Findley, William S. I Took the Long Way Home. Unpublished, 1962.

I’d set a new world’s record–100 yards in nine flat across a rain-slick rice paddy.  I stopped fleeing and turned to look apprehensively at the smoking United State Air Corps P-38 plane I’d belly-landed.  Any moment now, the few drops of gasoline remaining would explode.

But, why did the back of my legs ache so?  I peered over my shoulder, and grinned–a welcome relief from hours of tension.  My parachute was still strapped securely to me, and the seat pack had been thumping me every stride.

It’s humorous now.  It wasn’t, that Valentine’s Day, 1945. I’d made a routine takeoff from Myitkniya, Burma, climbed on instruments through a thick overcast to 25,000 feet, flown over-the-top several hundred miles south into Japanese-held territory.  This was photo reconnaissance, solo, with cameras substituting for guns.  My mission?  To get pictures and scoot for home.  Clouds obscured my target, so I u-turned and scooted, never dreaming I would take the long way home.

As I descended, I could scarcely see my wingtips, twenty-five feet from my cockpit.  Dangerously heavy icing wobbled the controls. My radio compass went crazy.  I radioed fighter control for a homing compass bearing and got it.  Then, cautiously, I continued my visibility-zero let-down over mountainous terrain, exact position unknown.

Suddenly, my blood chilled–through a break in the clouds I caught a terrifying glimpse of a tree-covered mountain hurtling toward me!  I yanked the wheel, hit full throttle and right rudder, braced myself for the crash and eternity–but it didn’t come.

Minutes later, soaked with sweat, my muscles rubbery, I leveled off higher than the cloud-shrouded peaks nearby.  I broadcast to anyone who would answer–standard, then emergency calls.  My earphones were silent–complete radio failure.

I’d never felt so alone–so helpless. I wondered: what now, hot pilot?  Those clouds cover most of Burma. Going to bail out?

And dies freezing on a mountain?  Negative.

Alternative? Fly by magnetic compass toward Mytikniya, and hope for a miracle before the fuel is gone–just one hour from now!

Roger.  It’s worth a try.

And say…..I will ask God to help me.  They claim He does in such a fix, if one is fervent enough.  And yet, I’ve not been so fair with God, have I?  Why should He help me, especially?  Maybe a bargain, a deal with God?  I’ve heard of this, too, from genuine folks who were given that “second chance”.

And so, “Dear God,” I prayed (hold that compass steady, fly-boy),. “please help me.  In fact, if you do, I promise I’ll….” the words stuck in my throat.  Who was I to bargain with God?

Instead, I said simply, “Dear God, help me if you choose.”

I relaxed a bit, groped blindly on, and on.  And it happened! A gaping hole broke in that white world!  I wheeled, dove for it, plunged two miles to level out in the mist above endless rice paddies.  Fuel?  Tanks nearly empty.  Then, the crash landing, the sprint, and–thank You, God, for this good earth under my feet.

But where was I?  Enemy territory?  Could I escape?  Could I, in heaven’s name, possibly get home before the “missing in action” message was dutifully dispatched to my parents?  Who could help me know?

Suddenly I was aware that, whichever way I turned, I looked full into the curious face of another person.  I smiled.  They smiled back.  But who were they, and where were we?

We ambled to a hamlet a quarter-mile from my now-burning plane.  Excitedly they pointed to the American flag on my jacket, and their smiles broadened.  It was time for me to dip into my “escape kit.”  We’d dutifully endured lectures about this bag of tricks, and had lackadaisically suffered the extra weight.  And now I knew why.

I produced the “blood chits,” cards introducing me as a friend.  “If you will lead me to the nearest Allied Military post, my Government will give you a reward,” it promised.

Card by card, language by language, I flashed these chits.  My hosts shrugged with blank stares. Then I held up one in a Chinese dialect–this was it! their frantic tones and gestures announced.  We had communicated.

Not one word of English did they comprehend.  I’d tried.  Not one word of Chinese did I know.  They’d tried.  Ironically, the “pointie-talkie” in Chinese was missing from my kit. What we shared was a slim thread, a simple message on a card, and those unmistakable gestures common to humans of every tongue.

So, we were friends.  But, where? We put our heads together over my silk escape maps, spread on a rough table in a Chinese farmer’s home.  My new friends stroked their chins profoundly, gazing up and down the length of the land portrayed before them.  One by one the looked up at me empty-eyed as if to say, “Nice silk, but what’s it say?”

I tried another tack, saying names of towns.  “Mytikniya,” I began.  “Ai, ai,” they chorused.  I pointed, boxing the compass, until they caught on and point west.  Kunming?  “Ai, ai,” came the response with fingers pointing east.  Mandalay, Bhamo, Salon, Tali, Yungping?  No response.  Then Tengchung rang the big bell, southwest.

My vector lines intersected in the Salween river valley, about 100 miles east of my home base, but over those rugged “hump route” mountains, impassable, except by air.

After a conference, they led me to a town an hour’s walk away.  When they had settled me in the finest home, a dignified and honored man appeared.  After smiles and bows, I learned why he was honored.  He owned Chinese-English and English-Chinese dictionaries.

Two hours and much page-thumbing later, I learned that he was a fine fellow; his town was Kito, sixty miles from Tengchung’s Allied emergency landing strip; and that he would see that I got there–sometime.  Time, I soon learned, was to be enjoyed, not made the most of or saved.  This was China, not Main Street, USA.

Feeling safe now, I began to actually enjoy the unfolding drama of my “walk-out” from backwoods China.

I was an oddity for them, and the focus of curiosity and tittering.  As word spread, people came in droves to get a glimpse of the foreigner who had swooped from the sky in the big silver bird.  They jammed the tiny room and surrounded it.  The doorways, the windows, the room–all were full of faces.  I could see nothing but smiling oriental faces.

