Yan Fuqing

The second of five children, Yen Fuqing was born in July 1882. His father, Yen Rusong, was a pastor who raised their family as practicing Episcopalians. Yen and his siblings were noted for being Western-educated. Both his father and his uncle, Yen Yongjing, had volunteered to fight for the Union North in the American Civil War while attending college at Kenyon in Ohio.

During his childhood, Yen Fuqing's father died, leaving his uncle, Yen Yongjing, to take care of him at the age of seven. Due to his father's death and his mother's sickness, Fuqing became interested in medicine at a young age. He grew up in a relatively cosmopolitan environment, heavily influenced by Western and Christian morality and thought. Uncle Yan Yongjing was founder and a principal educator at St. John's University in Shanghai, and Yen Fuqing was given an Anglican education there. After graduating from St. John's University's School of Medicine in 1903, Yen briefly went to work at St. Luke's Hospital before traveling to South Africa to treat Chinese miners working in the then-British colony.

Yen was married to Cao Xiuying, a relative of Sun Yat-sen.

After her marriage to Yen, Cao became a philanthropist and opened several teaching orphanages. Cao and Yen had six children, though only four survived to adulthood. This included Woqīng (Western name William), Yǎqīng (Western name Hilda), Xiangqīng (Western name Dorothy), and Ruiqīng (Western name Victor). Cao was renowned for her generosity. In one story, she was said to have lent a Steinway piano to an impoverished fellow parishioner in the 1930s in order to help the woman provide for her two young daughters. After ultimately having the means to raise their daughters, the family returned Cao's piano to her family after her death in 1966, just before the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution.

During his time at Yale Medical School, Yen became close friends with the only other two foreign students, Jacque Louis Buttner, from France, and Carl Johannes Grade, from Denmark. When Yen returned to the United States for the treatment of a gastric ulcer in the 1950s, it was Buttner who acted as his surgeon at New Haven Hospital.

Yen had eight grandchildren. During the three years of Great Chinese Famine, Yen's rations were provided by the government for his position as a “senior intellectual”. He consistently distributed these to his grandchildren, concerned that they would not grow without adequate nutrition.

Yen Zuiyuan, F.C. Yen's eldest grandson, is currently an associate professor at Fudan University. In 2007, Zuiyuan wrote and published a comprehensive biography of his grandfather's life. The book was released by Fudan University Press and has been translated into English.

In 1921, when Yen took a two-year sabbatical from his roles at the Yale-China Association and Hunan Medical College, his daughter Hilda was granted entry into Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Eighty-nine years later, Dr. Yen's great-granddaughter would go on to graduate from Smith College. Ninety-three years after Hilda's admission to Smith College, another great-granddaughter would also graduate from Smith College. Dr. Yen's great-grandson Ronald Chen, Hilda Yen's grandson through her first marriage to P.T. Chen, is dean of Rutgers Law School.