Woman discovers grandfather honoured for wartime service in China

A Chinese-Malaysian woman has discovered photographs of her late grandfather in a public exhibition in Kunming, southwestern China, honouring overseas Chinese machinists who supported China during the Second World War. Zhang Huiqing, who uses the social-media handle @Huiching, said she came across the display while travelling in the city in mid-September. She released a video showing two photographs of her grandfather, Kuang Jinyuan, on Xinwen South Road.

State media Xinhua reported that the video attracted one million views and 10,000 comments within two days. Zhang said she was walking with a cup of coffee when she noticed the photographs and recognised her grandfather. “This is my grandpa,” she said tearfully in the video.

“This is his name, and these are his words.” Kuang was born in 1914 in Alor Setar, northern Malaysia. In 1939, aged 25, he travelled to China after the Overseas Chinese Relief Fund appealed for young people skilled in driving and vehicle repair to assist the country’s war effort. Zhang said he left without telling his mother.

According to Kuang’s diary, he repaired trucks, recovered vehicles that had fallen from cliffs and collected military supplies. In 1942, he survived an 18-hour siege by Japanese soldiers and then spent 24 days travelling to Baoshan in Yunnan. He lost two comrades during the journey.

The exhibition commemorates 3,200 overseas Chinese workers who helped resist Japanese forces in China; more than 1,000 died, according to the supplied material. Kuang returned to Malaysia in 1946 and died in 1993 at 76. Zhang said her family learned of his wartime history only about a decade ago, when volunteers collected photographs, diaries and work certificates from a trunk of his belongings.

She said she was proud that China remembered him and planned to visit his family’s ancestral village in Guangdong.