Yuen: Tim Walz's trips to China should not be demonized

Hearing about the student trips to China that Gov. Tim Walz led as a high school social studies teacher inspired me to reach for my scrapbooks from more than two decades ago.

Stories told by those former students, from haggling with street vendors to befriending schoolchildren, activated my own nostalgia. As a young adult, I also crisscrossed the Chinese countryside. Shared a bus with chickens. Marveled at the riverside mountains of Guilin, said to be one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

Soaking up new perspectives and finding common ground with people halfway around the world isn't something everyone can do. To have that opportunity as a teenager is a life-changing gift. But these experiences that Walz sought and introduced to his students are now a political liability.

Conservative leaders are suspicious of his time spent in China. Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Walz owes an explanation "about his unusual, 35-year relationship with Communist China." House Republicans have launched an investigation into Walz's ties there, suggesting that the Chinese Communist Party may have targeted him as part of a long-term strategy to co-opt influential figures in the United States. (This theory fails to consider that Walz was an unknown 25-year-old educator from Nebraska when he first traveled there for a yearlong teaching job.)

As outlandish as this political tomfoolery sounds, you know who isn't surprised? Ross Pomeroy and his friends. They were among the couple dozen Mankato West High School students who traveled to China with Walz for about two weeks in 2005.

"When Mr. Walz was selected to run, we all figured the press and people who want to see nefarious things would say, 'Oh, look, he was taking kids to China to be indoctrinated,'" said Pomeroy.

By train and boat, by bus and bike, the students witnessed the vast paradox that is China, from the dense urban cities and the Forbidden City to the wood huts and rice paddies.

Pomeroy has no recollection of Walz trying to indoctrinate him. In fact, he has no memory of Walz saying much at all about the Chinese government on the trip.

"I don't recall him talking about communism," Pomeroy said. "I honestly don't remember any grand educational speech about their system of government."

What he does remember is Walz offering the students pointers on how to barter with street vendors. They'll start off high, Walz told the kids, so you'll want to talk them down. Nearly 20 years later, Pomeroy still remembers the Mandarin phrase he learned from Mr. Walz: "Bu yao," meaning, "I don't want it."

Peter Grieshaber was on a similar trip with Walz and his wife, Gwen, an English teacher, in the summer of 1997. (It was Mr. Walz who took over the bargaining when Grieshaber was too shy to negotiate a deal to buy a new Nikon camera in Hong Kong.)

Under the Walzes' encouragement, Grieshaber, until then a lifelong picky eater, cleaned his plate and tried every dish the group shared around a big lazy Susan. Grieshaber learned that he loved eel (which a Guangzhou local described as a "sea snake"). He discovered that a sense of adventure and curiosity was integral to who he was.

As for Walz, "you could see how happy he was," Grieshaber recalled. "He was happiest when he could see his students light up. Part of the China trip was about seeing students encounter things for the first time and open their eyes to a very different world."

While the two superpowers are now adversaries, back then the young Minnesotans and their chaperones felt largely embraced by the people they encountered. Walz had a dear friend in Guangzhou, and they made each other laugh by successfully joking in the other's native language.

"The local Chinese were curious about us — they were warm and welcoming," Pomeroy said. "A few of us played soccer with them. I learned that you can be abroad and be with people who look very different, speak very different, and you can still share this communal experience."

But the tone fell somber when the students visited Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The bloody uprising that Walz told them about in global geography class back in Mankato took on even more meaning, recalled former student Matt Olson. "It was eye-opening to know this was where the massacre occurred, and now here we were with our feet on the ground," he said.

When I see pictures of the groups Walz led, mostly white middle-class kids from the rural Midwest, I'm grateful that he fostered those seeds of empathy, curiosity and engagement. My feelings, admittedly, may be influenced by self-preservation. Anti-Chinese sentiments have been directed at Asian Americans like me here at home. Case in point: the troll who took note of my first column in the Star Tribune, calling me an agent of the "Shenzhen Star." (I was born in Illinois to immigrant parents from Hong Kong and Taiwan.)

Walz, as a teacher, seemed to know that there can be a vast difference between everyday people and those who rule them. He may have not told his students what to think of the Chinese government, but he had no problem routinely criticizing China's human rights record when he was a member of Congress. In 2017, he was the only House Democrat to champion the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which aimed to protect pro-democracy protesters there. He described a 2016 meeting with the Dalai Lama as a "life-changing lunch."

Walz apparently loved his trips to China so much that he embellished upon them, falsely stating that he had traveled there 30 times when it was closer to 15, as an investigation by MPR News and APM Reports revealed. He also has walked back his previous statements that he was in Hong Kong in the spring of 1989 during protests in Tiananmen Square. (He arrived in the region months later.)

These days, his fascination and familiarity with Chinese culture has been whitewashed. Even Walz barely mentions it.

But if he became vice president, he'd bring a reservoir of knowledge to the office when facing the situation with Taiwan, trade with China or even a potential war.

Those of us who've traveled to a foreign land know that current events carry more weight when they unfold in a place we care about. Ask one of the former kids who went to China with Walz.

"When you've spent time there, met people there, had laughs and smelled the air, you think about it so differently, in a much more complex and thoughtful way," Grieshaber said.

We could use some thoughtfulness as we steer toward the China issue. Remember a time when curiosity about the world was an asset, not a sin.