The Kindness Report #29: The Seeds of Kindness That Grew Into a Forest

In 1999, Ronald Sakolsky (an American educator) was watching television when a report came on about a woman in China planting trees to stop the desert from spreading.

Her name was Yin Yuzhen. She had been doing it for years, quietly and determinedly, on the edge of the Mu Us Desert in Inner Mongolia. The desert was advancing. She planted trees. That was her answer to it.

Something about that image stayed with Sakolsky. He sent her $5,000.

He’d never met her. He had no particular connection to China, no personal stake in the outcome. He just watched the report and felt something, and then acted on it.

The next year, he flew to Inner Mongolia and planted trees alongside her.

And then life moved on the way it does, and the two lost touch.

What the $5,000 Became

About 50,000 trees.

That’s what grew from that donation over the following 27 years – 50,000 trees where desert used to be, on land that had been bare and shifting when Yin Yuzhen first started working on it. The barren stretch at the edge of the Mu Us Desert is now, by most accounts, a sea of green.

Yin eventually took to social media, trying to find the man who had believed in her work enough to fund it. She searched for him. And this August, nearly three decades after their first meeting, they were reunited in Inner Mongolia.

The reunion made news across China. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson commented on it. The story of an American who had sent money to a stranger in China to plant trees, and then showed up to plant them himself, and whose trees were now a forest – that story travelled.

The Thread That Led to Zhou

But there’s another story running alongside this one. A quieter one.

In 2000, when Sakolsky was participating in a China-US teacher exchange program, a Chinese teacher named Zhou Xiangli arrived in the US as part of the same program. She had been assigned to his school, and she was struggling to find a place to stay.

Sakolsky’s role in the program didn’t require him to do anything about that. But he invited her to stay with his family anyway.

For the duration of her time in America, Zhou became, in Sakolsky’s words, his “fifth daughter.” His family included her in everything – family outings, local Chinese restaurants when she was homesick, and one particularly memorable evening when they all dressed up to take her to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in the cinema. The film was in Chinese with English subtitles. Every time something puzzled the family, they turned to Zhou and asked her to explain.

She gave him a nickname – “Mr. Mean.” He gave her one – “Ms. Last Minute.” They had great conversations. There were jokes. His family made her feel that their home was her home.

Then she went back to China, and they lost touch. Twenty-six years passed.

How They Found Each Other Again

When the news about Sakolsky’s reunion with Yin Yuzhen began spreading, a fellow teacher sent Zhou a video of it. “Mr. S will be in China soon,” the colleague told her.

Zhou was two days away from leaving Beijing for Hetian, a remote city in Xinjiang where she had signed up to spend three years teaching English to senior school students. She rushed to the hotel where Sakolsky was staying and found him in the lobby.

“After 26 years, he’s still enthusiastic and wears his heart on his sleeve,” Zhou said. “He cries whenever strong emotions well up in him.”

He told her she hadn’t aged.

During their video call after she’d arrived in Hetian, Sakolsky mentioned one of her former American students, a boy named Vito Grassi, who still greets Sakolsky with “Ni hao” and still asks about Zhou. Twenty-six years later. From a classroom she taught in for a single year.

The Classroom in Hetian

Zhou teaches English to students in a remote city at the foot of the Kunlun Mountains now. She took the post because she remembered what education had done for her. She grew up in a small town in Hunan Province, and learning had taken her out into a wider world. She wanted to do that for someone else.

Last week, she played her students a listening exercise about notable figures. It was harder than she expected. She played it again and again. And then, slowly, she started to see smiles spreading across the classroom, the particular kind of smile that comes when something that was difficult suddenly makes sense.

After class, several students came up to her. “Thank you,” they said. “We understood such a long passage. You are a good teacher.”

A small moment. She said it stayed with her.

The Thing That Connects All of It

There’s a line Zhou said during her video call with Sakolsky that might be the best summary of what the Kindness Report is really about.

“As members of a global village, even small acts of kindness can have a butterfly effect. If each of us puts that kindness into practice, we can make the world a better place.”

Sakolsky didn’t plant 50,000 trees. He sent $5,000 to a woman he saw on television, and then showed up the following year to plant alongside her. Yin Yuzhen planted the trees. The desert retreated.

Sakolsky didn’t become Zhou’s lifelong friend by grand design. He invited a stranger to stay with his family because she needed somewhere to go, took her to see a film, gave her a nickname, and made her feel at home. Twenty-six years later, a news story about some trees brought them back together.

And in Hetian, far from all of this, Zhou plays an English recording again and again until the smiles appear.

Kindness passed from person to person. $5,000 into 50,000 trees. One home opened into a lifetime of warmth carried forward. One teacher, planting seeds of her own in a classroom at the foot of a mountain.

“I planted the seed with each and every one of you,” Sakolsky told his former Chinese students when he returned to visit them this August, “and you have grown into trees.”

He’d know.

Missed previous Kindness Reports? Read them here: The Kindness Report

Seen something kind around you? Tell us about it — we’d love to share it in a future Kindness Report.

Source: Global Times — Seeds of friendship