Americans have been coming to China for centuries and they will continue to come long after my generation has left this world.  In fact, the first ones arrived in China in 1784 aboard the ship Empress of China, hoping to trade American ginseng for Chinese tea, porcelain, and other goods.  I have always enjoyed reading and hearing about these experiences, whether they happened a hundred years ago or last week.  Even with the great strides the world has taken and the developments these two countries have made, a trip from America to China is still an undeniable adventure.  Young men and women floating along in their lives in America with no hardened idea of what they want out of life may find themselves taking the flight to China and once there a new world of opportunity opens before them, and yes, even adventure.  China can intoxicate men with its vibrant cities, ancient culture, and a language that can make the most cynical of students see the beauty of learning a foreign tongue.  This country can literally provide everything that some young Americans need to make sense of this world, to see the way forward.

When Mozart first sat down at the harpsichord there must have been a click in his brain, a puzzle fitting into place.  For some, China can provide a similar epiphany.  It was this way for me and I know I am not alone in my sentiments.  While I am not saying I am destined to devote my whole life to China, I am just as sure that there was a profound click in my brain after my first trip to Beijing as a high school student.  It wasn’t something I could just brush off as I headed back to America.  There was something about this country that fulfilled my childhood dreams of foreign discovery in such a profound way and it gave me something useful to pursue in life.  Ever since that cold January day when I landed in Beijing that’s what I’ve been doing.  I don’t know where it will take me, but I know it will be worth it.

If this all sounds overly romantic, please excuse me.  I’ve just finished reading the story of an American that came to China to study a full five years before I was even born.  His name was John Zeidman and for him, like me and many other others, “China seemed to bring everything together.”

The story I read was written by Calvin Trillin and published in the New Yorker magazine on October 7, 1985.  I found my way to this mid-eighties copy of the New Yorker by way of a journalist I respect a lot, James Fallows.  You see Mr. Fallows just published a small article (all articles feel small in comparison to New Yorker articles) for the Atlantic magazine about an American couple who live in the town of Xizhou in my former home province of Yunnan.  To keep it short, they are trying to keep Xizhou from becoming the tourist wasteland that other historical towns in the hinterland of Yunnan have become (I’m looking at you Lijiang).  They run a community center/inn than supports the local arts and provides a more fulfilling way for visitors to appreciate that most beautiful and interesting corner of China.  Something mentioned in the article stuck out at me, though.  In the article we learn that the American husband, Brian Linden, came to China in the early 1980s as a student:

Soon after his arrival, he was spotted by a movie director while jogging down a Beijing street and cast as the lead in a Chinese movie. The film, He Came From Across the Pacific, was based on the tragic story of John Zeidman, an American exchange student who caught viral encephalitis in China and died in 1982.

I had never heard of John Zeidman, but I was instantly interested.  For a Chinese movie to have been made about an American student who came to China at that time, when relations between America and China were just beginning to include student exchanges, it was bound to be, at the very least, a good story and most likely a big deal.  Luckily for me before I came to Shanghai I packed a good chunk of my father’s “The Complete New Yorker,” which is stored on DVDs, and I had the 1984-1997 disc.  So today while there was a lull at work I stuck in the disc and brought up the article.  The information used in this post is entirely from that New Yorker article, unless otherwise noted; there was little more that I could find about him online and no photographs.  If you have a subscription to the magazine I suggest you read the article online.

I would like to add that in writing this post I don’t want to hurt anyone by rehashing a painful story, it was just that I found this young man’s experience in China so absolutely fascinating and heart wrenching.  The fact that no one I know my age living in China has heard of him is unacceptable to me.  Historians tell stories worth telling and this is without a doubt just such a story

As I started to read about the short life of John Zeidman I couldn’t help but notice a few minor similarities between him and the many young Americans like me who have flocked to China is recent years.  He was brought up in the suburbs (of Virginia) in a home with two smart and devoted parents, went to a distinguished high school (Sidwell Friends) where he didn’t really distinguish himself.  After failing French in his sophomore year he was told that he didn’t have an aptitude for languages.  His father summed up his teenage son by saying: “he could be a pain in the ass,” which isn’t too far from what me and many other American teenagers were like in high school.  For a high school graduation present his parents took him on a trip to China in 1979, his father had been invited because of his legal work.  During the trip John didn’t seem to show all that much interest in China and spent a lot of his time throwing a Frisbee around, but nevertheless it was an experience that stayed with him.  Bear in mind 1979 was only three years after the death of Mao Zedong and the very beginning of China allowing American visitors.

