When a running stream showed up over a video call from China, centenarian Len Billing in the United States raised his voice with excitement. “Oh, I remember this stream,” he said over the phone. “John once fell down in there!”
The 103-year-old can hardly speak articulately most of the time, but his memory of his childhood home in China is quite clear, even though he has never returned after leaving there at 16.
Guling, or Kuliang in local dialect, is a mountainous area in the suburbs of Fuzhou, Fujian Province in southeast China. Since the first house was built there by a British doctor in 1886, hundreds of foreigners had built their summer houses there in the following half a century. During its peak, the town
