Exhibit - Pioneers of International Education: Onn Mann Liang
International students have been travelling to study at Michigan State University for over 140 years, and what is even more fun about this population of students is that the individual experiences they shared with our campus often come back to MSU and can be reinvestigated and discovered. The scrapbooks and work documentation of Onn Mann Liang provide the story of one such student through photographs and a few brief correspondences from late high school until the year before his death in 1957.
Liang was one of a group of twenty international students who studied at MSU in the 1920s. In 1922 Liang began his nine-year stay in America as a fruit picker at Walnut Grove in California while he was living in Berkeley, California. He moved to Michigan a year later. For the next five months, Liang worked at a Chevrolet plant in Flint before coming to Lansing to begin his studies in Engineering.
During his time in at Michigan State College, Liang travelled extensively around Lansing and nearby areas of Michigan. His scrapbooks reveal how immersed he was in the campus lifestyle and the various activities he joined in – exploring, relaxing, and sightseeing. His photographs include images of himself and others canoeing and walking alongside the Red Cedar River or alternatively around the major sights of campus, such as Beaumont Tower or the Greenhouses. His campus pictures also reflect his early interest in bridge engineering – his scrapbooks include multiple artistic shots of various bridges around MSU, as do his post-graduation photographs of Chicago in 1928. While he was still attending school, Liang was known for the quality of his photographs (even winning a few awards), and he opened a photography studio in Lansing. These campus pictures are inter-mixed with oddly familiar and nostalgic college scenes of Liang looking perturbed at large drafting desks, reclining on lawn chairs, exploring nearby cities like Ann Arbor, and finally posing in his long-awaited cap and gown.
After completing his undergraduate studies in 1926, Liang interned with the Michigan State Highway Department for two years, at which point his scrapbook takes a journey to see the bridges and architectural feats of Chicago and Buffalo. The images of Chicago show such famous buildings as the Tribune Tower – which at the time of Liang’s visit had only been completed three years earlier – as well as the La Salle Street Bridge – which was built and completed throughout the year of 1928, and, as a bridge enthusiast, could very well have been the reason for Liang’s visit to the city. Within the next two years his travels also brought him to Buffalo, where we see images of the contemporary Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, before he came back to Michigan and began working full time with the Highway Department. Some of Liang’s final photographs of his experiences in the US include him among coworkers at the Department, prior to his return Canton, China in 1932.
The last materials in Liang’s collections provide a brief overview of his life upon his return to China. Wedding photographs from 1936 and registration documents as a Civil Engineer show Liang’s quick integration back into Chinese life. Employment papers from the same period reveal Liang’s work under the Marshall Plan as a primary engineer of dyke and bridge plans throughout his native country, which, just as with his time spent at the Michigan State Highway Department, was a direct application of the education he received from MSU. After processing the Liang scrapbooks, it becomes apparent that he carried that education with him, even up to the last years of his life. The last image of the Liang scrapbook shows him on a return trip to San Francisco alongside his wife and son – with the Golden Gate Bridge receding behind.
Exhibit created by Emily Field, March 2013
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