Different times, shared hearts — the phrase fits, but the story underneath it is older and stranger than any summit communiqué. With a Chinese and an American leader due to sit down together in Washington, each hoping to locate common ground and some room to cooperate, attention naturally settles on what passes between two governments. It usually does.
Yet the relationship has never been built in meeting rooms alone. It has been assembled, piece by piece, out of encounters between ordinary people who had no brief and no mandate — people who met in neighbourhoods, in the middle of catastrophe, and on playing fields. Their backgrounds could hardly have been more different. What drew them together was something plainer: an act of kindness, a decision to help when helping was costly, or simply a passion they happened to share.
A teacher from Iowa who stayed fifty years
Trace the thread back far enough and you arrive at a young woman from Iowa who wanted Chinese girls and women to have chances most of them had never been offered.
Her name was Lydia Trimble.
In 1889, having graduated from what is now the University of Northern Iowa, she arrived as a missionary in Fuzhou, in the south-eastern Chinese province of Fujian. It did not take her long to notice how little access to education girls and women had — a condition she described in terms that have stayed with people ever since, comparing them to lotus flowers without roots, carried wherever the current happened to run.
She had been educated herself, and she was not willing to watch. Girls and women, she believed, deserved the chance to acquire knowledge, to stand on their own and to speak with authority about their own lives.
What began as a posting turned into a life’s work. She stayed on for five decades, until she died in 1941, and in that time helped establish schools that took in girls and women of varying ages and circumstances — doors that, once opened, let students work out for themselves what they wanted from life.
Keeping those doors open took stubbornness. When one of the schools ran short of money, Lydia wrote home to Iowa, thousands of miles away. Her elder brother James mortgaged his own farm so that her plan could survive.
It was not wasted. Education altered the course of many lives, among them that of He Zhenni, one of Lydia’s students, who went to Iowa and studied at Coe College before becoming the first Chinese woman to head a middle school in Fujian Province as its president.
Much later, Lydia’s great-nephew, Gordon Trimble, pieced her life together from her diaries and the family’s papers. One episode lodged itself in his mind: his great-aunt had once stepped between a 10-year-old girl and the marriage to a much older man she was about to be sold into.
For Gordon, her conviction that ability carries an obligation to use it became part of the family’s story — and then part of his own. In 2005, more than a hundred years after Lydia first crossed the Pacific, he travelled to Fuzhou and taught at the college she had helped to establish. He was no longer reading about her in faded diaries. He was walking around inside the results.
“It is about if you can do something better, I should help you. Because once you’re able to do it, the community becomes better,” Gordon said.
Her face is on display today at the Kuliang Family Stories Museum in Kuliang, the old mountain retreat above Fuzhou where foreign and Chinese families once spent their summers — a small building that exists largely because people kept the letters, the photographs and the memories.
When helping meant risking everything
The same instinct takes other forms. In wartime, it can mean staking your own life on someone else’s.
By 1940 the Chinese war with Japan was approaching its tenth year, and the air force was badly depleted. That September, more than 20 seasoned Chinese pilots died in the fighting over Wuhan, deepening a shortage of both pilots and aircraft at exactly the moment the country needed them most.
Help arrived from the other side of the Pacific. In 1941, an agreement between the two countries opened a path for veterans and volunteers from the American military to travel to China, take part in its defence and keep essential supplies moving. That year, around 100 American veterans joined the American Volunteer Group — the unit the world would come to know as the Flying Tigers.
Among them was Harry Moyer. What decided it for him was learning what Chinese civilians were enduring.
“I chose to go to China because I wanted to fight for China,” Moyer later recalled.
One of the war’s hardest passages came when the Yunnan-Myanmar Road, the artery carrying supplies into south-west China, was severed. A replacement had to be found, and quickly.
That was the making of the Hump airlift. Chinese and American aircrews flew side by side between India and south-west China, crossing the Himalayas with fuel, ammunition, equipment and whatever else was desperately needed at the other end.
The route was merciless. Crews contended with weather that changed without warning, mountains that left no margin, and Japanese fighters. The cost, according to US records, was severe: more than 1,300 Chinese and American aircrew lost their lives. Between May 1942 and September 1945, some 800,000 tons of supplies arrived by air, Xinhua News Agency has reported.
