A Life of Service Ignited in “A China Story”

Chestertown author James B. Hendry, who died Friday, April 25, dedicated his working life to economic reconstruction in countries devastated by war. He described the spark that ignited that commitment in a gripping memoir of his years in China from the fall of 1946 through spring of 1949. His book, A China Story: From Peip’ing to Beijing, was published last year and is now available through Amazon.

The book’s personal narrative is set against the collapse of Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist armies, and the rise of Mao Zedong’s Communist People’s Republic of China. The book’s subtitle defines the boundaries of the era by using the Communist name change of China’s capital from Peip’ing to Beijing.
Jim tells his story through the eyes of his 25-year-old self and his future wife – Grace Estalyn Kreps (known as Lyn). Shortly after meeting in spring 1947, both knew China was “showing signs of coming apart.”

Jim, a World War II vet, was beginning a three-year China tour as an executive trainee with Standard Vacuum Oil Co. (Stanvac), a joint venture of two American oil giants. Lyn, 25, had recently arrived in China to teach the seventh and eighth grades at the Peking American School.

Jim describes their budding romance amid the isolation of expatriate life in Peip’ing. As Jim becomes “completely smitten,” the couple breaks free of life within compounds to explore the cultural riches of the city outside.

The romance goes easily until Jim gets his first assignment – Canton, “the farthest place I could be sent and still be in China.”

After a courtship by the then erratic mail, the couple meets again and becomes formally engaged during the Christmas/New Year’s holiday 1947-48. Ready to marry, they are blocked by a Stanvac policy prohibiting employees from marrying during their first tour overseas.

As Jim attempted to get an exception to the policy, other “classmen,” as trainees were called, began to resign, some in response to the marriage policy, others seeking more secure careers elsewhere.

When Jim debated his uncertain future, Lyn broke the stalemate. “Why not resign now, come to Peip’ing and get married?” They could then wait to return to the U.S. until Lyn’s school term was over in June. Jim resigned, left Canton on March 24, and married Lyn in Peip’ing barely 10 days later.

At first the newlyweds resumed their “easygoing and seemingly normal” social lives inside the expatriate bubble. Not for long. Jim’s new temporary job – inspecting U.S.-backed medical and welfare projects brought him face-to-face with spreading starvation, ruinous inflation, corruption, collapsing communications, and accelerating banditry outside the foreign compound.

Lyn’s Chinese students, many from well-off families, were increasingly turning to her for support in facing their uncertain future.

For Lyn and Jim, their own sense of uncertainty increased when Lyn learned in May she was pregnant with a baby due in late January 1949.

When a division of the U.S. foreign aid program offered Jim a better-paying job, they decided to remain in China at least until the birth of their child. In deciding, they weighed the job in hand against uncertain prospects in the U.S. and the excellent pre-natal health care still available in Peip’ing. Also, as Jim puts it, “we doubted the Chinese, Nationalist or Communist, would let anything serious happen to lovely Peip’ing, the crown jewel in their national cultural heritage.”

By November the US Consulate General was advising Americans to consider evacuation while transportation was still available.

In his account of these days, Jim mixes anecdotes illustrating life both inside and outside the emptying compounds. He describes the mounting dangers from desperate people in the streets outside while inside, those remaining plan a Thanksgiving Dance “to shore up flagging spirits.”

By December, the Communists had begun their final 40-day siege of the city.

By midnight, January 28, with the baby’s arrival imminent, Lyn and Jim traveled through the curfew-darkened streets to the hospital. Two days later, baby Nancy was born, the first of three daughters. About that time, Jim learned that the last evacuation flights had been cancelled.

In wrapping up his story Jim describes the closing of his office and his complex, arrangements for their departure to the U.S. The sometimes unreal atmosphere of the story continues until the end. After getting to Shanghai, Lyn and Jim celebrated their first wedding anniversary in a luxury restaurant atop Shanghai Park Hotel.

Three weeks later, they boarded a PamAm flight on the first leg of a trip home. A month after that, Shanghai fell and the airport was in chaos as people fought for a place on any outbound flight.

Their China experience shaped both Jim and Lyn’s careers and subsequent lives. After earning a doctorate from Columbia University, Jim specialized in economic development. He served as an advisor with U.S. university groups working in Viet Nam and East Pakistan. Later recruited by the World Bank, he spent much of his career on agricultural lending efforts in North Africa, Sub-Sahara Africa and Asia.

During their overseas postings, Lyn continued her teaching career, at one point serving as acting Head Mistress of the Dacca (Bangladesh) American School. After their return to the U.S., she taught at the Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Md. Her long career of teaching excellence eventually brought her an Honorary Doctorate from Georgetown University in 1979.

After their respective retirements, they moved in 1991 to Heron Point in Chestertown where Lyn died in 2010.

Jim’s book vividly brings to life a pivotal moment in world history. Most of all, however, it is a love story set in a tumultuous and dangerous time. Jim tells the story, but it is Lyn’s book. As his dedication explains, he wrote the book “For Lyn, no longer among us, but always in our hearts.”

By Fred Harmon