Source: China Daily

When we asked Richard Edwards, a professor of earth sciences at the University of Minnesota, US, who became a member of Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS) last year, to comment on his background, he explained, "My own story is an integral part of my family history which goes back to 73 years ago, when my father was driving a charcoal-powered truck along the southwestern border of China to carry medical supplies for the Allied Army during World War II. And, yesterday, I was sitting inside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, with the country’s leaders.”

The reason the 53-year-old Edwards is here is that, for the past seven years, he’s been working closely, in his own words, with “a whole host of really stunning Chinese collaborators” to understand climate change better. He goes on to say, “My main contribution, technologically, has been to get the precise age of each layer of cave deposits through uranium-thorium dating,” then adds, “Applying this method to the study of climate history has allowed us to travel across time back 600,000 years.”

Edwards first visited China as a tourist in 1980, with his parents, “for whom every visit was laden with memories”. His mother, Vee Tsung Ling, was born in 1918, in Xiamen, Fujian province and went to study in the United States at the age of 18 and, “She was the only Asian in her class and very homesick. In fact, I believe that she missed China for a good portion of her life.”

At the end of World War II, Ling became a Chinese language professor at Yale University, where she met Edwards’s father, also named Richard and, “They married in 1947. That was after my father came back from the Chinese battlefield, where he stayed for about two years between 1943 and 1945.”

He continues by noting that his father had served in the U.S. Army in Africa and Italy, and offered to transfer to the China-Burma-Indian Theater toward the end of the war and, “There, he joined a volunteer group called the France Ambulance Unit, where he transported supplies and fell in love with China.”

After the couple married, they returned to China in 1949 and had their first child, Richard’s eldest sister, but had to leave after the outbreak of the Korean War, in 1950.

Now, by returning to his mother’s homeland, Edwards, who is also the member of the US National Academy of Sciences, explains, his work has given him a unique insight into Chinese history and culture and, while he has helped train people and set up laboratories, the cooperation has given him access to Chinese caves that he might otherwise not have been able to see. He goes on to say, “My research in the cave records allows me to learn about how monsoon rainfall changes over time and why it changes. The records suggest that dry conditions gravely affected agriculture and contributed to the demise of the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907).”

“It’s worth noting that at around the same time as the fall of the Tang, droughts in Central America hastened another dynastic change and, “By relating the records we gathered from Chinese caves with those of ocean sediments and ice cores, we get a worldwide pattern of climate change.”

Earlier on, Edwards’s mother acted as an interpreter for the first Chinese table tennis team to visit the US back in 1972 and three years later, she was invited back to China and, now, “Later this year, my eldest daughter is coming to China to teach English at a university in Shanxi province, and my younger daughter is currently studying Chinese.”

Edwards, whose Chinese name which he got from his parents is Ai Si Ben, concludes by saying, “The story goes on.”