Feel strongly about these letters, or any other aspects of the news? Share your views by emailing us your Letter to the Editor at [email protected] or filling in this Google form. Submissions should not exceed 400 words.

Last month, American educator Ronald Sakolsky travelled back to China’s Mu Us Desert for an emotional reunion with national “model worker” Yin Yuzhen, 26 years after he raised US$5,000 to help her plant trees. Watching the two embrace amid the towering canopy they built together, I found myself moved to tears. Their story involved an act of selfless generosity, an unyielding vow and a cross-border friendship that endured decades of silence.

In the late 1990s, Sakolsky, then teaching in central China’s Henan province, watched a television programme about Yin and her husband’s punishing, solitary battle against the encroaching Mu Us Desert. When Sakolsky visited the desert in 2000, holding fragile green shoots amid howling winds, he shook his head in quiet disbelief, viewing it as an impossible dream. Yet his contribution planted the seeds of a miracle.

Yin made a silent promise to prove that a humble Chinese farmer could keep her word. For decades, lacking machinery, she and her husband relied on manual labour – and steel bars, shovels and water buckets – to battle sandstorms and freezing winters. Crucially, Yin never diverted a single yuan of the donation to her family’s comfort; all the money went towards the trees, transforming the barren wasteland into a flourishing green space.