Cross-cultural Practice of Everyday Life: Zeng Baosun’s 曾寶蓀 （1893-1978） “British Experience” and Modern Chinese Women’s Education

As the first Chinese woman to receive a university bachelor’s degree in Britain, Zeng Baosun (曾寶蓀, 1893-1978) is a markable figure in the history of Chinese women and the development of Chinese education in early twentieth century. Examining how the Memoir of Zeng Baosun provides detailed accounts of Zeng’s overseas study experiences, everyday life, and cross-cultural interactions with the world, the paper explores how autobiographical writing as a non-fictional genre reflects and interacts with history. Focusing on Zeng’s “British experience” in her memoir, the research investigates the everydayness of Zeng’s cross-cultural activities and how she incorporated western and Chinese thoughts into her practices of cultivating Chinese female students into new women of modern China. Zeng’s reflections on British culture profoundly influenced the development of modern Chinese women’s education she initiated after returning to China. The Yifang Girls’ School she established also cultivated many outstanding women into pioneers of China’s modernity. The Memoir of Zeng Baosun is an essential record illuminating how a new woman in modern China gained new experience of modernity and hybrid identity and realized self-transformation through transcultural travels and intellectual journeys that combined western knowledge and values and traditional Chinese ones. With critical analysis of Zeng’s memoir and relative historical materials, especially her cross-cultural records of great historical events, the paper presents global history as “her history” and shows the interactions between private experience and grand historical narratives and how macro-history is presented in gendered micro-history.