For most of my life, China existed in my family as a distant but persistent presence — a place spoken of in fragments, attached to old photos and diaries about a great-grandfather who spent decades there as an American missionary.
I have never visited China. I don’t speak Mandarin or Cantonese.
But my great-grandfather, William Artyn Main, considered China home for much of his life.
He arrived there in 1896, shortly after graduating from Northwestern University and marrying his wife, Emma.
Assigned to Methodist missions in Fuzhou, in southeastern China, he became treasurer of the church’s operations there.
He lived through political upheaval and war, remained during the Japanese invasion in 1937 and didn’t leave permanently until 1941, when the conflict forced his evacuation. He died in California four years later, unable to return.
As a child, I knew only pieces of that history. China felt less like a place than a family echo. Hand-me-down rugs and dinnerware served as mementos of that era.
Last week, though, my son Thomas began researching our ancestry, hoping to learn more about the years the Main family spent overseas as American expatriates.
And what he uncovered transformed those scattered family memories into something vivid and unexpectedly current.
He found that more than 100 years ago, the Rev. William A. Main and his family spent their summers in Kuliang, a mountain community in the hills outside the big city of Fuzhou.
Kuliang is known for its cooler climate and lush landscape.
I’d never heard of the place.
After discovering records showing the family had lived there, Thomas left an email message on a Fuzhou tourism account asking whether they could locate where the home was — and if it still existed.
The response came quickly.
Tourism officials sent photos of a small gray stone building with a red sign mounted outside reading: “Mr. Main’s House.” They explained the property had been preserved as part of a historic district of former missionary homes in Kuliang.
Soon afterward, Thomas received a video of the house set to the Scottish song “Auld Lang Syne.”
The house, he learned, had been restored under a preservation initiative supported by the Chinese government during the tenure of Xi Jinping while he was a local official in the region.
He’s now the president of China.
Today, the former missionary residence operates as a public coffeehouse.
Our discovery of this house felt improbable enough on its own. But there was more.
Through conversations with his Chinese contacts, Thomas learned about the “Friends of Kuliang,” a group made up largely of descendants of American missionaries who once lived there. Some have returned to visit and formed enduring relationships with local residents.
Over the years, Kuliang has also become a symbolic site of cultural exchange between China and the United States, hosting student performances and other events encouraged by Xi and his wife.
Part of that effort traces back to 1992, when Xi was serving as Communist Party chief in Fuzhou.
After reading about an American woman named Elizabeth Gardner, whose husband had spent part of his childhood in Kuliang and longed to see it again before he died, Xi arranged for her to visit the town.
Two decades later, while serving as China’s vice president, Xi recounted the episode during an official trip to the United States.
“I believe there are a lot of touching stories like this between Chinese and American people,” he said on that 2012 trip.
Last year, Xie Feng, China’s ambassador to the U.S., also cited Kuliang as an example of personal ties that could help stabilize relations between the two countries at a time of growing political and military tension.
For me, the story carries a quieter significance.
My great-grandfather couldn’t have imagined the home where his family once escaped the summer heat would someday stand as a carefully preserved symbol of American-Chinese friendship.
Yet at a moment when the two nations increasingly define one another through rivalry and suspicion, I find something moving in the survival of our family’s brick-and-mortar connection to China.
“Mr. Main’s House” still stands in the hills outside Fuzhou.
And last week, for the first time, we saw it.
Frank Main is a Watchdogs reporter with the Sun-Times.