1925 Portrait of “Mike” Foon Kai-Kee of Yale, the Only Chinese Student Playing for an American College Baseball Team

New Haven, Connecticut, 1925. Single 8 x 10 inch photograph. Fotograms and date stamps verso with typed news caption affixed. Slightly curled with some folds at corners, editorial overpainting recto, excellent contrast; overall excellent.. A portrait of “Mike” Foon Kai-Kee (1903–deceased), a Chinese-American college baseball player at Yale University, from Dinuba, California (misspelled as “Dinerba” in the caption). The caption describes the third baseman as “the only Chinese playing on an American University baseball team [...] according to Joe Wood, Yale’s head coach, he is a marvel. Nothing gets by him in the field”. At the time, Chinese people were persecuted in the US—the Immigration Act of 1924, including the Asian Exclusion Act, had recently been enacted. Yale, however, already had a long history with the Chinese people; Yung Wing graduated in 1854 as the first Chinese person to earn an American university degree, and in 1878 Samuel Wells Williams became the first professor of Chinese language and literature in the US. Of interest to scholars of the Chinese-American experience in the early twentieth century.