A crinkly-faced old woman brought food, but I refused, afraid of dysentery or worse.  They seemed hurt.  So I feigned a stomach injury from the crash, and they clucked sympathetically.  I did ask for boiling water, made bouillon from cubes in my kit, and gratefully savored some of their tea, the finest I ever drank.  They smiled at my genuine compliments, and our bonds deepened.

Late afternoon brought the inevitable–I hadn’t seen a men’s room since before my takeoff at 0920. Now, nature would have her way.  So, with dozens of pairs of eyes and ears alerted for every word and gesture, I found the appropriate words in the English-Chinese dictionary until my literate friend got the point. 

He fairly exploded with glee, and muttered in his highly tonal language to the nearest male, who guffawed and passed on the joke.  When all were convulsed with laughter, my dignity collapsed, and I roared with them through my pain.

In the nick of time, one noble soul shooed away the throngs and led me down a winding loggia to a bare stall about three feet square with an irregular hole in the floor.  He ceremonially closed the door.  I groped in the dark, then opened the door and protested that this must not be the place.  “Oh, yes it is,” his knowing smile reassured me, and again he shut me in.

Ten minutes later, I emerged, victorious, certain some new sort of medal should be struck, and pinned on my breast above my silver wings.

At last I slept, protected from the curious by several men, and one large boy who importantly kept at ready a rusty relic of an army rifle.

I woke at dawn, drank more soup and tea, downed some chocolate rations, and stepped into the sunshine eager to be off.  Hours later, my guide–he knows the way to Tengchung, Mr. Dictionary assured me–appeared with two burros, a huge smile, and a cheery, “Ding-hi!” Uttered with a grin and the right thumb up, this was a standard greeting.

With my parachute strapped to one burro and me perched on the other in the squarest wooden saddle I’d ever seen, we embarked amid cheers and tears and ding hi’s.

Mid-morning I insisted that my guide “rest” a while on that saddle while I walked.  Nothing doing.  I was the honored one.  The old stomach injury bit did the trick again, and I gratefully walked and rested my battered posterior.

About noon, we met a Chinese army outfit.  Their Colonel halted them.  “So there you are!” he said.  I never knew how wonderful simple English could sound!  I babbled until I was hoarse, and he listened patiently.  He had been searching for me while on another mission.  He wrote a message for me in Chinese characters.  It was magic.  From then on I got action and a mite more speed. 

We hiked level plains, climbed steep paths, waded rocky fords, paddled precarious ferries.  We came at dusk to a comparatively prosperous village.  All hands turned out smilingly eager to help.  The best house in town was mine, with elders in white array, boiling water ready for my tea and bouillon, and a clean bed made up. 

We had a companionable evening, including a floor show by the town’s talent.  I wowed them with a display of shadow pictures and animal calls to match.  It was quite a party.

Abruptly, however, the mood changed from levity to solemnity. My guide was recounting an event of that afternoon.  Walking barefooted, he’d gashed his foot on a sharp rock, leaving a bloody trail in the dust. I’d insisted that we pause at a stream where I bathed the ugly deep cut–it should have been stitched–swabbed it with iodine, and fashioned a shoe from a huge compress in my kit.  He’d been dubious, stepping gingerly at first, then dancing down the road.  Now he proudly displayed his “shoe”, and pointed at me with mystic awe in his voice and eyes.

Then they came to me, the sick, the maimed, the blind, and with rising panic and pity, I knew–they expected me to heal them!  I could neither shatter nor ignore this poignant hope.  What could I do?

Finally I remembered.  In my kit were potassium permanganate crystals for disinfectant.  Dissolved in water, they dye anything it touches an impressive deep purple.  By coincidence, I’d recently read A.J. Cronin’s novel The Keys of the Kingdom, in which a young missionary in China used such a solution with dramatic effect.  It could not help elephantiasis–and there was some in that room with me that night–but it could subdue infection.

I pantomimed the need for hot water and cloths, then sprinkled in the crystals while all watched hypnotized.  Volunteers stepped forward, moved among the ailing, tenderly bathing gangrenous sores, swollen eyes and limbs, painful and ghastly tumors.

I read their gratitude in their eyes when the rite was ended.

I lay awake for some time that night, feeling overwhelming compassion, and cursing my inability really to help these tortured persons.  Humbly, I begged God to help them, and to forgive me for my partial hoax.

We lunched the next day at a hilltop village.  Our portly and voluble host, flanked by a pipe-smoking crony–both straight from a Pearl Buck novel–grandiously offered his home brew as an after-lunch cordial.  I could tell five feet away that the alcoholic content was near saturation.

“Thank you, no.  I’ve a long walk ahead today,” I protested with gestures.

“Ha!  Phony excuse,” he leered in Chinese, I think.  Crony nodded.

“My poor little insides are all shaken from the crash,” I tried, writhing.

“You insult me,” he growled.  Crony puffed ominously.  My guide pleaded with his eyes.

So I put the flask to my lips and pretended to drink, swallowing loudly and smacking my lips.  The sham didn’t work.  So I swilled a large swill.

When I gasped for breath, my throat and stomach seared and my eyes gushing tears, Mr. Big was satisfied.  I read in his mocking eyes his freshly-formed generality–that all Americans are too soft to appreciate green rice wine. 

Late that afternoon my fatigue vanished instantly as we rounded a bend in the hilly trail.  A lump came to my throat.  Below us was the unmistakable symbol of the US Air Corps–a C-47 plane, workhorse of the Air Transport Command–refueling at the Tengchung emergency field!  I raced the last half mile, now guiding my guide.

I was greeted in mad confusion.  The Americans there knew I was down because a wide search for me had been on, finally abandoned that afternoon.  I was found!

After arranging for proper rewards, I took my hero to the medics to sew up his foot, and bid farewell to this close friend with whom I’d exchanged not one intelligible word.

I gulped my first square meal in 56 hours, and gratefully endured the bumpy flight to Mytikniya in the ancient C-47.

“Hello, Major?  This is Findley.  Can you send someone to get me?  I’m over at—,”  I got out just this much on the scratchy field phone.

