Followingthespirit

American banker presents China’s iconic soldier to the world

If Leif rogers had not had a chance conversation with a cabbie at an airport, his cultural and social life might have been entirely different. But that fateful summer night, when he hailed a taxi on his arrival at the Beijing Capital International Airport and the man asked his name, his fate was sealed. “Leif?” said the cabbie. “It sounds just like Lei Feng.” Rogers, then a 34-yearold who had just quit his job as a postal manager in Tacoma, Washington, to teach at the Liaoning University of Technology in Jinzhou, a city in northeast China’s Liaoning Province, was intrigued. Who was Lei Feng?

His tentative researches told him Lei was a young orphan who joined the People’s Liberation Army’s transport unit when he was 20. According to Lei’s official biography, he died a year later in 1962 after being hit by a falling pole. Despite the lack of medals and heroic deeds, what has made Lei’s name live on is the selflessness ascribed to him, putting others’ needs before himself and always being ready to serve others. word for I didn’t want to mistranslate the diary and mislead the English readers.”

Today, the translated excerpts are at the Lei Feng Museum in Fushun, another city in Liaoning. “I regard it as the greatest achievement in my life,” Rogers said. “I am [hoping] that some day there will be someone translating the whole diary and it will be published by some press because it is worth reading [by everyone].”