Local boy at heart
His father, Victor, an American missionary, came to China in 1908 and traveled to northwestern China in the 1920s, settling in Huangyuan. Historically known as Dangar, the town was a major trading hub along the ancient Tea Horse Road.
Born in Los Angeles in 1931, Plymire was brought to Huangyuan by his family in 1932 and grew up to the sound of jingling camel bells.
He remembers playing with his friends on the hill behind town, swimming in the river, and standing on tiptoe in a crowd to catch a glimpse of a truck passing through. Cars in those days had to be started by a hand crank at the front of the vehicle. Some of the local kids had seen Plymire's windup toys. When they saw a driver cranking his car, they figured he was winding it up too.
During the war, when planes flew overhead, Plymire and his buddies wondered how they got off the ground. The only things the boys had ever flown were kites. Plymire figured someone must have thrown the plane into the air and run really, really fast.
He also remembers when the one-way trip from Xining to Huangyuan by horse-drawn cart took a full day and his father stopped at an inn along the way. At 17, Plymire said he was already so tall that he had to sleep diagonally across the bed, from corner to corner. The innkeeper took one look at the boy and scolded his father, asking: "Why hadn't he found his son a wife yet?"
The Plymires were treated much like any local family.
As Plymire recounted these stories, the details came back to him with remarkable clarity. He said he could still picture it all in his mind.
Plymire never tires of telling stories about his childhood in Huangyuan.
"I only hope that I tell the same story each time. Sometimes I leave some (part) out accidentally," he said.
"A lifetime can have only one old home, and so that's how I feel. Here in Springfield, … my body is here, yet my heart is there where I have so many happy memories and friends that I know are still there," he added.