“Findley?”  bellowed the amiable CO of the 9th Photo Squadron, “Findley!  Where in the hell have you been?  Where are you?  Damn it son, speak up!”

I spoke up.

Minutes later he himself came to a careening halt in his command car, leaped out, embraced me like my mother used to, and I was “home”. 

I’m often asked whether it was this experience that compelled me to become a minister.  Yes, partly.  Because God saved me from death?  Or because, even though I consciously avoided trying to make a deal with God, I really had promised Him something?

No, it was something else.  I realized that day, for the first time in my gay young life, how startlingly puny we humans are.  Wasn’t I a nearly perfect physical and mental specimen, one of the finest trained pilots in the world?  Wasn’t my P-38 one of the sleekest, best-equipped aircraft men had yet produced?  And yet I was absolutely helpless.

Penetrating insights come with such helplessness, and afterward one burning question hounded me constantly.  It harassed me as I walked out of China.  It haunted me as I returned to duty, completed my tour, returned to the States.  “What, after all, is ultimately important?”

I knew the answer shortly after VJ Day:  Neither plane nor pilot training, nor wars, and rumors of wars, nor language and cultural barriers, but God’s love for us and our love for God.  And because of this, our love for each other, no matter the color of skin, the angle of eyes, or the syllables of speech.  Apart from such love, we are all helpless together, and such togetherness is havoc.

To this truth and the articulation of it I have dedicated my life.

Findley, Lisa. E-mail to Daniel Jackson. 28 February 2016.

Dear Daniel:

How nice to hear from you. Your thesis sounds fascinating…..and is the kind of thing that could certainly expand become a life’s work–or, at the very least, a PhD!  I also enjoyed perusing your website. Its great! The video of Tengchong fighting is quite amazing to see. And how I wish that beautiful city wall had not been destroyed. I am happy to contribute whatever I can to your efforts.

My father, William Findley, flew a P-38 (configured as an F5) doing photo recon over the CBI late in the war (’44-’45). He was in the 9th Photo Squadron, 10th Air Force. The son of one of his squadron mates maintains a website about the squadron at http://www.9thprs.org/

Dad was moved forward from India to Myitkniya, Burma and his adventure began Valentines Day, 1945. After a series of mechanical difficulties, he had an emergency belly landing of BEVERLY in a dry rice paddy about 60 km north northeast of Tengchong in a place called Jeitou. He was unhurt, and walked away, but was completely lost. The locals took care of him, and guided him a two-day walk south the allied emergency airbase in Tengchong.

I am attaching a recreated digital version of his debriefing when he got back to base so you can have the story in his own words…..at least how he experienced it then–when he was your age. Also attached is a version of the story he wrote when he was in his 40s. Also including a few photos you might enjoy. As you mention, my father would never have made it out without the help of the local peasants. It was not as dire a circumstance as many pilots and their rescuers faced because the Japanese had been pushed out of the area a few months prior.

I am writing my own account of my Dad’s adventure, and my follow-up to it. My first trip out to Tengchong was in 2000. That first trip we found the Jeitou, people who remembered my father, a pieces of his plane turned into useful household items. I have now been there nine times. My family supports college scholarships for poor students in Jeitou village (about 60 KMs north northeast of Tengchong) through a fund administered by friends there. I have also gotten involved in the area as an architect (I am a professor of Architecture), encouraging the preservation of old buildings and, with some of my students, working with a local village on how to design for the coming influx of tourists. Here’s the story told by China Daily in 2013. http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/life/2013-08/20/content_16906942.htm

Over the 15 years I have been involved there, I have gotten to know several Chinese historians and journalists working on this huge piece of history. In particular, I am friends with Ge Shuya, a prolific historian of the CBI. He is based in Kunming. If you haven’t met him, I am happy to help with the contact. He has done a lot of work on the Hump pilots and hump plane crash sites. I also have good contacts at the new Museum of the Anti-Japanese War in Tengchong. 

So much to say. If you would like, I would be happy to have a phone conversation with you about our family’s little piece of this very large, but somewhat forgotten, piece of history. Though you will find that in China, it is not at all forgotten. Let me know if you want to set up at time to talk.

Best wishes for your pursuits,

Lisa

Findley, Lisa. Interview by Daniel Jackson. 4 March 2016.

It’s a very unique situation. I think I mentioned in the e-mail that when I finished this database, it became clear how unique the war in China was. Comparing it to Europe for example, statistics-wise, about fifty-four percent of reported-missing aircraft, the crew either died in the bailout or the crash. And that’s about the same for Europe. They lost about half. But in Europe, only twenty-five percent of the ones that survived made it back to friendly territory with the help of the French Underground or the Belgian Underground or whoever, whereas in China, ninety percent made it back to friendly territory if they survived the crash or bailout. Which is amazing.

That is amazing. Well, and I’d have to say meeting the Chinese peasants—I found some people that remembered my dad—they’re pretty amazing people, you know? They’re uneducated, they work hard in the fields every day. But they truly hated the Japanese and knew their own territory much better—especially in the mountains in Yunnan. I think it was less likely that people survived because the terrain was so difficult, but when they did, they were able to sneak around the Japanese at the time where it was occupied.

I actually missed your father’s missing aircrew report initially because the Tenth Air Force had him going down in Burma, which is outside of my self-selected area of study here.

I’m an academic and I know you have to—even then it sounds like a huge project to me. As I said in my e-mail, sounds like a PhD. Just out of curiosity, what do you fly?

I fly U-28s, which is actually a reconnaissance aircraft. So from the beginning of my research in this theater I’ve been interested in that aspect and I’ve interviewed quite a few guys that were in the photo reconnaissance squadrons in China and Burma.… At any rate, this study made me have to redefine what was enemy territory. You know, you look on the maps and there’s a neat line separating Japanese occupation from supposedly Free China. And you find out that some guy crash-lands in downtown Shanghai in his P-51 and still manages to be rescued by Chinese civilians there. There is no enemy territory per se besides the ground those guys were standing on.

