Honolulu Anglo-Chinese Academy Closes Successful School Year
By I. C. Colcord
JUNE 6 marked the close of a full nine months’ term of school work in the Anglo-Chinese Academy. We believe we can safely say we have had a successful year in many respects. First, a sweet spirit of harmony existed in the faculty, and also among the students. The motto of the school is “Do right.” Each of our boarding boys owns a Bible and a song book, as do also a large number of the day students. The last half of the term the boarding boys have been eating English foods, prepared and served in English style.19No chopsticks, no pork, no ollapodrida preparations,—these all had to go; but they went with the willing consent of the boys. Some of them are fleshier, and there is less complaint of headache, and, as they say, “I feel more better.” At the beginning of the school year over half our thirty-eight boarding boys wore queues, and at the close I counted only five left. Nearly all of them wear American-cut suits. We have secured the transportation papers for three of our Chinese boys who will sail on the seventeenth of this month, in company with Elder B. L. Howe and his family, on the good boat “Sonoma.” These young men expect to enter Healdsburg College next fall. One other would like very much to do so. He is ready to take his stand on the side of truth, but his parents have not yet given their consent, and this he wishes to have, and intends at least to give them sufficient time to think it over. Two of these young men who go to the mainland were baptized in December, 1901, in Nuuanu Stream, before their fellow students, and are now members of the Honolulu Seventh-day Adventist church. Money is beginning to be scarce here in the islands, and the nonpayment of the “fire claims,” when the Chinese were burned out during the time of the plague, has caused quite a number of the smaller enterprises of this people to go to the wall, and is bringing some of their leading merchants into straitened circumstances. But present indications are that the United States will make an appropriation of one million and a half or two million dollars to pay off these fire claimants, which will, if done, greatly relieve the financial condition. Also there is a severe strife between the Bow Wong Society and the Consul Party here in the island; in other words, between the Reform Society and the old colonists. Some of the members of the Chinese committee that has the financial responsibility of this school, are Bow Wongs. This brings in a factional element, and they have already had some of their troubles in court. How this will affect our school we do not know, but the time may be not far distant when it will be necessary for us to quit our present quarters, and open up a denominational school, to which we may invite students from “every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people.” We believe the hope of this cosmopolitan place is largely through the educational effort. I. C. COLCORD.