For as long as there have been movies, filmmakers have portrayed China as a mysterious and distant land, full of novelty and intrigue. People believe it holds secret medicinal fixes that modern doctors do not understand, and its philosophers can turn the world’s complexities into simple truths. Yet those who have lived here understand that China has many of the same mundane daily difficulties that exist everywhere else. People struggle to succeed, and sometimes fail in the process. It is a place similar to any other, and yet far removed from life in the West.

After my first year living in Chengdu, I visited my parents’ Brooklyn home in late 2002. On a crisp September day I stopped to talk to their next door neighbor as I had done hundreds of times before. A dignified man who can often be seen walking around in his tweed or leather 1950s-style caps, Joshua Taylor has lived in his four-story brownstone for as long as anyone on the block can remember. When my parents moved there in 1980, Mr. Taylor had already retired. Yet seeing him out and about, shoveling snow before 8am in the winter, or raking leaves in the backyard each fall, you would never guess his true age.

As they have gone in and out of style over the years, he has steadfastly stuck with his aviator-style glasses—big frames, tinted lenses, and all. Despite being more than sixty years his junior, his endless energy has always been a marvel to me. Sometimes he offers my mother help with her grocery bags, embarrassing her, as their age differential should reverse the roles. Watching him amble around the neighborhood it is clear that he is a remarkable man. However, nothing could have prepared me for what he revealed that early autumn day: he had spent several years in China, northern India, and Burma (Myanmar) as a young man.

*****

More than three decades before The People’s Republic of China and the United States normalized diplomatic relations on January 1, 1979, the two countries stood side by side in an alliance of convenience during World War II. As China’s modern metropolises today flood with foreigners seemingly stumbling into untouched lands, it is easy to forget that thousands of Americans came to China in the early 1940s to combat Japanese military aggression. Unlike most of the foreigners who have landed in the country’s bustling cities in recent years, the soldiers during the war were overwhelmingly stationed deep in the heart of Southeast Asia.

The supply route from Rangoon, the Burma Road, was a critical one for the Chinese resistance movement. When the Japanese captured Burma from the British in 1942, the Allies were forced to develop a new strategy for bringing arms, gasoline, and food to China. They had two primary options into Kunming, Yunnan Province: land and air. Flight was the fastest mode, but the Chinese-Indian border has some of the highest peaks in world making it an incredibly dangerous route. On the ground, with the only supply route already blocked off, the Americans and British decided to build an alternate path around the Japanese. It was this effort to forge a supply route to China that took Mr. Taylor to Asia in the early 1940s.

American soldiers were stationed in Assam, India almost exclusively to supply Chinese troops. While there were skirmishes, the sole purpose for most of the troops was building an alternative to the Burma Road. It was bitter and thankless work for the Americans who dug their way through the jungle under the constant threat of air attacks. To add insult to injury, even as the U.S. was busy fighting the racist Nazi regime in Europe, they continued to segregate their own army. They shipped Mr. Taylor’s regiment to India in large part because the government had little interest in sending black soldiers to fight in Europe. Instead they preferred them to carry out manual labor halfway across the world.

More than 60 percent of the 15,000 U.S. troops stationed in Assam were black. Well after the last shots from WWII had been fired, President Harry Truman finally decided to integrate troops in 1948. So in an awful irony, the United States fought countries that supported eugenics with a segregated national army. It was this simple twist of history that landed Mr. Taylor, a man who had lived in New York his whole life after his family moved from the West Indies at age four, halfway across the world in northern India.

*****

In July and August of 2007 India’s Assam region was besieged with driving monsoons that killed dozens and displaced thousands. However, soldiers from WWII know all too well the region’s vicious weather is no recent development. In the 1940s months of driving rain made the already difficult task of building a road from India to China nearly impossible. Soldiers had to contend with a jungle that had never seen cars and the constant potential for attack from the Japanese. But it was the rains that made daily life so difficult. Rivers rose and the roads flooded out with alarming regularity.

