Adams and his wife. [Photo provided by Della Adams to China Daily]

In the 1950s in China it was unthinkable for any young Chinese lady to marry an American GI. But Liu, whose father was a local warlord before his own death in the 1930s and who went on the run from the invading Japanese with her elder brothers and sisters, returning years later to find her mother dead, was anything but faint-hearted.

Della Adams was born on Jan 3, 1959. "The whole conversation on the mountain where the university was located was on what the baby would look like－some said it would be checkered; some said it would be black on one side and white on the other; some said it would look like the zebra," recalled a bemused Clarence Adams, who filled her daughter with gratitude for "the working-class people, of whom my father considered himself one".

"My birth was followed by what is known today as China's Three-Year Famine. Everybody was starving, more or less. Yet people would come by and bring food－an egg one man had collected from his hen that morning, or some fish another had just captured. This is for the child, they say," Della Adams said. "Whenever my father talked about these people, his eyes lit up－he had never before in his life experienced that level of kindness from people who were not his family or close friends. And it's making me cry right now …"