HOHHOT, Aug. 24 (Xinhua) -- For more than a quarter of a century, a retired American teacher and a Chinese woman fighting desertification have lived on opposite sides of the Pacific, bound together by old photos, a newspaper and a forest. On Sunday, they finally met again, face to face.
As Ronald Sakolsky descended an escalator at an airport in Ordos, north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, he wiped tears from his eyes with his right hand while clutching a bouquet in his left.
At the bottom stood Yin Yuzhen, a woman who has spent over four decades wringing green life from the Maowusu, the fourth-largest sandy area in China. The short ride down the escalator was the last stretch before their long-awaited embrace, 26 years after their first in-person meeting.
Their friendship began in 1999, when Sakolsky taught English at a school in central China's Henan Province -- more than 11,000 kilometers from his home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, under a teachers' exchange program between the two countries.
One ordinary evening, a television program caught his eye. On the screen was Yin, planting trees to help hold back the advancing sands of the Maowusu sandy land.
Stretching across parts of Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi and Ningxia, the Maowusu has been one of the front lines in China's fight against desertification in the north: an effort launched in 1978 and slated to continue through 2050.
But for Yin, the fight against the sand was not an abstract national effort. In those years, a night of strong winds could leave the doorway of their dugout sealed by sand. There was grit in the food, dirt in the water, and little else in sight but miles of shifting yellow stretching in every direction.
By 1999, Yin had planted trees across some 30,000 mu (about 2,000 hectares) of barren land -- an area equivalent to around 2,800 standard soccer pitches.
"I was so touched that I started to cry," Sakolsky recalled, thinking back to that evening. "I honestly cannot tell you why. Something just happened to me. I just felt like I needed to help."
Over the next two months, he contacted more than a dozen organizations across the United States. A Boston-based charity agreed to provide a grant of 5,000 U.S. dollars.
At the time, the donation was a staggering sum for Yin -- enough to build a house, cover the costs of raising her children, and give her family a very different life. Yet, Yin spent it all on saplings, keeping only a single banknote as a memento.
In May 2000, Sakolsky took a train from Luoyang, Henan, and then switched to another vehicle, jolting all the way into the sandy land to see the saplings with his own eyes.
He later described the landscape as desolate: "No roads, no trees, no houses. We were just driving over one dune after another."
Then he spotted Yin. "She popped out of a hole," Sakolsky said. The two couldn't speak each other's language, and they relied entirely on gestures and smiles to communicate. Yin showed Sakolsky how to plant.
To Sakolsky, the saplings looked so fragile that he thought they might never grow much higher than his knees. Deep down, he could not see how this patch of sand could ever become a forest. He told her so plainly: "This is impossible."
That night, Yin and her husband invited him to their home for dinner, and made him a steaming bowl of noodles.
"Delicious," Sakolsky recalled.
Sakolsky went home months later, and they lost touch. Across the Pacific, he kept telling his students about the Chinese woman who was trying to turn a desert green. In China, whenever Yin met an American, she would pull out an old photograph of Sakolsky and ask if they knew how she could get in touch with him.
RECONNECTED ONLINE
Year after year, her search went nowhere, until a video and a social media post achieved what years of searching had not.
In May this year, Yin stood before the forest she had spent decades growing, holding up the old dollar bill -- the one she had saved from the money Sakolsky had raised. She looked into the camera and said: "Mr. Sakolsky, if you see this video, I invite you to come back to China and see the forest that grew from the money you sent us."
The appeal quickly went viral online. Within hours, messages began reaching Sakolsky in the form of emails and texts from strangers telling him that a Chinese woman was looking for him. Less than 26 hours after Yin posted the video, they found him. The two then reconnected online.
This was followed by photographs and videos. For the first time, Sakolsky saw what had become of the saplings he had once thought too small to make much difference: a forest of more than 50,000 trees.
"Amazing. Absolutely amazing," he said.
A DREAM FULFILLED
Upon arriving in Beijing early this past Sunday, Sakolsky received mooncakes sent by Yin, a traditional Chinese symbol of reunion, and tomatoes grown in the sandy land. He flew to Ordos that afternoon.
"This is a dream come true from a lady who is the hero of the story," he told media gathered around them at the local airport.
"I never thought I would see her again," Sakolsky said. For him, this visit brought home the power of a culture that lives by its promises. Yin had vowed that the saplings would take root and grow, and that one day he could come back to see them for himself.
Today, including the trees funded by Sakolsky's efforts, Yin and her family have planted trees across 70,000 mu, an area roughly the size of 6,500 standard soccer pitches. Poplars, oriental arborvitaes, spruce and Mongolian Scots pines now rustle in the wind as birds chirp.
Official figures show that about 85 percent of the Maowusu has been restored. Between 2021 and 2025, China accounted for roughly one-quarter of the world's increase in green vegetation and managed to rehabilitate approximately 152 million mu of sandified land.
When he raised the money in 1999, he expected nothing in return, Sakolsky said.
"You can't give something and then expect something back," he told Xinhua. "I raised that money because I wanted to thank China, and I wanted to help her make China a little more beautiful. That's all."
On Monday afternoon, Sakolsky walked through a carpet of fallen leaves as Yin led him to a tall, sturdy poplar, more than 10 meters high, in a grove named in his honor.
He could hardly believe it. This was the tree he and Yin had planted together 26 years ago. Back then, the sapling had been no thicker than a finger, swaying in the wind as if it might be swallowed by the sand at any moment.
Yin handed him a shovel. "Let's plant another one."
The two bent down together. Yin steadied the sapling as Sakolsky pressed soil around its roots -- his hands trembling slightly but his movements steady.
"I planted a friendship tree in Inner Mongolia," Sakolsky said.
FRIENDSHIP FOR GENERATIONS
To welcome Sakolsky, more than a dozen members of Yin's family had come from different places to be there for the meeting. Red chili peppers hung by the doorway and small pumpkins lined the walls, while the courtyard had been swept clean.
"I asked my children to come back because I hope the friendship between our two families will last for generations," Yin said. "I want my children and grandchildren to remember it."
For Sakolsky, the reunion with Yin and her family is about more than a forest. It is a reminder that no act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. Given time, a small act can take root, spread and grow into something no one could have imagined.
The story of Sakolsky and Yin adds another thread to the long history of goodwill between the people of China and the United States -- from the American volunteer pilots who fought alongside Chinese forces during World War II to the historic visit of a U.S. table tennis team to China in 1971 and, more recently, the Philadelphia Orchestra's decades of performances in the country.
During his stay in China from Aug. 23 to Sept. 1, Sakolsky will also take part in China-U.S. teacher exchanges and return to Henan, where he will meet teachers and students at the school where he once taught, among other activities.
The retired history teacher believes that while people may look different and come from different cultures, underneath it all, everyone bleeds red.
"Whether you're Chinese or American, we all love our families, we all love life, and we all love the Earth," he said.
Americans and Chinese need to "focus on our similarities and not on our differences," he once noted. He hopes that when the trip is over, the message can reach people around the world: Chinese and American people "can work together and make a peaceful world."
"I see where the United States and China can work together," said Sakolsky. "So I will not quit. She never quit. 'Quit' is not in her vocabulary. Together, it works." Enditem
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