Shirley Wood (second left) attends an oral defense for a doctoral degree in 2013. CHINA DAILY
After arriving in China in 1946, Shirley Wood devoted her life to teaching and providing westerners an insight into her adopted homeland, Mo Jingxi and Robin Gilbank report
In the early hours of April 7, Shirley Wood passed away aged 96.
Born in Arkansas in the United States in 1925, Wood became a Chinese citizen in 1975 and had dedicated her life to education at Henan University located in Kaifeng, Henan province. The Chinese Ambassador to the United States Qin Gang called her "A true exemplar of China-US friendship".
Wood was one of the few surviving individuals of overseas extraction who could draw upon extensive recollections of the country both before and after 1949.
Her interest in China was first piqued at the age of thirteen by reading Red Star Over China by Edgar Snow, the first Western journalist to interview late Chinese leader Mao Zedong.
A few years later Wood enrolled at Michigan State Agricultural College, where she met the visiting Chinese microbiologist Huang Yuanbo.
Huang and Wood fell in love and were married at Christmas 1945 with an intention to return and settle in his homeland.
Shirley Wood revises a doctoral thesis for her student Liu Ningning in 2017.CHINA DAILY
The new bride celebrated her twenty-first birthday on the maritime passage to Shanghai.
Huang found employment at Northwest Agricultural and Forestry University in Wugong county, Shaanxi province, which was where Wood began her study of the Chinese language. In 1947, their first child was delivered at the local British missionary-run hospital.
Wood claimed that her proficiency in Mandarin grew during a second stint in Shanghai from 1949 to 1953. She found a job there as a typist for the Texaco Oil Company.
Wood wears a medal commemorating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. CHINA DAILY
By then, China was on the cusp of national liberation. One day while foraging through her husband's bookshelves for suitable reading material, she happened upon a book of speeches by Mao Zedong.
Wood remembered having heard him deliver an address from Yan'an on the radio and now became enticed by his political ideas.
In 1950, Huang was transferred to a new biological drugs factory set up by the Ministry of Agriculture in Kaifeng. Wood and their children joined him in 1953.
On commencing employment as an English lecturer at Henan University in 1957, Wood garnered a reputation for being both a strict taskmaster and a teacher from whom students could expect to receive encouragement. She specialized in the dramas of Eugene O'Neill.
As the first foreign teacher at Henan University, Wood motivated students and sparked their interest and enthusiasm for spoken English by taking them out of the classroom and engaging in conversations about anything they saw, from the trees on the campus, to the steamed buns in the canteen.
She also selected pieces from Grimm's Fairy Tales and Andersen's Fairy Tales, and compiled them into bilingual teaching materials for students.
Throughout her half-century career, Wood taught more than 3,000 undergraduates and over 300 graduate students.
Wood (left) with her mother in 1974. CHINA DAILY
In an article reminiscing about Wood, one of her graduate students, Yang Chaojun, now dean of the School of Foreign Languages at Henan University, recalled how he was impressed by Wood's rigorous examination of his graduation thesis. She was already in her 70s at that time.
"My thesis was revised three times. I was so anxious the third time I took it to her because, normally, it took her three days to finish reading it, but the date of my oral defense was near at hand," Yang wrote. Yang said he passed by Wood's yard three times that night, and every time he saw the lights were on in her study.
"When I knocked on her door the next morning, I saw my thesis lying on her desk with corrections in red ink on every page. After instructing me how to make revisions, she stretched her arms and said 'now you can go for your oral defense and I'm going to take a break'," Yang wrote.
As well as teaching, Wood had been keen to introduce China to Western countries and promote Western people's understanding of the country.
In 1958, her self-illustrated book A Street in China was released by the London publishing house Michael Joseph.
A jaunty collection of tales, it is populated with characters, including antisocial neighbors and a philandering teahouse owner and his argumentative wife. Nonetheless, whatever conflicts arise in the community they are smoothed over by the local cadres, including the heroine, who works for a family woman's organization.
The book was introduced by the publisher as "a picture of everyday life in present-day China as experienced by an American woman who is married to a Chinese and lives the life of a Chinese housewife and mother."
Her reflections on daily life were also printed in the internationally-distributed Letters from China (published 1962-70) by US journalist Anna Louise Strong.
In 1975, at the behest of then premier Zhou Enlai, she had Chinese citizenship conferred upon her.
Wood continued to teach and write, even as five of her children left China for the US and she became a widow in 1984.
The self-described "foreign granny" (yang laotaitai) felt like just another of the senior citizens in her neighborhood－cooking, knitting and wrangling small children.
Each National Day she would unfurl her own red flag, which she got on the eve of the birth of the People's Republic of China, as a reminder that she had served this country since its beginning.
The esteem in which the nation held her was demonstrated in 1988, when she was invited to Beijing to help translate reports from the Seventh National People's Congress. She also worked on the first draft of the English versions of Chen Yun's speeches.
A tranche of national and provincial awards did nothing to skew Wood's outlook of New China or stoke her self-importance.
Her relationship with Henan is best summarized in the title of the biography issued by her university to mark her seventieth birthday: The Yellow Earth in Blue Eyes. After three quarters of a century here, she now takes her rest in that beloved loess.
