A painting by Ruth V Hemenway featuring Chongqing's streets (right). [Photo provided to China Daily]

Faith amid the ashes

In the late 1930s, as Japanese air raids began to devastate China, Dr Hemenway headed to Chongqing to treat wartime casualties. Her diaries captured the fierce resilience of the population: After an intense bombing, she emerged from a shelter to find the streets shattered and smoking. Yet, instead of despair, she saw local residents and shopkeepers instantly return to clear the debris and restart their businesses.

"People started the hard work of rebuilding homes and reopening shops in the ashes that had not yet cooled," Dr Hemenway wrote in her diary, deeply moved. "I thought to myself, 'With such a spirit, China will never be defeated.'"

But war and insurmountable institutional barriers eventually forced a heartbreaking separation. In 1941, suffering from a severe illness, the physician had to return to the US for treatment, leaving her Chinese daughter Hua Sing behind. As geopolitical relations deteriorated, all correspondence between them was severed.

Dr Hemenway passed away in the US in 1974 without ever seeing her daughter again. Yet, her family noted a poignant detail: until her final days, the kitchen walls of her American home remained covered with photographs of Hua Sing.

An ocean away, Hua Sing carried on her mother's legacy. She entered the medical profession, married a fellow doctor named Liu Minsheng, and relocated to the harsh northwest to join the faculty of a medical college in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region. There, she worked in the physiology department while he treated patients in the university's affiliated hospital.

"Life in Ningxia in the last century was hard — the winds relentless, the resources scarce," Huang, the granddaughter, recalls. "Yet my grandparents never faltered. They embraced it all with grace and gratitude."

Even when the opportunity arose to return to the comforts of Beijing, the couple chose to remain in the northwest out of a shared devotion to rural medicine.

"Looking back, their choice was itself a mirror of history," Huang says, "a reflection of the very spirit that Dr Hemenway had carried into China all those years before."