ABSTRACT
My first personal contact with the Chinese revolution came in 1948 when I was a student at Swarthmore College. I met George Chen, a young man of subtle brilliance who was in the U.S. to get a degree and was president of the Chinese Christian Students Association, which happened at that time to be a convenient cover for Chinese communist students. He was an avid supporter of the People’s Liberation Army and kept a large map of China on the wall of his dorm room, charting the advance of the PLA with red pins and the retreat of the Kuomintang army with white pins. The procedure continued when he graduated in 1949 and moved to New York. That year his pins disappeared, replaced by the People’s Republic of China. He then crossed the Pacific in a state of excitement with his bride Xiuxia. They had a girl and a boy, and George reverted to his Chinese name, Chen Hui.
