Bridge Builders: Zoe Reed

It's a March afternoon in 1997. In Beijing's Tian'anmen Square, two groups of people walk simultaneously from different directions towards the red flag hoisted high above the famous plaza. 

This is no coincidence. They have planned to meet here, to finally tie back together two strands of history – one in Britain, one in China – that have been separated for almost half a century. 

But who are these people? Why has it taken so long for them to reunite? And what does it all have to do with two of the most important bridge-building Westerners in China's 20th-century history?

Unplanned pregnancy

"So how on earth did my mother and father meet?" chuckles Zoe Reed. "My mother, who had an interesting take on life and would take chances, was very ambitious, very bright."

Living just outside London and working in a bookshop, Susan Reed took a chance that would change her life when she entered a Cooperative Society competition to write an essay on international relations. She won, earning a place at Stanford Hall Cooperative College in Nottinghamshire, where 103 people from all over the world were staying and studying. She was one of only three women in the group; one of the 100 men was Sun Kuang-chun, known to his new English friends as KC. 

"She had a pretty good choice of which young man to fall in love with and told me there was a chap from Iceland she quite liked," smiles Zoe Reed. "But it was my father from China with whom she fell in love. They had a strong romance together."

The affair lasted for two years, but the pressure of a cross-cultural relationship, plus Sun's desire to return to China, led them to go their separate ways in 1950. But as we now know, that wasn't the end of that story. 

"After my father had gone back to China, my mother found herself pregnant," says Zoe Reed. Panic-stricken, she turned for help to a benefactor she didn't know: "My mother hadn't actually met Joseph Needham, so she wrote him a letter."

Throughout Zoe's childhood, she and her mother would spend occasional weekends with the Needhams. "They would always remember birthdays and Christmas. We always got a book which they thought would be good to read – mostly about China," she smiles. "They were kind of there in the background, to spend time with, and as a support."

Few children had such a famous benefactor as Joseph Needham, who gave her a Chinese'Li', the same name as them. However, Susan Reed had been abandoned by her birth family and still faced a lot of prejudice and hardship bringing up Zoe alone. 

"As you can imagine, in those days there was a lot of intolerance, and not a lot support for what many called 'half-caste children'. My mother was on her own and having to carve a life for both of us, and that meant taking a number of jobs."

While Susan moved from job to job, Zoe had periods of foster care and lots of 'aunties' to look after her – but her father went unmentioned, and she had no contact with her Chinese heritage.

"I remember nobody ever spoke about my father. In fact, what I was told was that he was dead. That was kind of an easy way of handling the lack of connection. And it made sense, and it meant the aunties and uncles in the various schools that I went to, my Chineseness was ignored. It was not really part of the story."

When Zoe was at Chelsea College, her mother finally told her that her father may not be dead but had been unreachable in China. He hadn't replied to a series of letters that her mother had written in Zoe's early years, so she had no way of contacting him. Zoe was told that the only person who would know if he was alive or how to contact him was Joseph Needham. 

"It's interesting that all those years I was going back and forth, Joseph and Dorothy were trying to educate me about China. I wasn't paying a lot of attention to the books. It must have been silent between us all as to whether my father was dead or alive or how to contact him."

In 1973 Zoe wrote to Needham, who replied:

"My dear Zoe Kim, Dophi and I were very pleased to get your letter of 11th of November and to know not only that you now know about your father KC Sun, but that you've been inspired by it. I can assure you that he was an absolute charmer when young and I'm sure must be a fine man – a textile engineer now, if he is still living, as we all hope."

Although Needham was unable to contact her father, Zoe somehow knew their paths would one day cross. "I always thought he was alive," she says. "And I thought 'I'm going to get to see him, and he's going to be an opportunity for me to then connect with China' – whereas up until then, I'd completely suppressed it."

They started a written correspondence and exchanged photographs, and then Zoe decided it was time for a trip to China. Zoe and family travelled 9 hours on a plane, while Zoe's father and family travelled 36 hours on a train and they all agreed to meet under the red flag in Tiananmen Square at 3pm on March 21, 1997 – Zoe's 46th birthday.

"At 2.45pm we started to walk towards the red flag, and then we noticed the small troop of Chinese people also at quarter to three coming towards the red flag," she remembers. "So there we were, both parties had decided to come slightly early. And it was very nice – we just walked around Tiananmen Square talking."

Arriving in China, the first thing Zoe noticed was that everyone was the right height for her. Then an extraordinary sensation came over her: "But for an accident of fate, I could have been brought up in China and I could have been a Chinese person. But now I was a British person. And so it was wonderful to see the other half, to feel the other half, of myself."

At that moment she made a resolution "to accept that I was Anglo and Chinese, and to try to understand more of the Chinese take on the world and the Chinese people." And thanks to finally meeting Sun, this was no longer a fantasy: "I could become my other half because I now had a real Chinese family to relate to." 

However, Zoe found it wasn't as simple as just adding a new dimension – in a different, but also sharply defined, way. She had, after all, lived for nearly 50 years without a father, and to a large extent that had shaped who she was.  

"It took me a while before I called him father  - I didn't know what having a father meant, really. I'd thought 'My life is fine with just a mother.' My father wanted to start being a father, and I think he thought even at 46 he could start to boss me around as a daughter."

But they worked out their new relationship to be a harmonious one for the final 11 years of Sun's life. "I had 11 years, five or six visits to China when I had a sense of a father. He was a really interesting, bright guy, but very honorable. He chose to go back to China, he wanted to help his country. He chose to do nice things and care about people."