Well in that way, I suppose, it has some overlaps with Burma: the difference between Burmese who were sympathetic, Burmese who weren’t, Kachin, Shan. And so even though Burma was technically Japanese territory, there were certainly places the Japanese didn’t go and places where they just would have welcomed American flyers.

So I’m seeing the cluster there in western Yunnan that would have been the Hump losses.

I’m not even including the airlift. So I feel like the Hump Airlift—the Air Transport Command Effort—has been studied a little more than the combat air forces. So what’s interesting is you see what looks like a tail going into eastern India there are just the combat aircraft losses. Those don’t include the Air Transport Command.

Of course that would just be impossible. Weren’t there hundreds of those planes?

There were six hundred reported lost over flying the Hump. Which, because they weren’t on combat missions per se, would have skewed the stats as to what was killing American aircraft in combat in China. So I was also trying to get at why these airplanes went down.   

It is really interesting, I have to say Dan, I had no idea that it was this kind of number. I actually first got to know this Chinese historian of the war, Gu Shiya, when he invited me to this thing in D.C. This was probably at least ten years ago, maybe more. They brought Chinese peasants and I think they were from just south of Beijing—I don’t know exactly where they were from—anyway, they had rescued at risk to themselves and their villages a couple of downed airmen. So these completely typical Chinese farmers showing up in D.C. for this awards ceremony and I flew out and met him for the first time there and then went to this ceremony which was pretty interesting. Where you picked up my name, the event, those guys were in L.A. just last month. It was a very funny event but there were a number of flyers—mostly guys that were navigators, a guy who was a gunner, in the CBI. It was a ceremony from this Chinese-American guy who wasn’t in the war but is an avid collector of memorabilia. It was a huge gift to the museum—the new museum in Tengchong—and so there was a delegation from Tengchong. Part of the reason (this was in L.A.), I went down because a couple of the people I’ve known for a very long time who were there and I just wanted to see them because I don’t get to very often. But there were some guys who were survivors—I don’t know of any crashes per se, but there aren’t many of those guys as you have learned.

It’s funny because I have a lot of material, actually, and I’m trying to develop more of the Chinese material working on building some research partnerships there. But what became apparent to me was that the repercussions of this conflict and this two-way partnership between the United States and China obviously echoed well beyond the end of the war. It’s still echoing today. You’ve been to Jietou there, what, eight or nine times?

Nine, yeah.

So obviously your father’s experience there is continuing to the next generation. So that’s part of what I want to capture in this project as well, because I don’t want to just cover what happened during the war and all of the sudden end it. There were people who were captured by the Japanese who had pretty significant issues after the war. There are people that were rescued by the Chinese and had trouble reconciling how to feel about that in the wake of China becoming a communist country.

That’s to me, a really interesting part of the story. Because in western Yunnan, people love Americans there. When we were tracking down pieces of the plane, one man said: “Well, I had this whole bag of parts from the plane, but when the crackdown came,” when it was illegal to have anything Western, he said “I buried it someplace near the river and I haven’t been able to find it again.” But when you talk to people there they say, “the Flying Tigers, your father, they were heroes.” For a long time, I spent a lot of time trying to say, “Well, my dad wasn’t technically a Flying Tiger, blah blah blah.” But then I just heard this thing in L.A. that actually Chennault encouraged the Chinese to refer to all the airmen as Flying Tigers. So that helped me understand this constant reference. But the other thing that’s happened in the fifteen years I’ve been going to Yunnan, to Tengchong, is the first time I was there, I had my dad’s blood chit that has the Guomindang flag on it and I was showing it to the local officials. And my Chinese friend who was with me who was raised in San Francisco, fluent in Chinese, he went to help translate. He said, “Lisa, don’t wave the Guomindang flag around!” Now, it’s flying over the museum. In some little tourist trap this past summer, there was this whole stall set up with a big Guomindang flag and Chinese tourists were dressing up in that era clothing and uniforms and stuff and standing next to the Guomindang flag. I was just like, “Wow!” Nobody is explicitly saying in these museums that it was Guomindang in that part of China. Because there was very little Communist action in that part. It was almost entirely Chiang Kai-shek’s troops. So nobody is saying it, but “They were all heroes.” History is revising itself.

How did your father deal with his experience in China in the wake of China being painted as the boogey man of the Cold War?

It’s interesting because we never had explicit conversations about this—like many guys from World War II. It was something that he did and this whole experience in Tengchong was formative as you can tell from what I sent you. It was extremely formative. But at the same time, he didn’t talk much about it. I think—like the Chinese do, like many of us do—separated out what is a governmental policy and the stance of that versus what people do on a daily face-to-face conversation, or even helping strangers or whatever it is. And so I think what was important for him, like a lot of pilots—sorry, it’s true in my experience—you guys are the best and the brightest. You’re physically fit, you see really well, you have to be really good at what you do—especially to fly certain kinds of planes. So he was a “top gun.” He’s flying the P-38 Lightning. He was good looking. He’d never been helpless a day in his life. He played football in college, blah blah blah. And all of a sudden he find himself in the middle of nowhere having no idea where he is. I mean, you know, you sit in the cockpits of those planes, they were kind of tin cans with some controls. And with his radio and his compass was freaking out—I think it was probably weather or something—but suddenly he’s on the ground. He doesn’t know if there are Japanese troops in the area or not. He has no idea where he is—if he’s in Burma, China, you know. And that moment of helplessness was this—and this is one thing he did talk about, that being helpless when he had never felt that way in his life before, completely changed his point of view. He’s from Des Moine, Iowa. He grew up in a completely white—I shouldn’t say that. His best friend all the way from kindergarten all the way through high school was actually African-American and remained a family friend his whole life. But I think suddenly being with these Chinese peasants in this setting and realizing he had to completely trust and rely on them because it was the only choice. And so that kind of human—it sort of humanized all of those political dynamics. My father became a left-wing Democrat, out of the sense of compassion, caring, action around his beliefs. And became a Presbyterian minister who was a civil rights activist, etcetera, etcetera. And the civil rights activism in part from his life-long friendship with his friend Paul, but I think there was also this sort of sense—for instance his objection with the Vietnam War had to do with his knowledge of Southeast Asia and his understanding of the very dynamics you’re talking about and the just sort of craziness of thinking we could do anything. And then also young men in our church who came home expressing frustration they felt when they were over there that there was not a real attempt at winning, that is was just skirmishing and that everything was confused. They would take a hill and lose it, take a hill and lose it. Guys would die. So yeah, I think it was a profound thing. I grew up with these stories of what happened in China. So at the same time that Maoism and all that craziness was going on, I think I perceived it more as the craziness of Mao.