For the people who watched the aircraft leave and return, every flight carried a measure of hope and a measure of dread in equal parts.
Emma Jane Foster, an American nurse attached to the Flying Tigers, recalled how everyone at the airfield counted the aircraft out on a mission and counted them back in again. When one did not appear, the whole field felt it.
While American pilots took their chances in the air, Chinese civilians took theirs on the ground. The bond that formed between them was not drafted anywhere. It accumulated through small acts of courage and ordinary generosity.
Jeffrey Greene, who chairs the Sino-American Aviation Heritage Foundation, has been collecting and safeguarding these accounts for decades — those of the Flying Tigers, and those of the Chinese civilians who stood beside them.
Some of those stories are about food. In wartime, families frequently had barely enough for themselves, yet villagers would hold back what their children needed and hand the rest to the airmen. Eggs, in particular, were treasured — given so often that American airmen were still repeating the Chinese word for “egg” decades afterwards.
Others are about the runways. Chinese labourers built and repaired them with nothing more sophisticated than hammers, returning day after day. Mothers carrying babies joined in, unpaid and unasked.
Greene has been told that the effort ran into the millions.
“Two million [Chinese] people did that,” he said. “The American Congress saw this, and there was a respect between them. I’ve never met an American Air Force man who ever said anything bad about Chinese people. Never!”
The sharpest expression of that bond came when an American pilot went down behind enemy lines. A man brought down, or forced onto the ground a long way from his base, depended entirely on the villagers who found him, hid him and moved him towards safety. They understood what it meant. Chinese villagers discovered sheltering a downed American airman could face severe punishment, and often death.
No treaty produced that. It came out of compassion, gratitude, and an unspoken certainty that each would cover the other.
A ball game in Fuzhou
Generations later, the connection is being remade by young people who have found each other through the things they love.
At a recent China-US youth sports exchange, four American sides — drawn from Iowa, Virginia, Oklahoma and Michigan — flew into Fuzhou for exhibition matches against four Chinese baseball teams.
For a good number of the players this was a first visit to China and a first meeting with Chinese peers their own age. The awkwardness did not survive the first innings. On the field they already had a shared language: the game itself.
They played hard, celebrated hits and runs, and watched each other closely. Afterwards they traded techniques, gifts and accounts of their own lives.
For Shawn Simmons, of the Iowa team, the scoreline was beside the point.
“I really had a great time. I pitched. We ended up winning, but that wasn’t really what mattered,” he said. “We made some really good friendships with some of the people on the team.”
Julian Skosey-LaLonde, the assistant coach of the Iowa Baseball Team, was struck by how differently Chinese and American players moved.
“No one’s movement is more correct than others,” he said. “It is cool to see how people approach things differently. It’s a great example of how two people can be in competition but creating friendship.”
Robert Dombrowski, who coaches the Iowa team, took away something he intended to use at home — the work ethic he saw in the Chinese players.
“I actually said to our players if they can do eight hours a day at school, you guys can find one extra hour of work, you’ll improve so much,” Dombrowski said.
The game handed them a common vocabulary. The friendships carried it off the field.
What actually travels
Baseball is only one route. Young people in the two countries are finding each other through music, through art, through culture, and through the ordinary pleasure of encountering something unfamiliar together.
Often it takes very little to begin — a song both sides know, an anecdote from a trip, a moment in a match, even a memory of one. For a few seconds the distance stops mattering.
There are many more of these stories than there is room for here, and some of them are collected in “Ni How Are You,” a video podcast series that steps around the headlines and the geopolitical argument to look instead at the personal histories, the shared enthusiasms and the human connections drawing young Chinese and Americans closer to one another.
None of this settles anything between two governments. It was never going to. But it is worth remembering, while the leaders talk in Washington, that the relationship has also been carried for more than a century by people with no official standing at all: a teacher who would not leave, villagers who fed men they could not talk to, and a group of teenagers who discovered they liked each other somewhere around the third innings.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Lahore Times.
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