In West Virginia, US-China personal exchanges find a home, flown in from Yunnan

Over time, the house has become a small oasis for people-to-people ties amid high-level US-China tensions.

The very reassembling of the house tells a grass-roots story of bilateral cooperation.

It began as a joke, Flower recalled. Hearing that the colourful yet otherwise unassuming structure was to be demolished to make place for a dam, Flower mused to its previous owner, Zhang Jianhua, ‘I wish I could take it home’.

And so he did – with the help of hundreds of Chinese and American volunteers, young and old.

Zhang sold the house to him for US$6,000, and Flower returned in 2017 with a few former students, a fellow history teacher from the Sidwell Friends School in Washington and a guitar maker from Virginia.

Together with local craftsmen of the Bai ethnic community, they began the arduous tasks of deconstructing the three-decade-old wooden structure and convincing the local government to let them move the planks out of Yunnan.

Flower had always intended to find the house a setting similar to its former mountain home, aiming to take it “from the Himalayas and Mekong River to the Blue Ridge and the Shenandoah”. What sealed the deal was an offer from the Friends Wilderness Centre, a Quaker non-profit group, which leased the land in West Virginia to him for US$1 a year.

The planks arrived in the US in September 2017. What didn’t arrive with them were craftsmen whom Flower had hoped would help with the reassembly – they could not get visas.

So in 2019, the reassembly project broke ground with a group of Sidwell students and a West Virginia timber framers guild. Over the next few years, Flower said, volunteers logged at least 21,000 hours restoring the house and its surroundings.

“It usually takes a village to make a house,” he said, “but in this case it took a house to make a village.”

As the project began, Flower established a non-profit, the China Folk House Retreat, hoping to attract enough financing to turn the structure into an educational centre.

Flower, who started visiting China in 1991, was drawn to the house because it reflected China’s diversity. The house’s original owners were ethnically Tibetan; the architecture was a mix of Bai, Han and Tibetan; and the village in which it was located had a Naxi chieftain. He was also struck by its simplicity and its potential to tell stories about ordinary Chinese life.

“The house is a living text,” Flower said, as he passed out bowls of Yunnan noodles to visitors.

Inspired by his educational mission, a university in Yunnan sent over some 15,000 roof tiles and Chinese architecture models to be featured in the house.

Flower is in the process of staging thematic rooms to showcase different aspects of rural Chinese life, putting architectural models and explanatory plaques on display, and cultivating a garden with plants used in Chinese cuisine.

His partners in Yunnan were thrilled that Chinese culture and architecture would be shown to a wider, international audience.

But for Flower, the project was only partly about preserving and sharing a piece of Chinese cultural history. He also hoped that the house would become – as it increasingly did – a link between two countries whose leaders were at odds, particularly as first Covid-19 restrictions and then schools’ increasing liability concerns about travel hindered exchange.

If he couldn’t bring students to China, he thought, he could bring China to them.

Flower only returned this summer, citing airfares that have yet to recover from the pandemic for the delay. A group of American high school and college students went with him.

For students unable to travel to China, he and his wife, anthropologist Pam Leonard, host an annual summer camp where participants learn about Chinese traditions and architecture while helping to rebuild the house and its surroundings.

The mostly reassembled structure, open to the public by reservation from March to December, has already attracted hundreds of visitors, offering something different for everyone.

Chinese tourists have flocked to it, impressed by the couple’s dedication to preserving Chinese architecture. A local gardening club took interest in the plants surrounding the structure.

Diplomats, too, have taken notice. In 2022, Qin Gang, then China’s ambassador to the US, visited the house and dedicated a piece of calligraphy on the structure – after belting out John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads”, now one of West Virginia’s state songs.

The house has also earned the support of Chinese and American financial backers who share Flower’s belief in taking US-China relations into their own hands. Since 2018, the house has accepted grants from the likes of The Asia Group Foundation and Dalio Philanthropies.

He Daofeng, an entrepreneur from Yunnan who is a major donor, was drawn to Flower’s initiative for its potential to connect young students from the two countries. “We can’t control the relationship between the governments, but we can do something on the people-to-people level,” he said.

He was initially sceptical about the project but Flower’s commitment impressed him: The cost of deconstructing and shipping the house alone was US$40,000.

“He’s a crazy person who walks the talk,” He said of Flower. “I don’t even think Chinese people themselves would have the courage to do something like this.”

He was also moved by Flower’s long history with China. After studying Chinese history and philosophy at the University of Virginia, Flower gave up a tenured position at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2007 to teach Chinese history at the high school level. Since 2009, Flower has brought his students to rural China.

He, the Yunnan native, never saw the house in its original location, but like many Chinese tourists said that the reconstructed version tells a story of his upbringing.

Still, despite the abundant support from his community, Flower, now 64, said that the burden of maintaining the house remained mostly his and Leonard’s. He left his position at Sidwell Friends earlier this month to focus fully on it.

As the project grows, Flower is trying to strike the balance of keeping the initiative grass-roots and finding sufficient funding – with all the complications and conditions that may come with it.

Other Americans have found the house an inspiration for their own efforts to build connections with Chinese people. Jesse Appell, a Massachusetts native trying to overcome bicultural misunderstandings through comedy and sharing Chinese tea culture, is one of them. In March, he brought a group of friends to see the house and film it for social media.

“When I go to DC, I hear a lot of downer stories about US-China,” Appell said. “This is such a refreshing breath of fresh air … it’s definitely after my own heart.”

For Terry Lautz, the author of Americans in China: Encounters with the People’s Republic, efforts like Flower’s help provide “a more balanced, multidimensional understanding” of China’s behaviour.

“Americans tend to analyse China’s actions and motives exclusively in terms of its top leader, Xi Jinping,” he said.

“Looking at Sino-American relations and Chinese society from the perspectives of individual Chinese and Americans presents a far more nuanced and complete picture. It also allows us to see where there is room for shared interests and common ground.”

In the near future, Flower hopes to lay the final tiles on the house’s roof and complete the education centre. He also has new initiatives under way, including running more trips to Yunnan; facilitating exchanges between Chinese and American craftsmen; and co-hosting an intensive Chinese-language programme with the University of Pennsylvania, with the house as its venue.

Yet, amid these grand plans, Flower still remains committed to making each guest feel personally welcomed. “I can’t promise Yunnan noodles to every visitor,” he said, “but I’ll try.”