First provincial outreach trip: "Green Quzhou"

Earlier this month I got to go on my first outreach trip with the Public Affairs Section. These trips are all about meeting local people, sharing information about the United States and how to travel there, and increasing our own understanding of our consular district. As there are 28 entry-level officers in our visa section compared to a much smaller public affairs team, 3 of us were offered the chance to leave the visa window for two days and visit Quzhou (衢州), a third-tier city in Zhejiang Province.

All the brochures and photo books the local Foreign Affairs Office gave us painted a picture of "Green Quzhou" - a newly modernizing city spanning a river and surrounded by lush green forests, tea plantations, and orange groves. Everything these days is supposed to be "green." During our visit, though, everything looked gray: gray skies, gray buildings, gray river. Winter in Southeast China is cloudy and clammy, and while the temperature rarely goes below freezing, it's enough to make me miss bright, crisp, lose-your-breath-cold Boston days. The photo above was shot from my hotel window, and you can see some of Quzhou's brand-new high rise apartments next to older walk-ups that will inevitably be torn down.

One of the first things we did in Quzhou after the 4-hour train ride from Shanghai was visit a high school that has a sister city exchange program with Red Wing, Minnesota.

You would not believe how enthusiastic everyone here was about Red Wing. The principal and several other school leaders met us at the gate, then took us to a fancy exhibition room where all sorts of artifacts from their exchanges were displayed: photos, news articles, student diaries, letters written in the 1990s, even a 1980s "Girl Talk" fortune telling card game. Minnesota, you've got some serious fans here.

Next up was visiting a Cave of Historical Significance. I have to confess, we were initially skeptical about this one - it just sounded like a distracting photo op.

Turns out, local Quzhou people used this cave to save the lives of several American pilots during World War II. Remember how after the Pearl Harbor Bombing, the US responded with a long-distance bombing mission against Tokyo called the Doolittle Raid? Running out of fuel, some of the pilots landed in the Quzhou countryside, and villagers sheltered them in this cave from the Japanese occupation forces.

We were told all this history by a local amateur historian who has devoted his spare time to researching the Chinese side of the story. He's done so much original field work, locating the downed planes and interviewing elderly villagers, that he was invited to a conference in Dayton, OH where he met some of the Doolittle Raid pilots. Some of his prized possessions now are tiny fragments of the planes that he got autographed by the aging pilots. We were truly touched by this valiant episode of Sino-US partnership and by this man's passion.

Side note: just opposite the cave someone is building a new neighborhood of mansions. Seriously??

Some of our other visits included the town's college, where we spoke to students about studying in the US, a government-run home for special needs children, and a famous Confucian temple.

Our last stops were a bit of a surprise. We thought we'd get to meet with administrators of a new industrial zone and find out what kind of opportunities there might be for American business. Instead, we were taken to two different factories, at which a host of young staffers proceeded to take hundreds photos of us shaking hands with the boss and listening attentively as he reported on their situation. It reminded me a very great deal of this. Nevertheless, it was actually pretty cool to walk on the floor of two high-tech factories and see the engines of the global economy working away.

Overall, we thoroughly enjoyed getting to know the people of Quzhou and representing the US to a city that rarely gets an official visit. And fellow American citizens, thanks for supporting us over here and making this trip possible!