Joan Hinton, atomic scientist turned dairy farmer
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In the early hours of June 8th, Joan Hinton (Han Chun), an American citizen who had worked in China for 62 years, passed away in a Beijing hospital at the age of 89. Her husband Sid Engst (Yang Zao) had passed away in Beijing seven years earlier.
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Joan Hinton |
Hinton was a classmate of the famous Chinese-American physicist Franklin Yang, and was one of the few women to take part in the wartime Manhattan project to build the world's first atomic bomb.
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She was the granddaughter of Ethel Lilian Voynich, author of the radical novel The Gadfly, was born in Chicago in 1921. Her mother was a well-known progressive educationalist who founded the famous Putney School in Vermont. In 1948, Joan followed her husband-to-be, New England farmer Sid Engst, to China where they joined the Communist cause.
In 1949 Joan and Sid were married in a cave in Yan'an. On the eve of Liberation they moved, together with 83 Friesian cows, to grasslands on the border between northern Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, on a mission to improve dairy farming. Four years later they moved with 1000 head of cattle to Caotan farm near Xi'an, where they spent the next 10 years.
In the mid-1960s the couple was sent to work in Beijing but, chafing at office work, they were later assigned to run an experimental farm in Changping, an area on the outskirts of the capital, where they were able to continue their research on dairy farm technology.
Joan's view was that "Without social security, liberation is meaningless." She persuaded the leadership to provide social insurance for the workers on the farm and paid her former housekeeper a pension out of her own pocket.
Joan and Sid's two sons and one daughter were all born in China. In the mid-1970s the children left to live in America but a few years ago their second son, Fred Engst (Yang Heping), returned to work in China.
For 60 years Joan and Sid spent every waking moment on cattle breeding and pushing forward the mechanization of dairy farming. Every detail of the farm's operations reflected their unremitting efforts, sweat and toil. Joan researched milk refrigeration and storage, filling a gap in domestic knowledge. The couple's joint project - researching and planning the comprehensive mechanization of China's dairy industry - had a huge influence on dairy farms across the country.
Many people who knew Joan say that she applied to the dairy industry all the skill and enthusiasm that had won her a place on the Manhattan Project.
In 2004 Joan was the first foreigner in China to receive a green card – a permanent residence certificate.
On Christmas Day 2005, Sid died after a long illness. His obituary, at Joan's insistence, included the sentence that he had "ceaselessly struggled for the liberation of all mankind." She added that "It was our beliefs that kept us in China all our lives."
Sid instructed in his will that his funeral should be the simplest of ceremonies. Joan demanded that Sid's pacemaker be removed from his body and given to someone who could not afford one. She also insisted that Sid be cremated unclothed, since, she said, the dead have no use for clothes. She also wanted her husband "buried on the dairy farm within sight of the cows."
The couple's three children picked out three fir trees around the farm and Joan buried Sid's ashes beneath them "so that he will always be able to see his beloved cattle."
This week Joan's children traveled to Yan'an with her ashes and scattered them around the old revolutionary base.
Joan had made a living will insisting that she should not be sent to hospital should she fall ill. Her husband had lived the last two years of his life in hospital kept alive by a ventilator. She was determined not to end her days the same way, which, she thought, "would be a burden to others."
"The old lady never wanted to be a burden to anyone," said Lao Zhao, Joan's long-time driver.
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