John was accepted into Duke University but was to start his Freshman year in January, 1980, leaving the Fall up to him to fill.  He and his parents needed a break from each other so he moved to Boston to work as an intern at WGBH, the local public broadcasting station.  While working he also took English composition classes at BU and started going to a Chinese cooking class with a family friend.  That cooking class lead to a job as a busboy at the teacher’s Chinese restaurant.  Like so many others John Zeidman found that a love of Chinese food can go a long way towards cementing an interest in China.  Later, John would order food in Mandarin at Chinese restaurants for him and his family, showing pride in his language ability.  Sometimes I think there’s no Chinese language ability more important to me than the impossibly large food lexicon, food makes everything worth doing.

A result of his month’s spent in Boston John arrived at Duke in the winter of 1980 changed from his days as an apathetic high school student.  He had found a strong focus in his life: China.  He did well in his studies, including in his Chinese language class, even though he had been told by his high school French teacher that he didn’t have an aptitude for languages.  This was true for me as well, I never did very well in Spanish and Italian as a teenager.  For a student to do well in a language the language has to be interesting to the student and they need to take pride in what they are learning.  John Zeidman and I are not the only people to find that a lackluster performance in a high school language class does not automatically preclude a solid performance in learning a complex East Asian language.

After only one year of Chinese at Duke John Zeidman applied to a University of Massachusetts study abroad program that allowed students to live in Beijing for their Junior year studying at Peking Normal University.  He was accepted, though required to take a summer language program in Beijing before the Fall semester began.  In June 1981 John Zeidman left the United States bound for China.

Everyone seemed to think that John and China made for a good fit.  Beijing in 1981 in most ways was certainly nothing like the Beijing you find today.  A city that today often feels more international than Chinese, with its soaring modern architecture and fantastic food selections (burritos!), was certainly a far different city in those days.  My parents visited China the same year that John arrived, taking in Hong Kong before seeing the (at that point) small city of Shenzhen.  Their slides and others’ photographs show a China populated by people wearing identical blue coats and white shirts, streets almost completely devoid of cars, bookstores filled with tomes that are all the same color – in short a country that was still cloaked in Maoist austerity and only beginning to morph into something new.  It was a China that a lot of today’s foreign students and teachers would have balked at, you have to hold a certain amount of courage and curiosity to deal with and enjoy a place that deeply foreign.  Yet in the Beijing of 1981 John Zeidman thrived.  In the New Yorker article the author Calvin Trillin writes:

He simply loved it.  It was almost as if a situation had been designed to take advantage of the qualities that John had exhibited all his life.  Where someone more likely to be inhibited by an imperfect accent might hesitate to strike up conversations with strangers, John barged right in.  Where someone more conscientious about obeying rules and regulations might have believed everything he read about restrictions on what foreigners could do in China, John assumed he could do anything.  Where someone who had grown up valuing coolness and restraint might have been shy out toward Chinese students, John organized barbecues.

While I question whether John Zeidman fit so perfectly into his new life as a Chinese student (we all have issues with China), it is clear that he enjoyed himself immensely.  One of the most interesting parts of the New Yorker article were the quotations taken from cassette tapes that John had recorded in Beijing and sent home to America, it was truly a different time.  John’s life in China shines through in his remarks, such as, “The motto of the Peking bus system is ‘There is no such thing as a full bus.’” (Still true today!)  John bought a bike and trekked over the capital during his summer as a language student and during the break before the Fall semester he traveled by “hard seat,” the cheapest seat on Chinese trains, so that he could practice his Chinese and save money.  In a tape he sent home about this trip he remarks:

For one who has never been lacking in his use of the English language, August 7, 1981 will go down in history.  With one exception, I neither spoke nor heard an English word…. The one exception was when the train loudspeaker played a Chinese singer singing ‘Jingle Bells’ in English.

He later visited an American couple, Felton and Mary, who were friends of the family living in Shanghai, again buying a “hard seat” ticket, and pushed them to explore Shanghai’s lesser known back streets and smaller local restaurants.  Back in Beijing he stopped eating at the university’s cafeteria, preferring to scout out cheap noodle and dumpling places in the neighborhood.  On his twentieth birthday on September 26, 1981, he began a tape sent home by saying: “Everything is going really well.”  Three days later on Rosh Hashanah his father, up early for work, received a scratchy call from China.

