Archivists preserve information for the future for many reasons—some of them personal. This story appeared originally in the print edition of Footnotes, Fall 2010.
Margaret Liu never met her grandmother, Liu Wang Liming, who rose to prominence in postrevolutionary China as an author, speaker, and leader in the struggle for women’s rights. But she did know a fair amount about her grandmother’s life: She had been born in China in 1897, when there was still an emperor on the throne. She had defied convention at the age of 12 to attend a village boys school, where the books she read inspired her to further defy convention by unbinding her feet. She had left China by herself in 1916 to attend Northwestern University on a full scholarship and returned to establish the Chinese branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded a settlement house for beggars, and published three books. In 1938 her husband, the president of Shanghai University, was assassinated during the Sino-Japanese War by two gunmen on a Shanghai street. And in 1967, during China’s Cultural Revolution, she was imprisoned for her political views and was never seen by her family again.
Margaret Liu reads Syllabus in the University Archives reading room. Photo by Jason Nargis.
When Liu, a retired educator who lives in Connecticut, began doing serious research for a book on her grandmother, one of the mysteries still to be unraveled was the origin of her grandmother’s American name, Frances Willard Wang.“I didn’t know who Frances Willard was,” Liu recalls. “I looked it up online, and that’s how I found out about the Frances Willard Historical Association.”
That explained a lot. As leader of the WCTU, Evanston resident Frances Willard was one of the most prominent reformers and women’s rights advocates of the late 19th century — and clearly an inspiration for Liu’s grandmother. Liu knew that her grandmother’s attendance at Northwestern had been sponsored by a woman named Anna Gordon, and Liu discovered that Gordon, a leading figure in the WCTU, had lived with Willard as her friend and secretary in what is now the Frances Willard House Museum at 1730 Chicago Avenue in Evanston, just down the street from Northwestern.
When Liu contacted the museum to see whether there might be any correspondence in its archives relating to her grandmother, her e-mail was answered by Janet Olson, Northwestern’s assistant University archivist, who also manages the Willard House archives on a volunteer basis. Since Willard House hours are limited, Olson offered to bring boxes of Gordon’s correspondence to Northwestern, where Liu could examine them at her leisure. She also gave Liu a tour of the house, where, it turned out, Liu’s grandmother had lived under Gordon’s guardianship while she was at Northwestern.
Liu Wang Liming, identified here as Frances W. Wang, in the 1920 Syllabus Yearbook alongside classmates.
“I’ll tell you about the most amazing moment of that tour,” Olson recalls. “The furniture and the belongings in that house have been left almost completely intact, including Anna Gordon’s old wooden desk. For years all of us who volunteer there have been puzzled by a little framed photograph of a Chinese woman sitting on the desktop. No one had any idea who it was. We opened up the desk when Margaret was there, and she took one look at the picture that’s been sitting there for nearly a hundred years and immediately said, ‘That’s Grandma!’”
Liu was also looking for background information on student life at Northwestern during her grandmother’s undergraduate years (1917–20), so Olson searched for resources at University Archives that might be helpful. The 1920 Syllabus yearbook contained not only a picture of Liu’s grandmother (identified as Frances W. Wang) but also a list of the extracurricular activities she pursued: the Chinese Christian Association, the YWCA, and the Chinese Students’ Club (of which she was recording secretary), among others. “That was fascinating, because I knew very little about her social life and relationships during her student days,” Liu says. “It must have been through one of these Chinese student groups that she met my grandfather, who was attending the University of Chicago.”
The big surprise was an enormous scrapbook kept by a 1921 graduate named Edith Sternfeld. “If you want to know what student life was like in a particular era,” says Olson, “student scrapbooks are the most incredible resources. Students kept theater programs, ticket stubs, photographs, newspaper clippings — all these memorabilia that shows what they did in their spare time. We even have one from a boy who kept handkerchiefs from all the girls he dated.” This particular scrapbook was notable because Sternfeld was an artist — she went on to run the art department at Grinnell College in Iowa — who obviously took great pains to mount things attractively and label them well.
Since Liu was mainly looking through it just for background information, it came as a shock when, reading down a page of autographs and greetings from Sternfeld’s friends, Liu stumbled across her grandmother’s name. Next to it, in the column where friends were supposed to inscribe their “Happy Thoughts” to Sternfeld, Frances Willard Wang had written (in both Chinese and English) “Happy is the girl who is self-controlled, for to her belongs the whole world.”
The inscription is poignant, since conventional happiness doesn’t seem to be what Frances Willard Wang really cared about. “She was a very tough cookie,” Liu says wryly. “In her late 60s she was falsely imprisoned and accused of being a CIA spy. She died in prison without ever backing down. Her prison roommate tracked down our family later to tell us that she had asked that we contact Premier Cho En Lai’s wife to tell her our grandmother’s last words: ‘I did not betray China.’”
“She was always a mythic figure to me,” Liu continues. “It’s not just the information that I found in Archives and at the Willard House that made this such a remarkable experience for me. It’s also the emotional experience of finding these traces of her as a young girl, in her handwriting and in pictures. My hands were literally shaking as I opened up the boxes, not knowing what I might find. I’m so grateful that there are archives that keep all these materials — even when it doesn’t seem obvious why they should. There are always stories like my grandmother’s that couldn’t be reconstructed without them.”