www.montereycountyweekly.com OCTOBER 12-18, 2023 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 23 career, and applied to study conference interpretation at MIIS, which would also be her first trip to the United States. She’d never heard of General Stilwell (or the scholarship in his name) until she received a letter from MIIS congratulating her on a gift of $12,000, enough to cover roughly half her tuition in that time. Then came a letter from Easterbrook. “I remember what I said exactly,” Shen says. “I don’t know what I can do to pay you back, but in Chinese we say, ‘For a drop of kindness, we will pay you back with a river of gratitude.’ He wrote back and said, ‘You don’t need to pay us back. What you can do is to help others one day, when you can.’” For years, the help came in Shen’s direction. Her visa application went through instantly, something she attributes to a kind endorsement from Easterbrook. When she arrived at age 30 in the U.S., living abroad for the first time, he came to Monterey to show her around. He and previous scholars prepared a guide to what to know about living in Monterey for Chinese students, what Shen calls an “encyclopedia,” with information on where to shop for Chinese food and medicines. Shen started as a second-year student, and completed her year of study, and had planned to go back to China, but her plans changed. Instead, she got a job teaching Chinese and decided to stay in the U.S. But Shen grew tired of teaching Chinese. To advance her career and do conference interpretation, she’d have to go back home to China, where everything had changed. She experienced culture shock returning to her home country. She was working as a freelance interpreter and teaching as an adjunct professor, struggling financially—not what she had dreamed of. “When I was back in China, it was one of the hardest times in my life,” Shen says. During that difficult time, she kept up a correspondence with Easterbrook, who extended the kindness and support she needed in that 10-year period. With instant recall, Shen can summon the specifics of times that Easterbrook reconnected. June 3, 2013, she offers—the date corresponded to a photo exhibition for a 100th-anniversary Stilwell event— Easterbrook was coming to China to give a talk, and Shen was eager to serve as his interpreter. A subsequent event in 2017 became an important event for the Stilwell scholarship, in that it was the first time the family sought donations from China, and secured a significant gift from an anonymous Chinese donor, expanding the scholarship by 250 percent for 10 years. And it helped further solidify Shen’s connection to Easterbrook and the scholarship fund that had helped her come study in Monterey years earlier. “We are like family,” Shen says. That close relationship again became critical when, finally, Shen got her career on track with her dreams. In 2019 she got a job at MIIS, and returned, this time to teach translation and interpretation. But she struggled again, acclimating to a new environment. “It was quite challenging,” Shen says. “It was John, again, who cheered me up and encouraged me to overcome all the challenges.” She stuck with it. Her contract at MIIS was renewed, and for the academic year 2021-22 she received the Faculty Excellence Award. In a statement about the recognition, administrators described her approach to teaching as more akin to coaching— something Shen agreed with. “In Chinese, 教育 (education) literally means ‘teaching and nurturing,’” she said at the time, explaining her goals: to foster “an empowering community in which the students’ experience is more ‘living in translation’ and ‘growing in translation’ instead of getting ‘lost in translation.’ This humanistic approach, I believe, is going to further consolidate our world-class translation and interpretation program.” The concept is remarkably similar to the idea from the Chinese government about how to forge diplomatic relations: humanistically. “This is part of the legacy— friendship with the Chinese people,” Easterbrook says, adding that the family remains in touch with Stilwell scholars. “They’re like daughters and sons.” Text panels in the Chongqing Stilwell Museum continue this thread, praising in Stilwell’s service a “historical basis for developing friendly relations between the two peoples.” In the museum and in personal diplomacy, there is no residue of trade wars, of TikTok bans, of threats toward Taiwan. There is a sense that Stilwell is an old friend. “This is not mere rhetoric, but reflects actual policy,” professor Chang points out. “It is part of a broader effort by the Chinese state to use the memory of World War II for emphasizing its contributions to the world and improving friendly ties with the U.S.” So an official ceremony at the only museum in China dedicated to an American general who lived in Carmel may not have gained much attention in the U.S., but the news featured prominently in the People’s Republic. “They knew Stilwell as a friend,” Easterbrook says. “The Chinese people never forget a friend.” Life magazine devoted several pages to a photo essay on the general and his dog, Gary, at play on Carmel Beach. 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