In an article reminiscing about Wood, one of her graduate students, Yang Chaojun, now dean of the School of Foreign Languages at Henan University, recalled how he was impressed by Wood's rigorous examination of his graduation thesis. She was already in her 70s at that time.

"My thesis was revised three times. I was so anxious the third time I took it to her because, normally, it took her three days to finish reading it, but the date of my oral defense was near at hand," Yang wrote. Yang said he passed by Wood's yard three times that night, and every time he saw the lights were on in her study.

"When I knocked on her door the next morning, I saw my thesis lying on her desk with corrections in red ink on every page. After instructing me how to make revisions, she stretched her arms and said 'now you can go for your oral defense and I'm going to take a break'," Yang wrote.

As well as teaching, Wood had been keen to introduce China to Western countries and promote Western people's understanding of the country.

In 1958, her self-illustrated book A Street in China was released by the London publishing house Michael Joseph.

A jaunty collection of tales, it is populated with characters, including antisocial neighbors and a philandering teahouse owner and his argumentative wife. Nonetheless, whatever conflicts arise in the community they are smoothed over by the local cadres, including the heroine, who works for a family woman's organization.

The book was introduced by the publisher as "a picture of everyday life in present-day China as experienced by an American woman who is married to a Chinese and lives the life of a Chinese housewife and mother."

Her reflections on daily life were also printed in the internationally-distributed Letters from China (published 1962-70) by US journalist Anna Louise Strong.

In 1975, at the behest of then premier Zhou Enlai, she had Chinese citizenship conferred upon her.

Wood continued to teach and write, even as five of her children left China for the US and she became a widow in 1984.

The self-described "foreign granny" (yang laotaitai) felt like just another of the senior citizens in her neighborhood－cooking, knitting and wrangling small children.

Each National Day she would unfurl her own red flag, which she got on the eve of the birth of the People's Republic of China, as a reminder that she had served this country since its beginning.

The esteem in which the nation held her was demonstrated in 1988, when she was invited to Beijing to help translate reports from the Seventh National People's Congress. She also worked on the first draft of the English versions of Chen Yun's speeches.

A tranche of national and provincial awards did nothing to skew Wood's outlook of New China or stoke her self-importance.

Her relationship with Henan is best summarized in the title of the biography issued by her university to mark her seventieth birthday: The Yellow Earth in Blue Eyes. After three quarters of a century here, she now takes her rest in that beloved loess.

Contact the writers at [email protected]