XINING, Oct. 20 (Xinhua) -- In June 2000, an American bowed before a CT scanner newly delivered to a county hospital in northwest China's Qinghai Province.
"This scanner must serve the people of my hometown well," David Victor Plymire said, in the county's local dialect.
Plymire had made three trips to help secure the 350,000-U.S.-dollar machine for Huangyuan County People's Hospital. At the time, few county-level hospitals in Qinghai had one.
The scanner served patients for 15 years. Long since retired, it is now kept on display at the hospital.
Plymire, 95, was born in New York. But the place he calls home is Huangyuan, where he spent 17 years of his childhood and later devoted decades to improving local medical care.
The work began on a return visit in 1987, after 38 years away. He found old friends and familiar streets, but medical services remained limited. Many residents still had to travel dozens of kilometers to the provincial capital, Xining, for examinations.
Then in the late 1980s, Plymire and his younger sister bought an ultrasound machine in Hong Kong and took it to Huangyuan. It was the first of many such deliveries.
Over the next three decades, he made more than 20 trips between China and the United States, helping bring 31 pieces of medical equipment worth more than 6 million yuan (about 893,000 U.S. dollars) to Huangyuan.
Whenever he returned, Plymire also looked forward to the local foods he missed most -- niangpizi (a cold noodle dish popular in Northwest China), yogurt and boiled lamb.
Plymire was an ordinary wage earner, who rallied friends, overseas Chinese and charitable organizations to cover the costs of the equipment, shipping and customs charges, said Huang Jiong, the hospital's director.
"I can do very little on my own," Huang recalled Plymire saying. "It takes many friends to do something for my hometown."
Huang first saw Plymire at the hospital in 2000, though he had heard stories about the American from his elders long before they met.
Plymire's father, Victor G. Plymire, first came to China as a missionary in 1908. He lived in Gansu and Qinghai before settling in Huangyuan, an ancient city on the eastern edge of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, where he learned Chinese and Tibetan and offered medical care to local residents, often free of charge.
In 1932, the family moved to Huangyuan, as the son was barely a year old.
Having grown up in Huangyuan, Plymire played with local children, ate the spicy niangpizi, and learned their dialect so well that residents made up a teasing rhyme about him: "The big-nosed American loves Chinese niangpizi. He adds chili and vinegar, and gets chili all over his nose ..."
After leaving at 18, Plymire kept practicing the dialect, sometimes talking to himself in front of a mirror so he would not forget the words.
His father had spent nearly 30 years in Huangyuan, photographing everyday life. Plymire later donated hundreds of those photographs to local archives. The family's ties to Huangyuan endured: his mother was buried there, while years later, his sister Mary Ann Plymire's ashes were brought from Canada to rest beside her.
Plymire also supported local schools and helped arrange training for English teachers at local schools. Huangyuan named the American its first honorary citizen, and new employees at the county hospital learn about his donations during their orientation.
Earlier this month, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning cited Plymire's story while discussing ties between China and the United States.
People-to-people friendship holds the key to state-to-state relations, Mao said, likening the exchanges between the Chinese and U.S. people to "small streams that ultimately converge to form the vast river of China-U.S. friendship."
Now unable to travel, Plymire still speaks with old friends in Huangyuan on the phone.
During a video call arranged by Huang in September from Plymire's home in Missouri, a conversation planned for 40 minutes lasted more than an hour. Plymire remembered his old friends by name and recalled details of their years together.
He opened an album, running his fingers over a photograph from 1942 with six children on a hillside. Pointing to himself, he said in the dialect he had never forgotten: "I'll always be a child of Huangyuan."
"David, we've got boiled lamb waiting for you," said Wang Shikang, a former hospital director, from the other end of the call.
Plymire's eyes reddened.
"I miss you all, whenever I have a quiet moment," he replied. ■