I think humanization is the key. Here we see Americans rescued by Nationalists, Communists, by people who were ostensibly collaborating with the Japanese. And what astounds me is that in a country that was destitute, where inflation was out of control, where everybody was in poverty, more or less, you didn’t really see anybody being sold out to the Japanese—in spite of pretty high bounties being offered.

The stories are amazing that you hear. My closest long-time friend in Tengchong was a journalist for a long time and now has a company that does promotion videos, but he continues his interest in the war. And he’s been working with the Tengchong museum. They’ve just done a memorial to the civilian supply chain that brought food over Gaoligong to the Chinese Army. Hundreds of people died, these civilian porters—who were eating grass, not eating rice—in order to carry this stuff back. And so they’ve just done at the museum now in Tengchong a memorial garden to this civilian supply chain. It’s a pretty amazing story that I hadn’t heard in quite that way before. Because the young men were all off fighting it was old people, women, kids and they’re barefoot. Of course half the Chinese Army was barefoot from what I’ve read. It was pretty remarkable.

Do you know Ge Shuya? I went over in 2005. That was the first time I took my husband with me. We decided to spend ten days out in Tengchong and so I contacted Ge Shuya and asked “Can you recommend someone as a translator.” Because when I’d been there before, I’d been there with my Chinese friend and he couldn’t come with us for ten days. So he recommended this young woman who’s now like our adopted Chinese daughter. And that same trip, our friend who’s the journalist made a documentary of the whole story. But of course, his documentary makes it much more dramatic; my father was shot down… you know. But he won a documentary prize. Anyway, I’ve continued to know Ge very well.

Did your father ever express any interest in going back?

In the mid-1980s, I lived and taught in Penang, Malaysia, and when I was living over there, we were writing letters—way back before the internet. And I said, “Dad, this really is so close to where you were.” This was 1988. So he died in ’89. He had cancer. He had planned to at least come and visit and we were going to try to go to Burma. But even at that time in Burma you couldn’t get north of Mandalay. It was pretty hard to travel. I did go to Burma at that time, but I only got as far north as Mandalay. Of course, with China closed, there was no way to go. I’m sure he would have loved all of this. I did connect with a guy who was my dad’s tent mate and best friend. He also flew recon in the same squadron. So they were tent mates in Burma. He has passed away now, but he was in Long Island and one time when I was in New York City, I just added an extra day on and I have a lot of audio tapes. A lot of it was talking about his friendship with my dad and what life was like on the base. He also flew that day and he said it was the worst weather he had every flown in. And I think it was because essentially it was dimensionless. Once they took off, they were in rain and it was a deep, deep cloud cover. His name was Hank Lenox and he said he was very lucky to have come out of it. He was flying much closer to the Irrawaddy, so he wasn’t in such mountainous terrain, but when he came out of it, he was in a valley. And he was able to go to the Irrawaddy and just follow it back. But he was packing my dad’s trunk to send it home when my dad showed up in the tent and said, “Hey asshole! What are you doing with my stuff!” They had given up. They had sent out a rescue. And then Hank and some of the other guys convinced their C.O. to let them try once their jungle rescue stopped. Because, Hank said that he felt like they didn’t at the time completely understand how the jet stream operated. But he was fighting his whole time—he was being pushed east. Because they were searching essentially in a line between Lashio and Myitkyina, and Hank was quite sure that dad had been pushed east, but of course that put him in worse and worse and worse terrain. Which, he was very lucky to have ended up in that valley where he ended up.

When the 11th Bomb Squadron first deployed to China in June 1942, three of their B-25s crashed into those mountains in terribly weather.

My first trip to Tengchong, we took a bus from Kunming to Tengchong—before any of those highways were built. It was twenty-eight hours. And my friend is getting lower and lower in his seat. He’s like, “Oh, Findley, you owe me!” Then we discovered on the way back that we could actually fly from Baoshan. So on the way back that was six hours, Baoshan to Tengchong. The new road wasn’t done yet. Off on the usual old road, no line in the middle, people walking their water buffalo. And now of course you just fly Kunming to Tengchong, forty-five minutes—if the airport’s open, which it’s not in the summer months because of the rain. I mean, it is sometimes, but it’s not good to count on it. But now, Baoshan-Tengchong, there’s still one little piece that they’re building a bridge that you have to get off for twenty minutes, but it’s a couple hours now. So all that time-distance shrank.

It’s funny to think about back then too; the American effort in China was mostly with airplanes. So somebody like your dad flies over this space—this huge vast distance—and it passes like that. And all of the sudden, his world shrinks to the size of a single rice paddy and now it takes two days to travel what was probably ten minutes in an F-5.

