)席爾瓦(Hippolytus Laesola Amador Eça da Silva)結(jié)婚。

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

這對(duì)夫婦在夏威夷定居，金韻梅在那里生了一個(gè)兒子。但后來(lái)她搬到了加利福尼亞，并與丈夫分居。

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，金韻梅在美國(guó)各地為女性俱樂(lè)部講授中國(guó)營(yíng)養(yǎng)和其他“東方事物”，包括中國(guó)的鴉片危機(jī)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.

金韻梅的名望在美國(guó)不斷上升，盡管那里的中國(guó)移民正在抗議《排華法案》，這是美國(guó)第一部針對(duì)特定國(guó)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.”

哥倫比亞大學(xué)歷史學(xué)教授、《幸運(yùn)者：一個(gè)家庭和華裔美國(guó)非凡的發(fā)明》(The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America)一書(shū)的作者艾明如(Mae M. Ngai)說(shuō)，她是“跨國(guó)精英”的一部分，可以免受那部針對(duì)勞動(dòng)者的法律的影響。

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.

西奧多·羅斯福(Theodore Roosevelt)總統(tǒng)在1904年親自寫(xiě)信給金韻梅，表示很遺憾他沒(méi)有權(quán)力讓她成為美國(guó)公民，這是她精英地位的一個(gè)標(biāo)志。但她仍被允許留下來(lái)。

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，金韻梅開(kāi)始在中國(guó)北方城市天津管理北洋女醫(yī)學(xué)堂和醫(yī)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.

后來(lái)她在天津創(chuàng)辦了一所護(hù)理學(xué)校，資金來(lái)自清朝官員袁世凱，辛亥革命之后，此人成了新共和國(guó)的總統(tǒng)。天津歷史學(xué)家周綴田(音)說(shuō)。普實(shí)克在書(shū)中寫(xiě)道，她還是袁氏家族的醫(yī)生。

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

“她是中國(guó)護(hù)理教育的創(chuàng)始人——先鋒、開(kāi)拓者，”香港歷史學(xué)家錢(qián)鋼說(shuō)。

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.

她的兒子亞歷山大在第一次世界大戰(zhàn)最后的幾個(gè)星期里，在法國(guó)為美國(guó)作戰(zhàn)時(shí)去世，兩年后的1920年，金韻梅回到了中國(guó)。

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歲，沒(méi)有在世的親人。死因是肺炎。

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

應(yīng)她的要求，她被埋葬在北京郊外的一個(gè)農(nóng)場(chǎng)。

“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.”

“在這里，我的骨灰將與土壤融為一體，”她告訴普實(shí)克，“他們?cè)谖覊烆^上鋪上泥土，之后我的墳?zāi)挂矊⒔怏w，我將成為田地，一片肥沃的田地。”

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

這片土地已經(jīng)被城市擴(kuò)張所吞沒(méi)。