“It rained all the time. Now the mission at the time was to connect the road across the Salween River,” Mr. Taylor explained to me during a recent interview. “Hell of a river. Very, very dangerous. We had to go over the bridge one at a time because it was so shaky. If more went over, you know, it would probably collapse” sending the soldiers into the raging currents that the monsoons had exacerbated. It seems Mother Nature has always tested anyone foolish enough to fight against the unpredictability of Assam and Burma.

For months at a time the men were battered by the brutal rains as they tried to complete their mission. Living and working in those kinds of conditions inevitably leaves a lasting impact on a man. Even today Mr. Taylor keeps a close eye on news about the region, more than sixty years after leaving. When we spoke, without any prompting he pointed out that the flooding in India this summer was precisely where he had been stationed during the war. The news had clearly brought back memories of his difficult struggle.

The Americans, British, Indians, and Chinese had no choice but to brave the climate and build the road in order to send supplies through to Kunming. Engaging the Japanese in China was the Allies’ best chance to break their march across Asia, which was already well under way. The Ledo Road, as the route they were building was officially called, was of critical strategic importance. Without supplies flowing to the Chinese army they had no chance to defeat, or even bog down, the Japanese.

The man who spearheaded the massive undertaking spoke with words so vitriolic they earned General Stilwell the nickname “Vinegar Joe.” He was a hulking legend in his day, known as one of the only foreigners to speak impeccable Chinese, and understand the culture as well. A revered commander, he frequently met with the Chinese leadership in Chongqing, a fact that ultimately doomed his posting in Asia.

Vinegar Joe left a lasting impression on his troops: Mr. Taylor recalled the general’s name as easily as he might his own children’s. Aside from Stilwell’s sharp tongue, he was also a brilliant tactician and kept morale up by wandering through soldier camps in even the worst of conditions. Yet for all of his military skill and regional knowledge, even Stilwell could do little to stay out of the difficult political currents running through the precarious U.S.-Chinese alignment.

By the early 1940s, just a few years before the Communists would drive the Nationalists from Mainland China, the country had already devolved into two de-facto states. The official government, led by Chiang Kai-shek, had its war-time capital in Chongqing, having been chased out of Nanjing by the invading Japanese, while Mao’s faction had retreated to Yan’an. In theory the two sides had put down their arms against one another to fight their mutual enemy, but the reality was much more complicated. Chiang had little interest in strengthening the Communists, correctly fearing that their military prowess would ultimately doom his grip on power.

Stilwell understood clearly the potential benefit to the Allies of bringing the Communists into the fold, but Chiang adamantly opposed arming them. According to a 1944 account in Time Magazine, the general “was sure that he could create a striking force with Chinese manpower and U.S. weapons that would drive the Japanese from China.” However, his hands were tied by the tenuous nature of the situation. Furthermore, the Americans believed that the best way to unleash this “striking force” was to put a U.S. commander in charge of it, another point of contention for Chiang.

In a tremendous diplomatic blunder President Roosevelt sent Stilwell to demand that both Nationalist and Communist soldiers work under the command of the Americans. It is unclear if the Generalissimo, as Chiang was known, would have agreed to hand over control of his own troops. However, bringing the Communists into the plan was too much to ask. He called FDR’s bluff to remove U.S. troops from the region should the Chinese refuse to acquiesce, and Stilwell left Asia, a fall guy for the miscalculations of others.

The Nationalist-Communist rift that sank General Stilwell was not only apparent to the political brass. American soldiers could see the divisions just as clearly. Even the attitudes toward foreign troops varied among the two factions. For many it seemed clear that the Nationalists were ambivalent about hosting black soldiers in the country, while the Communists were more pragmatic and held far fewer reservations.h time. According to his account “soldiers heard [wife of the Nationalists’ leader] Madame Chiang Kai-shek wanted no black troops in.

In total, Mr. Taylor made “three or four” supply missions to Kunming, with black troops flying back to India shortly after arrival eac China...she wanted no black babies in China after the war. She was educated in Georgia, or some place like that” and had been taught the racist traditions of the American South. (She was in fact schooled in Georgia before going to college in Massachusetts.) In contrast to the black troops whom the Americans quickly whisked back to India, many white soldiers were stationed in China for long stretches, demonstrating a clear differentiation in the minds of the leadership.

