Read the excerpt below from the Yung Wing's book My Life in China and America published in 1909.
As early as 1834, an English lady, Mrs. Gutzlaff, wife of the Rev. Charles Gutzlaff, a missionary to China, came to Macao and, under the auspices of the Ladies' Association in London for the promotion of female education in India and the East, immediately took up the work of her mission by starting a girls' school for Chinese girls, which was soon followed by the opening of a school for boys also.
Mrs. Gutzlaff's governmental official happened to come from the village I did and was, in fact, my father's friend and neighbor. It was through him that my parents heard about Mrs. Gutzlaff's school and it was doubtless through his influence and means that my father got me admitted into the school. It has always been a mystery to me why my parents should take it into their heads to put me into a foreign school, instead of a regular orthodox Confucian school, where my brother much older than myself was placed. Most assuredly such a step would have been more in play with Chinese public sentiment, taste, and the wants of the country at large, than to allow me to attend an English school; moreover, a Chinese cult is the only avenue in China that leads to political preferment, influence, power and wealth. I can only account for the departure thus taken on the theory that as foreign intercourse with China was just beginning to grow, my parents, anticipating that it might soon assume the proportions of a tidal wave, thought it worth while to take time by the reins and put one of their sons to learning English that he might become one of the advanced interpreters and have a more advantageous position from which to make his way into the business and diplomatic world. This I take to be the chief aim that influenced my parents to put me into Mrs. Gutzlaff's Mission School.
Yung Wing tells briefly of how the public would think of his parents sending him to Mrs. Gutzlaff's Mission School. How does this influence how the reader should view his parent's decision?
He wants the reader to understand the social stigma around his parent's decision.
He is providing context for the reader as to why he and his friends hated Mrs. Gutzlaff's Mission School.
His plan is to explain why his siblings went to the regular orthodox Confucian school.
He is showing what happens to families who go against what the general public wants.