Getting to know you

As China began to open up in 1979, a clutch of American students descended on its universities to learn about what lay behind the rhetoric of the Cold War, in a country that had emerged from an odyssey and was ready for change.

It was the summer of 1979, and Stephen Allee and Frank Hawke, two US students who had been in China for six months, were traveling on an overnight train as part of their end-of-semester tour around the country.

"A man came over asking where we were from, and then he turned around and announced to the crowd that we were from America," says Allee, who is now associate curator for Chinese painting and calligraphy at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M.Sackler Gallery in Washington.

Two weeks later the two were imbibing moist fresh air on a cloud-wreathed Mount Emei in southwestern China.

"Frank has long legs but I have short ones, so he could climb much faster than I did,"Allee says. "Much of the time I was walking by myself, soaking in the poetic beauty, which I first encountered on book pages as a high-school student."

That book, an English translation of ancient Chinese poems, had captured Allee's imagination.

"I tried to extract every ounce of emotional weight from the lines, knowing all the while that the original version must be much more profound. And there was no other way for me to be in touch with this profundity than to start learning Chinese."

While Allee became what he calls a guinea pig in a Chinese study program launched by George Washington University, where his father taught, Hawke, for his part, was also learning about China in his class on international security and arms control at Stanford University," so that I could be more literate in talking to my father, who was involved in nuclear weapons in the US Air Force".

In the 1980s and 90s, as Allee was poring over inky brushstrokes in the quietude of a museum storage room, Hawke was busy helping US companies get their footing in China, amid a bubbling effervescence that was a product of China's early days of opening-up. That mountain-climbing trek provides the metaphor for the two men: both have charted the landscapes of China-political, economic, cultural and aesthetic-in their own unique ways and at their own pace.

Both belong to a group that has been called "The Beijing Eight". The man who coined that name was John Thomson, who in June 1978 arrived in Beijing from Taiwan, where he had worked for the US Information Agency. He would witness and participate in the hectic activities that led to the normalization of US-China relations.