The attitudes of the Communists towards black soldiers also appeared to differ appreciably from the Nationalists. In response to the powerful Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s influence, Nationalist troops kept their distance from the black Americans. However, the Communists approached them frequently, often looking to barter. “They were poor, poor, poor,” Mr. Taylor remembered, but, “they didn’t beg like the Indians.” Instead they were always looking to make deals with the soldiers. They had so few possessions that they would buy pretty much anything: clothing, shoes, even pencils. They had cash but nowhere to make purchases. At the time “the dollar wasn’t worth anything,” so American soldiers were happy to get their hands on anything that had buying power.

Aside from the Guomindang forces, locals did not seem to care about the color of the soldiers’ skin: anyone who had something to sell was welcome. So large was the market for foreign goods that rumors abounded about a group of U.S. troops that had illegally set up a scheme pawning off huge amounts of army supplies to the Communist factions, which had trouble finding other sellers. Eventually the U.S. Army caught wind of the situation and shut down the operations.

*****

Ironically, Mr. Taylor’s foray into China was not his first experience with communism, nor the first time that party members showed more racial tolerance than their contemporaries. Back in Brooklyn, the local Communist Party was always trying to recruit, especially in black communities. In New York there had always been some racism, but until he underwent basic training in Mississippi Mr. Taylor “had no idea what it was like in the South.” Yet when the Communists were recruiting he could clearly see overt bigotry in his own hometown. “If you had any connection to the Communist Party you got the hell beaten out of you, especially the blacks,” he recalled with a hint of sadness. He himself had not been involved, but he had seen enough that the prevailing attitudes had become clear to him.

Communists in many places might have been more sympathetic to the black community, but in China the Nationalists still controlled most of the country, and certainly held the most influence with the Americans. If they wanted black soldiers to stay in India the U.S. was not eager to quibble. As a result of this their stints in China were short, but the impression that they made was considerable.

After coming out of the Burmese jungle, the troops worked their way up through Yunnan. For the American soldiers untamed southwestern China was as far from home as they could be. They hailed from places as diverse as New England, California, and Mississippi, and it took them a series of flights to get to India at a time when air travel was still relatively rare for consumers. Their route took them all the way to Auckland, Perth, and then finally up to Assam. And in the end they found themselves in China, brought in to combat the German-Japanese alliance by building a 1,600 mile road through some of the world’s harshest terrain.

In Yunnan the landscape changed from the monsoon-prone forests of Burma and India into something out of a different era. Making their way into China the soldiers came upon walled towns, the cumulative edge of the dynasties that had crumbled into history, but whose footprints were still visible to all. Each community they encountered gave the men a glimpse into something new and strange.

At one stop Mr. Taylor went to see a Chinese play, completely different from anything he had seen before. As he watched, taking in whatever he could as they chattered away in an unknown dialect, something stood out to him as bizarre and amazing: many of the women had tiny feet, only a few inches long. The practice of binding feet was already beginning to die out around the country, but among older women, and in remote provinces like Yunnan, it was still the norm. Moments of discovery like this added wonder into the monotony of daily life normally consumed by manual labor and concerns about physical safety.

The soldiers, seemingly so out of place in China, slogged through the region’s difficult landscape and saw things they never again would. But as odd as the sight of them must have been for locals, they were not the only foreigners around. High above them were U.S. pilots. In 1942 the US Army absorbed the famous Flying Tigers, a group of “mercenary” airmen, as Mr. Taylor called them. The Tigers themselves had been in the region since 1937 when U.S. Lieutenant General Claire Chennault brought them there to confront the Japanese on an ambiguous mission (for more on the Flying Tigers please see A Sky of Fierce Animals on P.7).

Before the government sent him to Mississippi for basic training, Mr. Taylor himself had hoped to be assigned to the US Army air forces (the predecessor to the US Air Force), but in WWII black Americans were used primarily as service troops. So overhead the pilots flew, gaining fame and recognition, while Stilwell’s troops pushed forward on the ground, doing the hard lifting required to take back the region. The soldiers knew all about the feats of the US flying force. While the Tigers themselves had been few in number, once the Army air forces came in the skies became filled with men spoiling for a fight.

