To open a book, to read a page stepping back into time is an experience dreams are made of. In my case the book had not yet been written. I knew my grandfather when he was in his sixties and seventies but it was hard to picture him in his thirties managing an 80-bed hospital in Nanping. His Aunt, Lydia Trimble I know even less about, mostly from my mother. I had not yet read Ethel Wallace’s book describing the oldest women’s college in South China. I was shocked when a U S. customs Officer in Honolulu told me that Hwa Nan was small but quite well known for the quality of its graduates. Yes, I was living a dream that hot dusty day in October of 1989 when the family visited Hwa Nan. For my father it was after an absence of 62 years and I was privileged to witness the cobwebs of time being pulled back as he tried to reconnect the sights, sounds and smells to an eleven year old by who had left China in such a hurry that he had never gotten a chance to say a proper goodbye to his Chinese friends and the only home he had known.

We first visited Hwa Nan in October 1989, met with school administrators and walked to the original campus for a picture taken in front of Trimble Hall with family. Conditions were very basic. Nothing but the bare essentials. My eyes watered. The air was dusty. I had a headache and my eyes teared up because of the ubiquitous use of coal briquettes for cooking. My sense was that conditions had not changed measurably since the days of Canadian and American educators Ethel Wallace and Lydia Trimble in the 1920s. Living conditions were certainly not as good as the areas in the Philippines where I had taught twenty years earlier. Perhaps the biggest difference was that I didn’t see rich people. Old Hwa Nan was history. New Hwa Nan was the present. We have a past and a preset to hopefully allow us to create a better future and my focus was always the future.

Smiles were few. These were very serious folk, and it was easy to see the high value they placed on education and the ability to communicate in English was certainly near the top along with nutrition and raising healthy babies. The room was full of women with one of the foreign teachers serving as interpreter. To keep the conversation going, I mentioned it was a pity that because of my gender I would not be able to teach at Hwa Nan, Faces lit up. They patiently explained that faculty were of both genders and many nationalities, it was only the students that were female and they then extended an invitation to become a teacher.

The family visited the school another half a dozen times during the next 16 years. Our routine was always the same. Whenever we came to China we would always stop by Fuzhou and Hwa Nan Women’s College. My father asked them to describe how they were going to succeed. He wanted to see the plan. And every time as we left he wondered out loud if Fujian Hwa Nan Women’s College would still be there during our next trip to China. It always was. Conditions were always slightly better. I slowly grew to understand that Hwa Nan succeeds when people participate.

We were impressed that the seeds that had been planted by Aunt Lydia still captured other people’s imagination. The more I thought about it, the more I could visualize living in Fuzhou and teaching at Hw Nan. Yes, Ethel Wallace and Lydia Trimble had gotten it right—Women’s education was an essential component of modern society. In the back of my head. I had challenged myself to learn as much about the world as I could and at the age of 55-60 become a teacher not of what I had read in books but rather what I had experienced in life. I had taught at the University level in the 1970s but had given it up because I didn’t think I had a good enough understanding of life to be a really effective teacher. So now you know how we got to Hwa Nan.