Yep. So I’ve been writing my own version of this story. It’s very personal; a story about my dad. I’ve filled in by talking with different people bits and pieces, more of his story—talking with villagers and people who were teenagers at the time who remembered what happened. This guy, Yang Yinting, who helped my father, all of his backstory. He was, by the way, the local landlord. He had these dictionaries because he was off at university. When the war broke out, his father died. He wasn’t killed by the Japanese. I think he died of illness or something. So Yang Yinting had to come back from university to this little town with these landlord responsibilities and the first thing he did was start a school. So at the time, if you got to have an education it was with private tutors. Well he started a school in Jietou. And, there was already a little rice warehouse, but he grew these warehouses so that during the Japanese occupation, for a while they actually had food for longer—until the Japanese got there and took everything over. But after the war, when the Red Army (it took them a long time to get all the way to Jietou, you can imagine), but when they got there, they’re marching up the road and the people of the town had heard that the Red Army was killing landlords. So the villagers went out and met the Red Army and said, “Our landlord is not one of those guys. He’s the head of our school. He’s made sure we had food to eat. He’s helped everybody who was sick. He lives modestly like the rest of us.” It didn’t do a thing. They marched into town, dragged him out of his house, and shot him in the street. We got this story from his sister who we interviewed—of course this is all with translators, as your work must be. Of course out in Tengchong County people are not speaking standard Mandarin. I mean, people can, but that’s not what the villagers are speaking. In the villages, with the old people, our translator, who’s from Kunming and speaks Kunming dialect along with Mandarin, she needed a translator. It would be like us going to some rural town in Scotland and trying to talk to the old guys. So that was a pretty amusing thing.

When did you first go there?

In 2000.

Was that prompted by anything other than your father’s experience there?

Yeah it was. I teach architecture at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and we have formal relationships with some schools in China and other places around the world. And some of them are specifically art schools. So at the time, in Kunming, the Nationalities Institute—which is about supporting and maintaining the culture of these ethnic groups—we had a relationship with them and there was an exchange going on in jewelry and metal arts. Because our school grew out of the arts and crafts movement we have a lot of people that still do traditional craft practices—though with a very contemporary spin, I have to say now. And we also do all the fine arts and whole range of design disciplines too. So we had this relationship and we’d been having this faculty exchange in the fine arts. I was, at the time, co-chairing an international conference in Hong Kong—I’ve been interested in Asia my whole life. Maybe because of dad’s story—I don’t know. I’m much more interested in Asia than in Europe. So my living there, I’ve traveled there frequently. So because I was going to Hong Kong, the provost of my university said, “Would you mind, while you’re there, going to Kunming, meeting with the people at the Nationalities Institute, and seeing if there’s something architecture and design—if there’s some possibilities there.” In some academic environments, architecture is the messy one: we need studio space, the students stay up late all night, and all that stuff. But in our art environment, we architects are the organized ones. So he though, “Well, you know, we’ll send the architects, maybe they can…” So being the being the kind of person who you just wave a plane ticket and I’m gone, I said, “Sure.” So then when I got the maps out and started learning about Yunnan, informing myself about Kunming and the whole nationalities issue there with the ethnic minorities and history of that, I realized, “Wait a minute, this is really close to where this all happened to dad.” I still have his silk maps. There’s one that actually has an ink arrow pointing to the approximate place of Jietou. And so I got that out and I’m looking at everything and so that’s when I cooked this up. It’s like, “Well, if I’m going that far, I’m going to be that close.” You maybe saw my dad’s debriefing. He probably heard “Jietou” as “Gaitou” which is how the local people pronounce it and it gets described as K-I-T-O in the debriefing. So we had that, we had its approximate compass bearing and distance from Tenchong, we had the name Yang Yinting. So I had these clues. And my friend who I went with, his father flew P-38s for the Chinese Air Force. We looked at the timelines of our fathers’ lives in the war and his father was training in Myitkyina just at the time my dad was flying his missions. Because in Myitkyina there was the south field and the north field—I mean it was huge, I guess. But his father had been in the United States training here before he went back to China to finish his training at Myitkyina. And then you know, of course, it was right at the tail end of the war, his father became Chiang Kai-shek’s pilot and ended up being killed in a plane crash in Taiwan when my friend was like two years old. So my friend was teaching architecture in Hong Kong. We had gone to grad school together. So I called him up and said, “As one pilot’s kid to another, would you come with me? I know I can’t do this without language access.” And he said, “Sure.” Of we went. I think we had allowed four days. And of course a huge amount of it was spent with our butts in a bus. But it was beautiful. The people are all so lovely. And at that time, I think when I rolled into Tenchong, I don’t know how many European faces most people had seen out there. Not very many. And of course in Jietou, even fewer. It was quite the object of interest when we rolled in. And then it turned out the guy at the Nationalities Institute in Kunming whom I met with—my friend came along with me, which was good because the person that they had to translate, his English was pretty horrible. You know, “somebody” speaks English and poor people are put in positions that are embarrassing to everybody. Especially, I think, the poor translator. Anyway, my friend went along and we told this whole story to the guy at the Nationalities Institute, who said, “Well, you know, one of my former students is a government official in Tengchong. I’ll call him and he’ll meet your bus.” So we get off the bus: “Thank God we’re finally here!” And there’s this guy in his little Kaharo SUV. And he takes us to the Tengchong guesthouse, which at the time was the best hotel in town. Which is hilarious, because now there’s every kind of five-star hotel there. And they took us to dinner and everything. The next morning, this entourage starts showing up. They had the Communist Party, this journalist who is now my very dear friend and his daughter is now out of college—she speaks perfect English—she translates now between her father and me. Anyway, so then rolls in this very dusty SUV and it’s the mayor of Jietou. And as you know, there are administrative areas in China—like Jietou actually encompasses several towns. They didn’t know where in his area it would be. So, anyway, we all hop in these cars and take off up the dirt road that’s now paved with huge shoulders. And we had to stop in a couple other towns and talk to old men who had stories about pilots. There’s one—I’m going to have to look up my notes—there’s one town where they had two different stories of pilots who were not my dad. I think in the town of Yang’an [Yangjiawan?], which is about fifteen to twenty kilometers south of Jietou, right at a big bend in the river. These guys had stories of parachutes in trees. So we listened to their stories. And I was getting really frustrated, because clearly this wasn’t the town of Jietou and I didn’t understand about this administrative regions at the time. Anyway, eventually we got to Jietou itself and it allowed us to meet these people who remembered dad and see pieces of the plane as useful household items, which was fun. I actually have a few pieces. We saw a lot of pieces, but I never felt right asking for any of them, though my brother, when I got home, he’s like, “You didn’t ask? You didn’t bring anything home?” I said, “No, they belong there.” There’s something about the ecosystem of the whole thing. If you look carefully on those aerial photos I sent you of the plane in the rice paddy—they went back to see if there was any chance to get it off the ground, but it had been belly-landed, so there was nothing going to happen. And they had already started cutting it up, which you can see on the actual photo with a loop: there’s little pieces missing. Anyway, once we started our scholarship fund there, this one schoolteacher showed up one day with a couple pieces his family had. This is one piece; it’s a piece of the skin. The original rivet holes are here, but they put all these other holes in it. What the family would do—they weren’t using it anymore for this—but at the time they would make dough from rice and push it through and extrude rice noodles using this piece of the skin. So that’s one piece. This piece—maybe you can help me figure out what it is. It’s got three threaded rods coming out of it. It looks like some sort of cam or something. This was sitting on a chunk of wood in the family shrine and had a candle in it. They turned it into a candle holder, which is what we use it for here. But I’ve always wondered what it was. We were wondering too about the propellers. The thing they did with the propellers—and this is one of the stories in one version of the book I’ve written, but I don’t think I’m going to use it—where these pieces become a story, right? So here’s the piece, somebody hacks it off the plane and goes off and does something with it. Like we met this guy—he was 88 when we met him, now he’s 98. Apparently each propeller would yield two and a half aluminum basins. They took them to a guy who made them into these aluminum washbasins. Of course they’re ubiquitous now, but at the time it would have been amazing. The person who got the propeller—I’m not sure who decided who got what part of the plane—but the person who had the propeller would pay that half basin to the guy [who made them]. They exchanged that for these other two basins. So he had a basin that had been made out of the aluminum that was in the propeller. So we were tracking these pieces. And as I said, a lot of the pieces have been lost. I think anything that had any significant amount of steel in the Great Leap Forward was probably melted down. People did hide thing. Then people need a little cash and had something lying around and sold it to the scrap metal dealer. The other thing, though, is one of the propeller mounts served as the school bell in Jietou for years. And we love that because Yan Yingtin started the schools and my family—my three siblings and myself, all four of us—are teachers in some way. We come from a long line of that. But I guess in the ‘60s some time, the principle or headmaster found this in a junk sale and he didn’t have a bell and so he bought it and he must have been able to save it from the Great Leap Forward because it was being used in the school or something. So that’s still hanging in the school. Now it’s got this memorial plaque, pictures of me.

