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Zhifang “Jim” Yang

Zhifang “Jim” Yang died at home in Westbrook on Oct. 17 at 10 p.m. He was 87. Zhifang was born in Beijing in 1936, during the Japanese occupation of China. When he was six years old, the Japanese, who had expropriated the local power company where Zhifang’s father worked, fired his father because they suspected him of being a Communist. There was no such thing as welfare in those days, and, without Yang Wenlou’s salary, the family began to starve. Wenlou decided he had to ship the kids to his family farm in Shandong because at least there they could eat. The parents remained in Beijing.

Zhifang spent from age seven through 12 in his father’s small hometown in Shandong. He was unable to attend school. He missed his mother and was terrified by the Japanese soldiers, who were brutalizing the local population. At the end of World War II, as the Japanese withdrew, Communists and Nationalists battled for territory. Zhifang and his brother with their great-uncle fled on foot, tugboat, and mule train through gunfights and menaced by groups of renegade soldiers. They almost lost their lives in a massive flood. But they finally made it back home to Beijing.

In the relative calm of his teenage years in Beijing, he fell in love with Hindi after sneaking into an Indian film festival and watching the old sentimental favorite, “The Wanderer,” (Awara) three times in a row. It turned out that China trained Hindi translators for the military, and after Peking University, to his dismay, he was dispatched to the People’s Liberation Army. He was sent to the Himalayas on the border of India. Even though he fought in the 1962 border war and captured Indian soldiers, he remained friends with some of them for decades and exchanged letters after they returned home. His account of the border war was published online in China, and overnight, it attracted a quarter million views, until the censors demanded its removal.

He was sent to teach Hindi at a military institute in Nanjing, but the Cultural Revolution began, and there were bloody battles on the campus. He fell afoul of one of the factions and was discharged and sent to cobble shoes in what was and now is again Beijing’s largest Buddhist temple, Yonghegong. The only bright spot in those years was the birth of his first son, Yang Fan, in 1970. He managed to get out of the shoe factory and into China Pictorial, a monthly magazine that was distributed to China’s embassies around the world. He worked there translating Chinese to Hindi. In 1987, China was promoting its agricultural reforms, and a county in Jiangsu Province asked China Pictorial to send a team to write articles. Yang Zhifang was sent there along with Anne Stevenson, who, unbeknownst to either of them, would become his wife. The group spent three weeks together traveling the province and visiting farms, villages, and factories. Zhifang and Anne initially didn’t speak the same language and, to make sure they wanted the same things from marriage, they wrote letters to one another, which their friends graciously helped to translate.

They returned to the US in 1988 and spent three years in Washington, D.C., where Zhifang worked at Berlitz and the Foreign Service Institute teaching Chinese. In Washington, they had their first son, Sam. In 1993, they returned to China. Their daughter, Lucy, was born in 1996 in Beijing. They stayed in Beijing until 2014 when Lucy matriculated at American University in Washington. Sam had graduated from NYU, and Fan, who had started a solar company, was living in Maryland with his wife, Abby, and, at the time, one son, Anthony (Audrey and Anne would follow). Zhifang and Anne took up residence in Manhattan, where Zhifang spent time with family, wandered around museums, and walked their dog, Jake, through Central Park. At the time of Zhifang’s death, he and Anne had been married for nearly 37 years.

People talk about unconditional love, but few people really experience it. Zhifang loved his family in an all-out, hyper-partisan way. When Sam was a baby, Zhifang would push his stroller up and down Tunlaw Road in Washington and run into a Chinese couple pushing their grandson. When he got back home, Zhifang told Anne, “I feel so sorry for that old couple. When they see Sam, they know that their own grandson is inferior.” He told Anne regularly, with tears in his eyes, that he cursed himself for being so much older than she, because they should have had ten children, and they should have been together their whole lives. She didn’t disagree.

He had a kind heart. He cried over movies, especially if children in the film suffered a misfortune, cooked for his family even when he could no longer stand without aid, and cultivated peonies because his mother had loved them. He felt a deep sympathy with the children that few parents do. One of his proudest moments was defending Yang Fan against the parents of a bully at Weigongcun. He was proud of him throughout his life. He talked constantly about Fan’s success as a businessman and a father and spoke on the phone with him every day. When Lucy was a baby, if Zhifang and Anne went to a party and she fell asleep in the car, he would sit with her for an hour, two hours so as not to disturb her sleep. Once, visiting Anne’s brother, they put a sleeping Sam into his cousin’s crib and shut the door, but when they were leaving, they found him standing in the crib in the dark room crying and crying. On the trip home, Zhifang sat in the back seat and held Sam against his chest, singing to him, and he never forgot how afraid baby Sam must have been to wake up in a dark, unfamiliar room. Anne often told him that their kids have such big hearts because he carried and held and sang to them for hours at a time when they were small.

During COVID times, Anne and Zhifang took up permanent residence in Westbrook. There, Zhifang gardened, cooked, wrote, and talked with his family for hours each day without fail. While he still could, he took his grandchildren to the beach and told them stories about China. Whenever any of his children came to visit, he always made sure their favorite meal was waiting for them upon arrival. He grew ill in 2020 and died peacefully at home with his wife and three children at his side.

He is survived by his wife, Anne; children, Fan, Sam, and Lucy; daughter-in-law, Abby; three grandchildren; two brothers and one sister-in-law in the US and in Beijing, two brothers, a sister, and various nieces and nephews. He loved them all entirely.

Zhifang was cheerful, funny, optimistic, compassionate, and high-energy. He loved wildly and unconditionally, and he will always be missed. There will be a private burial at Cypress Cemetery in Westbrook, followed by a wake at the family home on Friday, Oct. 27. Donations would be appreciated to the Westbrook Democrats www.daycampaign.com/Donation/Index/36.