Margaret Lu Eginton Carmichael, dancer and movement educator from Iowa, United States came to meet her third cousin, Gordon Trimble who is from Hawaii in Fuzhou on October 29, 2023.  She fondly remembers her great, great aunt Lydia Trimble and would like to meet Gordon, see the original buildings that still exist and Aunt Lydia and Lucy Wang’s portraits.  Her great grandma, Margaret Ann Trimble and Gordon’s great grandfather were siblings with Lydia.  Margaret is working on an essay about them.

Margaret also would like to learn more about the methods Lydia used to negotiate various historical changes and governments during her tenure.  Finally, she is interested in learning the recent history of Hwa Nan including the alumnae drive to reopen it.

After Margaret and her husband Gregory arrived at Hwa Nan, Gordon and his wife Sonia Trimble showed them Lydia’s portrait and told them stories about the Trimble Family history in Fujian.  Gordon retold an inspiring but little known part of Hwa Nan’s history, in 1941 there was the battle of Dahu where Japanese forces were humiliated and they abandoned hopes of overtaking Nanping by marching west from Fuzhou.  So Hwa Nan remained in Nanping and Hwa Nan girls performed many social services to help the people along the upper reaches of the Min River.

Margaret also has done a lot of research into Lydia’s life via Chinese history, ship records, other missionary letters, and of course her cousin Ethel Wallace’s book about Hwa Nan.  She hopes to write a long form essay about Lydia Trimble’s and Lucy Wang’s life histories, her, and her Iowa and Canada family’s involvement and the continuing friendship with China through education.  This will be a creative non-fiction piece, not a book: “A form of memoir with a historical slant.  People in the US and people in China are very interested in this story.”  Her cousin Gordon observed:  “We should open our minds to let the blessings of FU bring our hearts closer together.”