The Americans “had good planes, superior to the Japanese, but [the Japanese] had the Zeros, the high flying planes. I can tell that the Americans didn’t go after the Zeroes. The P-51s were made for Europe, so they weren’t made for high flying,” Mr. Taylor rattled off, remembering in precise detail the tactics and plane models used. Even though the Japanese planes “were like paper: you hit them once and they went down,” the U.S. nevertheless spent little effort chasing them around the skies. Nor did they equip the Chinese air force to do so.

The Chinese “had no gasoline, no planes” and the U.S. was content to keep at least the latter the status quo. The Americans wanted to win the war, but they were also worried about making China too strong. They did not “want to wake up a giant, you know, a sleeping dragon.” black troops were brought in to do the heavy lifting, but not to get the more glamorous roles, and the American leaders saw the Chinese quite the same way.

U.S. commanders claimed that their reluctance to allow Chinese pilots to use American planes stemmed from their poor skills, but Mr. Taylor disputed that argument. “The Chinese were very good pilots because they didn’t give a damn [about the dangers of the mission]. The Chinese DC-3 (C-47) and C-46 all flew The Hump...The C-46 was built special for The Hump.” So without the use of black pilots, and with the Chinese manning only their own planes, the U.S. fought with one hand tied behind its back.

The missions of the US pilots were clear: protect the army from Japanese planes and run supplies to Kunming. While the army was busy working together with the Indians to put in place the road, air wars periodically broke out in the skies high above them. On the ground, the troops dug holes into the sides of the mountains to protect themselves from air raids. As they were building the road, there was always uncertainty about when the Japanese might come swooping in and put the soldiers’ lives in jeopardy. It was a life fraught with difficulty and peril.

*****

The memories from the war are amazing, but it was an extremely hard experience for Mr. Taylor and other veterans. War is never a pleasant endeavor, and facing prejudice and monsoons made it all the more scarring. Even in India, where they were permanently stationed, the black troops felt like second-class citizens. It was clear to the soldiers that the Indians “were as black as [the Americans], but were treated better.” For these men, the war was full of injustices and hypocrisy.

Yet Mr. Taylor does not seem personally bitter about the experience despite the “bad memories” that linger. Things were different, and in many ways worse then, but he came through it hardened, with his head held high. He served his country, and helped the world overcome one of the worst dangers the international community has ever faced.

More than a decade ago the American newscaster Tom Brokaw coined the term “The Greatest Generation,” a simplistic phrase to describe the amazing resilience of Mr. Taylor’s contemporaries. Slapping such a grandiose label on this remarkable group of people inadvertently does them a disservice, wrapping up their accomplishments into a neat cookie-cutter tag. The praise, nevertheless, does put into plain words the reality that the WWII generation faced difficulties most Westerners could only imagine now.

Long before exchange students began to fill the seats at China’s universities and the world business community looked toward the country as the Great Eastern Hope, Americans were stationed in the far-flung provinces of Yunnan and Sichuan. They fought alongside Indians and Chinese to overcome a threat to regional autonomy. These countries were not ideologically bound together. On the contrary, like so many alliances, it was one of convenience. The U.S. had great love for neither the Nationalists, nor the Communists, but they nevertheless fought and died alongside both.

After the Communists took over in 1949, the U.S. broke off diplomatic ties with their one-time ally. Following the war, American soldiers went home, and Mr. Taylor never again returned to Asia, building a life, career, and family in New York. He became a regular neighbor just like anyone else, his feats and experiences hidden behind his big tinted glasses and boundless energy. For years I knew almost nothing about him other than his Brooklyn heritage. It was not until I went off to China myself, fifty-eight years after he did, that he shared his amazing story.

(Additional reporting by Joy Li. Joy is a freelance producer based out of New York and Beijing. She can be reached at joyli (at) purpleroseproductions.com )