At first Mr. Zeidman believed that the call was from John wishing the family a happy new year, but he quickly realized something was wrong.  The caller was not John but rather the American head of the study abroad program John was taking part in.  She informed John’s father that his son was in the hospital and critically ill.  I can’t even begin to imagine the calamitous emotions that must have hit John’s father at that exact moment.

At about the same time an American researcher living in the same dormitory as John named Anne wrote a letter to her husband back in America, who happened to be a China scholar at Harvard, and told him that a young American studying abroad there had contracted viral encephalitis.  “His name,” she wrote, “is John Zeidman.  I met him in August… a nice guy – friendly, outgoing, 20 years old.”  As it turned out when John was admitted to the hospital a group of eminent American neurologists were in Beijing on their way back from a conference in Japan and were able to examine John.  Their prognosis, heard second-hand by Anne, was filled with finality: “The American doctors, as I understand it, are saying quite frankly that he will probably die.”

The Zeidman family quickly went into high gear to find a solution and save their son.  They called doctors, the State Department, anyone who knew something about viral encephalitis and what could be done to treat it.  One thing was clear: they were going to Beijing to see their son.  In the meantime the family friend living in Shanghai, Mary, whom John had visited a mere month or so before, headed to Beijing to help.  When she arrived at Infectious Diseases Hospital No. 1 she found John paralyzed and unable to talk, yet still semi-conscious.  When Mary told John that his parents were on their way she thought she saw tears come to his eyes.  Shortly after that John slipped into a coma.

John Zeidman was stricken with a form of viral encephalitis known as Japanese B or Japanese encephalitis, which is an almost unknown disease in America but was at the time common in some rural parts of China (it can still be found in China, though its occurrence is rare today).  Encephalitis is an inflammation of the brain caused by an infection, John most likely got infected by a mosquito who had picked it up from an infected pig or bird while traveling in rural China.  When John contracted Japanese encephalitis there was a vaccine for it, though it was unavailable in the United States.  Treatment, then as now, for such a form of encephalitis is only symptomatic and the disease is still fatal for some patients.  Before John’s parent’s arrived Anne allowed a tracheotomy to help John breath and to avoid complications such as Pneumonia.  The outlook for John from the moment he entered the hospital was simply not good.

There was talk about evacuating John to an American Air Force base in the Philippines for better treatment, but it wasn’t clear whether going to an American hospital would not ensure that John would be cured.  However, the relatively primitive conditions of the Chinese hospital (it was 1981 after all) had Mary, the family friend, call in the Air Force to take John to the Philippines.  When the medical officer in charge came to pick up John he came to the conclusion that John was too sick to be moved.  Right after that aborted evacuation John’s parents arrived at Infectious Diseases Hospital No. 1 and found their son in a coma.

John’s parents, the family friend Mary, Anne, and John’s American classmates in Beijing began to pretty much live in the hospital.  John’s father described the hospital as being like, “an abandoned training camp.”  The walls of the hallways were raw cement blocks, there was no operating room, paint was peeling off the walls, there was no telephone to be found, and the courtyard was a drab dusty space since all the grass had been pulled out as a result of one of Mao’s campaigns which sought to get rid of disease by destroying all grass in the country.  It was the beginning of autumn in Beijing and the weather was getting cold and dry.

Even with the shoddy nature of the hospital John’s parents were happy with the care he was receiving, especially the nursing.  John was getting the best care possible in Beijing at the time and in his room there were always at least two or three nurses in the room making John as comfortable as possible.  They put ice on his body to cool his fever, washed him regularly, readjusted his position to avoid infections, and even squeezed watermelon juice (medicinally a highly prized juice in China) into a tube for John to drink.  The nurses spoke to him in Chinese, often softly repeating his Chinese name, “Zei-da-men.”  He was well cared for.

As the days wore one Johns parents and his classmates grew closer and John’s father searched high and low for anything or anyone that could help his son.  At one point they learned that John’s brain damage was extensive.  Everyone continued to fight for John, but the inevitable seemed to be happening.  An American doctor flew to Beijing to repair the life support equipment keeping John breathing and later did a procedure when one of John’s lung’s collapsed.  Even though the Chinese doctors and nurses were steadfastly doing what they could, frustrations began to mount as communication issues in the hospital arose.  The Zeidmans learned that the Chinese government had downplayed the extent of Japanese encephalitis in the country and they were angry that no one had mentioned inoculation prior to John’s departure to China.  With the American doctor in Beijing the family began to consider evacuating, a power failure in the hospital sealed the deal.