So a lot of this discovery of the places and I assume the reports you were able to uncover from your father’s debriefing and stuff like that, a lot of this happened after he passed away. Do you feel like you reclaimed a piece of him—a piece you never really knew or felt connected to in the first place?

Yeah, it is interesting that way and something that I’ve been trying to write about too. My dad was 23 and so I didn’t know him then. It’s also—I teach college, I also teach graduate students, so from 18 to say, 27, 28, 29. Especially early on, less so now, most of my students were men in architecture—more women are coming into it. I’ve watched some of my students have that moment in their life, (and I think it’s more true of men), that this sense of your own mortality is something you don’t recognize. Certain men don’t recognize it. I think it depends on one’s life experiences, if you’ve lost somebody or not and all of those things. But I remember the first time it happened; one of our students (this was years ago) who was a bicycle racer was out training one day and he was hit by a car and killed. The guy driving the car had a diabetic blackout and was Sean’s parish priest. It was just this horrible, horrible thing. Anyway, watching his friends have that moment of mortality, and this was—I don’t know, I’ve been teaching thirty years, so this was like twenty or twenty-five years ago. But I realized, that was the first time I had this thought that, “Hey, that’s kind of what happened to dad.” It was this pivot in a moment of a view of the world that was very interesting to see. And of course helping the students through that; it happened in the middle of the semester. He was in my studio. His friends were too. So we had quite a time. But I think that recognizing—because I knew my dad as my dad, first of all, and you have that moment when your parents become human. But also thinking about him as a young man. And by his own admission, he says he was cocky, a pilot, good looking, girls falling down. I think he married my mom because, he came back from the war, he went to Grinnell College. He showed up, he was in the president’s office (he was pretty early back). And my mom was the editor of the college’s newspaper. They were at Grinnell in Iowa. And so my mom comes to interview him for the school paper. She’s the editor. She’s got a photographer with her. She walks in. He’s in his uniform. He’s still being all cocky. And my mom just hated guys like that. He’s like big man on campus and she’s just like, “Meh. Ok, get over yourself.” It took my dad months of asking before she finally went out with him. So yes, it has connected me in a different way, of course. He died in 1989. He was only 68 years old. My grandmother—his mother—lived to by 94. His father lived to be 89. We expected to have him for a long time. And so there’s this way of continuing that relationship, but also understanding it differently. But now the whole thing in China is not about that anymore at all. Not it’s this kind of weird set of friendships halfway around the world in a place where I can’t talk to anybody except with a translator. We started out supporting primary school scholarships. We saw kids at the school writing with this teeny tiny skinny little pencils like you get at miniature golf courses or whatever to keep score. That’s what they could afford as their pencil for school. And then some essentially newsprint little tablet of paper. So we started out doing primary school scholarships, but then Hu Jintao really did a lot of rural development, in terms of education, electricity, water. He understood he had to spread the wealth around better. So now the primary schools are fine. Primary school students are well supported. Schools are much better. But there are still kids in Jietou who pass that national exam, have the opportunity to go to university, but—one of our scholarship students, her father was in bed from a farm accident—I don’t know what happened. Her mother was kind of loose in the head. She did her schoolwork on a board across her lap. The family didn’t even have a table. She did well enough to go to Yunnan University. Even just going to Baoshan is a big deal, but to go all the way to Kunming, to the flagship university of the province. It might as well have been millions of dollars for someone like us. The way that the government works with kids from extreme poverty in a rural environments is, they have to pay for their first year and then the government steps in. So we’ve been able to send about six students a year who are in that situation that we give them that foothold year. And it’s not very much. It’s like $500. Now these students, some have graduated and they live in Kunming and they have apartments and they brought their parents to live there, or they’ve moved to Baoshan. And they always ask what they can do to thank us. And I always say, “Turn around, do it for one more, just one other person behind you.” My brother and our household, we contribute money to the scholarship fund every year. And then I do a little consulting with the government in Tengchong County about architecture preservation and dealing with tourism and those kinds of things. They pay me—I didn’t know this—but it turns out they pay me for this consulting, the government does. But my friends there just put the money in the scholarship fund. They’re very scrupulous. Every time I go we have this accounting meeting. I trust them completely, but we have this accounting meeting and I’m like, “How can there be so much money in this?” Because we keep giving it away. They said, “Because we just put your pay in there.” And now I’ve been taking architecture students out there. Because they all read about Shanghai and the big Chinese cities, but they don’t know—we start in Kunming and then go progressively more rural, out to Dali and that area and then Tengchong and finally we end up—my journalist friend’s family is from some valley partway to Jietou, and we end up in their little courtyard on their farm, eating a meal that his mother has prepared. It’s good for them.

