A 60-year Sino-American Reunion

A friendship that started 60 years ago has been marked with the reunion of three friends. The writer joined his old wartime friends Dick Pastor and Ma Shitu to revisit Kunming and discuss the changing times

Kunming: We greeted each other warmly in the brisk autumn air of Kunming.

Our ages added up to nearly 260 years, and our embrace was tender. This reunion marked the 60th year of a friendship that had started here during World War II and has only grown stronger over the years.

Eighty-six-year-old Dick Pastor is a former member of the US 14th Air Force, nicknamed Flying Tigers. He was stationed in this Southwest China city in 1944, when the US military came in to help defend China against Japanese invasion.

Dick and his 90-year-old wife, Naomi, flew from New York City to meet up with Ma Shitu, 90, a famous writer, and myself, Zhang Yan. I am now 82.

It was Ma who started our friendship. He was a Southwest Associated University student who helped welcome a group of American GIs to the city.

I was a former schoolmate of Ma, and one of the liveliest participants in the activities of this extraordinary friendship.

It was a friendship among young people with common social and political interests, a friendship which included caring for each other’s well-being and trying to protect each other in times of war and imminent danger.

Test of time

Since then, our friendship has continued along in a jagged route. Three of the GIs in the group――Edward Bell, Howard Hyman and Jack Edelman――met Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong in Chongqing.

In 1945, Mao predicted the friendship between our two peoples would be bound to blossom, even though at the time the US Government was intensely hostile towards the appearance of a “new China”.

After the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, the US Government tried to undermine its administration.

Our personal relationship with our American friends was completely cut off, and their insistent support of the recognition of new China meant our American friends suffered tremendous persecution during the 1950 McCarthyism――“red scare” period.

And on our part, during China’s notorious “cultural revolution” (1966-76), each of us who had made such good American friends was labeled an “international spies”.

All these dark clouds were driven away only by the normalization of relations between the US and China in 1979.

We were finally able to resume our friendship by letter, which has only intensified over the years, and continued even into our second and third generations.

Dream comes true

And now, Dick Pastor had at last succeeded to make his dream come true――to make a reunion with his Chinese friends in Kunming.

Touched that he would make this trip across the world even in a wheelchair, Ma and I were extremely proud to join him.

Ma traveled from Chengdu, Sichuan Province with his son and daughter; and I came with my 79-year-old wife Pei Yusun, from Beijing.

The provincial government of Yunnan, which had benefited from the contributions made by the American Flying Tigers during the war, were happy to host the reunion and laid on the best facilities available.

We were invited to tell our stories to the young faculty and students of Yunnan Normal University, successor of the wartime Southwest Associated University; and we had a symposium with members of the Aviation Association who had close relations of American Flying Tigers organizations.

Quite unexpectedly, while visiting the Hump Aviation commemorative monument for Flying Tigers, we happened upon Rita Wong (now Huang Huanxiao in Chinese), a former nurse in an American Kunming wartime hospital. She is 93 now, but still healthy and energetic.

Kunming has become a modern city that we no longer recognize. With only our memories to guide us, we were practically unable to track where we had frequently met, picnicked or carried on long debates into the early hours once a fortnight between 1944-45.

For hours, Dick eagerly searched for the bookshop where he had first met Ma, but in vain. It has been replaced by a shining skyscraper of more than 20 storeys. Only the famous sights like Daguanlou and Cuihu Lake still remain.

The new Kunming, with its World Expo centre and international gardens, was an amazing sight to us, who remembered a humble, poverty stricken town.

Through endless discussions during our reunion, we agreed that the world has changed a great deal more than we had dreamed it could 60 years ago.

The United States is now the most developed country, while China is the most populous and most quickly changing developing country.

Relations between our two nations play a decisive role in world peace.

It is true there have been differences, sometimes quite serious, between our two governments. But it is even truer that the interpersonal relations have always been very friendly on the basis of increased mutual understanding. Our profound and everlasting friendship is a perfect example.

At the farewell banquet, Ma Shitu presented Dick Pastor with a scroll as a souvenir on which he had written an original poem in beautiful Chinese calligraphy.

A rough translation follows:

Three old men happily got together again

Chatting about what has passed in the last sixty years

There are still great expectations before them

To remember to meet again in Beijing in 2008!

When he got back to the US, Dick e-mailed me his impressions:

“The first word that presents itself is overwhelming.

“The face of China has changed, though its people retain the soul of warmth and friendliness.

“To talk of the physical changes is an exercise in futility, because changes are constantly taking place.

“From the main avenues to the side streets to the heaven-bound skyscrapers, change is a constant process.

“But for us there was much more than a changing landscape. There was the remarkable and constant attention to our well-being――to our needs as wee as our desires.

“China is as new as it is ancient. To describe briefly China’s revolutionary transformation in the middle of the 20th century from feudalism to the early stages of socialism to its present economic and industrial transformation at the start of the 21st century is like trying to describe the rapidly changing colours of a sunset.

“Perhaps one word can try to do justice to our short stay: Phenomenal.”

Tale from a former GI

In early summer of 1974, Dick Pastor wrote “A War Tale of US-China Friendship” in the magazine China and Us, which was published by the United States-China Peoples Friendship Association in New York.

In the article, Pastor recounted the beginning of a great friendship between Chinese and Americans.

“About this time 30 years ago (1944) the Japanese Imperial Army was sweeping through the interior of Southwest China.

“On arriving in Kunming, I was assigned to a Photo Intelligence Detachment. I walked around whistling such tunes as Bandera Rosa (which I expected would be known only to the radical cognoscenti) and soon discovered six GIs from my own and adjacent outfits with whom I began to build a political relationship.

“Quite independent of this I had struck up an acquaintance with a young Chinese who had sidled up to me in a bookshop and asked softly in English, ‘Interesting, yes?’ as I examined a piece of Marxist literature.

“He asked, as we talked, if I would like to meet some of his friends, to which I replied with an enthusiastic Yes!

“ And asked if I could bring mine.

“As we got to know each other at successive gatherings, we learned that Anton Ma (Ma Shitu) had escaped a Kuomintang concentration camp in which his wife and infant daughter had been killed. He was now engaged in underground political work though still hunted by the police.

“Others in the group included Donald Chang (Zhang Yan) and a number of young students from the Southwest Associated University whose Anglicized first names are all that I now recall. All spoke fluent English.

“We met frequently for exchange discussions on our respective homeland struggles for a just society. We also discussed political theory as it was developing in both China and the U.S.

“In the midst of these happy pursuits during a war, intelligence reports indicated that the Japanese advance into Kweichow (Guizhou) Province might be a prelude to a paratroop attack on the main base of the 14th Air Force at Kunming, from which missions were launched against the invaders.

“Because the base lacked adequate defenses, all military personnel were advised that in the event of an attack we were to make our way, as best we could, to the nearest base some distance to the north and west.

“Out of concern such an attack could mean to our Chinese friends we warned them as speedily as we could of the growing danger.

“What we did know then was their concern for us ‘conspicuous foreigners’ was even greater than ours for them.

“At 3 a.m. the following day, I was awakened in the dark of the barracks by someone urgently shaking my shoulder. It was Donald Chang. He told me that he had bicycled 7 or 8 miles from a meeting where our report of the military threat had been discussed.

“The meeting ended, he said, with a decision to invite us, seven Americans, to join them in their underground political unit in the event that the attack came, so that they could protect us and escort to our next destination.

“The attack never came, but I remember that invitation as a beautiful example of solidarity and friendship between our two peoples.”