The plan was to take John in military airplanes to Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore with a stopover in the Philippines.  The departure was happening about three weeks after John had first fallen ill and the day before it was take place elaborate rehearsals involving John’s American classmates were conducted to make sure everything would go off without a hitch.  The day of the evacuation the American team, of extraordinary size and scope, arrived at the dimly lit hospital.  All told the team consisted of: a neurologist, anesthesiologist, general surgeon, internist, two nurses, two corpsmen, and a video camera team.  With sirens wailing, flags waving, and streets cleared of cars and people John and his entourage rushed to the airport and America.

In America every option was explored, but the fact was that there was nothing that could be done.  Two months after he arrived back home to the United States his family consented to taking him off life support.  At first, the nurses in the ICU ward and a resident staged a sort of strike, refusing to allow John to be taken off life support.  They had a disagreement with the doctors regarding a ECG reading, but really they had grown attached to the young man and didn’t want his life to end so suddenly.  An agreement was reached and on January 3, 1982 John Zeidman died.

During his funeral his father read a letter he had written to friends and family back in America when he had first arrived in Beijing to help his son.  I found it to be one of the most moving things written in the New Yorker article and I reproduce it here:

Perhaps we are as willing to accept what life has dealt John, and us, because these few hours have driven home to us what we grasped intellectually but did not fully appreciate emotionally until we arrived here: the importance of these few months in John’s life.  The extraordinary nature of these months for John makes this tragedy especially poignant, of course.  We have the sense that a flower was uprooted at the very instant it was turning to the sun and opening its petals to bloom.  But we are steadfastly determined to remember that John was doing exactly what he wanted to do, that they were the happiest days of his life.  We want you all to remember that, as a shining candle in this awful darkness.

John Zeidman was the first American studying in China to die since Nixon’s historic visit had opened relations between the two countries.  John’s family could have used his example as a bitter weapon against the Chinese government, China’s medical systems, and even the study abroad programs that bring Ameicans to China, but they did no such thing.  An Op-Ed piece published shortly after John’s funeral in the Washington Post entitled “Lessons of an American’s Death,” derided China as a quasi Third World country with a Communist government that wickedly used censorship, ran filthy hospitals, and had consistently worked against the Zeidman family to keep their son from receiving the American medical attention he deserved.  The Zeidman family shot back with their own Op-Ed piece in the Post.  They were, deservedly, furious that someone had used their son’s death to push a political agenda.  In the reply, entitled “Lesson’s of an American’s Life,” John’s father wrote that John had died of Japanese encephalitis and the lack of the required vaccination in America, not inadequate Chinese care or the country and its people.  He went on to say that the message of his son’s life was not that China is a bad place not worth a young man’s interest, but rather quite the opposite.  The emotional article was reprinted in other newspapers including the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China.  Suddenly John Zeidman’s life was being seen by the Chinese as a symbol of the friendship between China and the United States.

After his son’s death John’s father quickly became an outspoken advocate for the dissemination of the Japanese encephalitis vaccine to Americans traveling to China.  After a long slog getting the vaccine, which was manufactured in Japan, and getting it approved by the relevant American agencies it was finally made available in America.  At the same time work was being done to create a memorial program for Chinese studies at John’s former high school, Sidwell Friends, which still exists today at the school as an annual memorial lecture on China, a Fellowship Program, and a Chinese Studies Resource Center.  At Duke, John’s alma mater, the Zeidman Memorial Colloquium was started.

These public examples of the growing friendship and academic connections between China and the United States were not lost on the Chinese government.  The Chinese Embassy supported the Sidwell Friends school with donations of books and sent representatives to Sidwell events.  When in 1983 the Premier of China at the time, Zhao Ziyang, visited America, in between all his high-level official meetings he planned to visit the Chinese studies program at Sidwell Friends school.

The school worked fervently planning for the Premier’s visit, but when it started snowing the night before the State Department canceled the trip, saying that the snowy conditions would not allow the Premier enough time to get to the House of Representatives, where he had an engagement.  The Chinese would have none of that.  To make time for the Premier’s speech at Sidwell Friends a formal farewell ceremony that morning with the Secretary of State was called off by the Chinese embassy.  Zhao Ziyang made it to Chinese class at the Sidwell Friends School and chatted with the high school students and complemented them on their tones.  He also invited the students to visit Beijing, what the school had at the time considered a mere gesture.  But the next day the school received a call from the Chinese Embassy about planning a trip for the students.  In the summer of 1984 a group of 20 American students from Sidwell Friends school, including John Zeidman’s little sister, visited Beijing and seven other cities in China as guests of the Chinese Premier, Zhao Ziyang.  Xinhua, the Chinese state-run news agency, published an article June 24 that summer detailing the school trip and shining a spotlight on John Zeidman’s sister and what this trip meant for growing ties between the two countries:

People want friendship, and friendly ties between the people of the two countries can last long only when it is passed down to the younger generations.  In this sense the Sidwell Friends school has taken an important step.