Have you seen the old British consulate in Tengchong?

I have and one of the things I did for them was track down the original drawing from the British archives. The British are such great record-keepers. So I was able to send them. Because they wanted to restore it, but I’d gone to see it and I’m like, “Are you sure?” The standard of what restoring means. But it’s a nice building. I one time brought a friend of mine from when I lived in Penang who’s an expert in historic preservation. He works for UNESCO and World Heritage and all that. And I invited him because I got invited to come out and give them advice about historic preservation, which is not at all my field. So I asked Lawrence to come with me and he brought the head of World Heritage China, who he knows, from Beijing. We got taken around and this was one of the buildings they were shown. And they were really concerned about the standards that were going on there. It was nice because for once, I wasn’t the main person at all the meals. I got to sit off to the side. They became the focus of all the attention, which was really good. A lot of success of Tengchong right now, financially, of the county, is resting on tobacco, agriculturally. And when the government decides that it’s costing them more than it’s earning them, I really worry about our friends out there, because they’re going to be stuck back growing just rice. They grow some of the best rice in China, but it’s not a cash crop in the same way. What is happening out there is some people are finding other crops. Like they can grow mushrooms easily during the wet season. There are some medicinal crops. This one valley where I worked with my students last summer, they’re growing a medicinal crop under shade cloth that is earning them so much money that the young people aren’t leaving the village. So it’s this whole real village ecosystem, not just old people and kids. It’s people of all ages and families. They’re also starting to grow tea. Way up in the valley there are some really nice tea plantations—above where it snows especially. So there are other cash crops when the tobacco thing goes.

So the one other poetic piece of all of this is my husband is third-generation Japanese-American. His grandparents were interned during the war. His uncle fought for the 442—the Japanese battalion—in Europe. His father was with the OSS in Germany after the war. So he was American, they were American, but he has this kind of weird ethnic guilt around the Japanese behavior during World War II. It horrifies him. We’ve spent a lot of time in Japan. When you’re in Japan, the Japanese are so kind and polite. What happened with the soldiers—ok, with Nanjing is was top-down—but random soldiers were also incredibly cruel. We’ve heard stories of soldiers beating a little boy who’s trying to keep them from taking his water buffalo. So when we first went out there, my husband wasn’t sure how people would react to him because he sees himself as looking very Japanese. But in fact, he looks more like the Yi minority. On another trip—a completely different trip—we were in a Yi village and everybody—my husband has a little bit of an unusual look for a Japanese. He’s got a very interesting nose. But there are all these people that look like his relatives in this village. So I take out a photograph of him and I show it to the local people and they go, “Oh! You’re married to a Yi guy!” And I said, “Well no, he’s actually Japanese, but he’s been in the United States. His family’s been there a hundred years, blah blah blah.” And they said, “Well that’s right.” They said, “Back in the old times, when we were pushed out of central China by the Han, some of us went to the coast and we ended up in Japan and some of us came here to the mountains.” And I said, “When was that?” And they said, “Oh, two thousand years ago.” So I took Rod, my husband, back to this village when we visited another time and we’re walking down the street and people are just talking to him. Everybody just assumed. They thought it was hilarious. We check into a hotel together, you know, same room, and they’re trying to figure that out. People are talking to him, he’s like, “I don’t know what you’re saying!” He was very nervous at first about how people might react to him in Tengchong but everyone of course was completely lovely. But it was this other little poetic twist on our whole engagement out there.

I really appreciate this.

It’s been great to meet you!

Thank you so much!

Findley, Lisa. E-mail to Daniel Jackson. 17 August 2016.

Dear Dan;

So great to have your update and a summary of the intriguing outcome of all your research.

I was just in Yunnan again this summer with a group of my students. We spent a two weeks in the Tengchong area working on a project for a village north of there. While we were there I (on behalf of my siblings) donated my father’s uniform hat to the Museum. There was one of those kind of awkward official ceremonies, then one of those awkward official lunches. However, they were very happy to have the donation.

All this was done through Li Genzhi, of course. I took a copy of your last book to him as a contribution to his library. He was so happy to have it–especially since it contains photos he had never seen. I know he will also make his way through the content. He can read English, slowly.

When passing through Kunming, I did not have a chance to see Ge Shuya. If you see him anytime soon, please give him my warm regards.

Please keep me on the list! And let me know if you are ever in the Bay Area so we can meet face-to-face. I am thinking of you, and others I know on active duty, as our leadership fritters away decades of carefully balanced foreign policy. I remember we spoke briefly about this over Skype that day…..months before the election gave us this current administration.

Stay safe, be well.

Warm Regards,

Lisa