As side note, you may be interested to know that Zhao Ziyang’s penchant for reaching out to people and fostering friendship was not limited to American school students.  Five years after the Sidwell students came to China, while Beijing was being rocked by that massive popular protest that we’ve all heard about, it was Zhao Ziyang who, going against the wishes of the old Party hardliners, including Deng Xiaoping, stepped out onto Tian’anmen square and spoke to the student protesters in person (with today’s Premier Wen Jiabao standing behind him).  He famously told the students: “Students, we came too late.  We are sorry.  You talk about us, criticize us, it is all necessary.”  It was there that the famous photograph of Zhao holding a megaphone while surrounded by rapt student protesters was taken.  For this noble exercise in diplomacy Zhao Ziyang was sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life.  He sadly died in 2005 and his name remains taboo in China.  If you want to learn more about Zhao check out his memoir, published in May this year, entitled Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang. I hope to pick up a copy next week when I travel to Hong Kong, the book is banned in mainland China.

Getting back to our story, the summer of 1984 seems to be when John Zeidman became a hero in the eyes of the Chinese government, a bright symbol of the growing friendship between the two countries.  I assume that this is around the time the film He Came From Across the Pacific was produced with Brian Linden staring as John Zeidman, though I have no idea and can find no record of the movie online (I don’t know the Chinese title of the film).  It wasn’t only the Chinese government who invoked his story as an example of Chinese-American friendship, soon American leaders were using it as well.  When President Regan visited Beijing in April, 1984, a few months before the Sidwell students visited, he spoke at the Great Hall of the People (China’s legislative building) and at the end of his speech he brought up the story of John Zeidman:

The future is ours to build. Surmounting the risks and the fears of some may be difficult, but I’m convinced the challenge is worth it. The greatest victories come when people dare to be great, when they summon their spirits to brave the unknown and go forward together to reach a greater good.

So often, we see individual actions of courage and love in everyday life that give us faith to believe in ourselves and hope for a better future. In 1981, a bright, young American student, John Zeidman, came here to study China and to seek new friends. He was a boy of great heart and enthusiasm, and riding his bicycle on Beijing’s streets, conversing and camping with artists and students, he fell in love with your country. Tragically, he was struck ill on his 20th birthday and later died. But his tragedy brought forth new life.

John’s family and friends have established a Chinese studies program at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington. Hundreds have contributed, and the program now attracts young people from public and private schools and serves as a model for other schools all across America. Earlier this year, Premier Zhao visited the school. This summer the entire class will come to China as his guests to meet their student contemporaries.  (Transcript)

*****

This post has taken a long time to write, it is now over a month since I first read the story of John Zeidman’s life.  This story of an American student who found his way to China by way of a burning interest and desire to see the world more completely, like so many of us here, followed a surprising and tragic path.  I had not expected that this young American’s life would be spoken of by a Chinese Premier and an American President, yet there it is.  Out of the sad fate of John Zeidman’s life the future of our two countries, China and America, has blossomed and now more than ever American schools want to teach Mandarin Chinese and American students want to come to China and study.

I first came to China as a high school student as part of an exchange program that was begun in 1989, the first between a Chinese and American public school.  It was the hard work of individuals on both sides of the Pacific that allowed me and thousands of others to come to China.  John Zeidman and his family’s legacy in helping students like me come to China is unequivocal.  On another bright note, I can also say that the medical system in China, while still not without problems, is much better today than it was 28 years ago and that the frustrations that the Zeidman family had back in 1981 are a largely a thing of the past (for another look at being a hospitalized foreigner in China check out my blog post from earlier this year).

President Regan, a man I never thought I’d respect, had it right when he finished his speech in Beijing by saying:

From the great grief of one boy’s death came a seed.  And from that seed has grown a tree of understanding–a tree that now blossoms with the beauty of friendship and cooperation.  If our people could go forward in this same spirit, planting not one tree, but millions, and then tending each so it may grow sturdy and tall–then the dream of a single youth might grow into the golden dreams of all mankind.