Alaa Al Sukhni/Reuters

Jordanians gather outside King Abdullah Mosque to express solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, in Amman, Jordan, Oct. 17, 2023.

A peace summit in Jordan canceled at the last minute, a public lecture from the Egyptian president, ghosting the U.S. secretary of state for an entire night in Saudi Arabia.

Arab leaders’ rebuffing of U.S. officials this week underscored a deepening frustration with an administration seen as unable or unwilling to rein in the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, which they say is destabilizing the region and, amid a devastating blast at a Gaza hospital, their regimes at home.

Protests shook Amman and the West Bank for the second day Wednesday over the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip, which has uprooted more than 1 million Gazans and killed nearly 3,500 people in response to a Hamas attack that killed 1,400 Israelis.

Cairo was also the scene of mass protests, and the U.S. Embassy in Amman was forced to close.

The main diplomatic casualty was a peace summit set to have taken place in Amman Wednesday between President Joe Biden and the leaders of Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority.

It was canceled within hours of an explosion at a Baptist hospital in Gaza City that local officials say killed 500 civilians Tuesday evening, less than 12 hours before President Biden was set to arrive in the region and as protesters marched in Amman. One reason for its cancellation, analysts say, was Mr. Biden’s refusal to put talk of a cease-fire on the table after the hospital blast.

“There is no point in doing anything at this time other than stopping this war,” Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi told Al Jazeera Wednesday. “There is no benefit to anyone holding a summit at this time.”

The tensions laid bare unprecedented frustration for America’s Arab allies, who face a difficult balancing act. They rely on U.S. aid, support peace with Israel, and have supported American foreign policy over the past two decades, even as their stance has enraged their own people.

They accuse the Biden administration of being out of touch and “dismissive” of both the impact of the war at home – including the perils of a new refugee crisis – and the risk of regional conflagration.

Alaa Al Sukhni/Reuters

Jordanians gather in a rally to express solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, in Amman, Jordan, Oct. 13, 2023.

Washington, say Arab officials and analysts, fails to understand how the mass displacement of Gazans evokes for Arab states and societies the multigenerational Palestinian refugee trauma created by the 1948 and 1967 wars, which transformed the region and echo to this day.

They say the lack of understanding held up humanitarian efforts in Gaza while leaving moderate Arab governments weakened at home and unable to contain a war threatening to spill across the region.

“We are in for long weeks ahead,” says one Arab official not authorized to speak to the press. “And it seems there is nothing we can do to avert a wider catastrophe.”

Mr. Biden said Wednesday that Israel had agreed to allow “lifesaving” humanitarian aid into Gaza from Egypt – an Israeli statement specified “food, water, and medicine” to southern Gaza – and that the United States would provide $100 million to help civilians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Canceled summit

Wednesday’s summit was designed to ease humanitarian suffering and “avert a regional war,” officials said.

For the Arab allies, its immediate goal was to solve the impasse over the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza and to stress to President Biden their refusal to facilitate a mass exodus of Gazans into Egypt, according to Jordanian official sources.

It was hoped that face-to-face diplomacy would drive home the seriousness of the regional fallout of the war and encourage President Biden to pass along the message to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and obtain a humanitarian cease-fire in the besieged strip.

Yet the de-escalation efforts were shattered before the summit could be held when a blast Tuesday evening shook the Al Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City, which was doubling as a makeshift refugee shelter. Gaza health officials say 500 people were killed, making it the single deadliest wartime calamity in the strip in two decades.

Hamas immediately blamed Israel, calling it a missile strike. Israel attributed the blast to a failed rocket launched nearby by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Wednesday presented video and a phone intercept as evidence. In Israel, President Biden noted there are “a lot of people who are not sure,” but that initial intelligence from the Department of Defense indicated it was “the other team,” Palestinian groups.

Yet video evidence provided by residents near the hospital and distrust of Israeli military statements – including its monthslong denial of responsibility for the killing last year of American Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in the West Bank – led Arab governments and publics to conclude that Israel was to blame and had committed a war crime.

Abed Khaled/AP

Palestinians carry belongings as they leave Al Ahli Baptist Hospital, which they were using as a shelter, in Gaza City, Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2023. The Hamas-run Health Ministry says an Israeli airstrike caused the explosion that killed hundreds at the hospital, but Israel says it was a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket.

“The summit lost its momentum after the bombing of the hospital,” says Mohammed Momani, former Jordanian minister of information and an international affairs expert close to Jordanian decision-makers. “It was a clear sign Israel is not going to stop the aggression, and it set up the summit for failure” before it convened.

Protests erupted in Amman and Ramallah over the hospital blast and Mr. Biden’s planned arrival. Jordan’s King Abdullah called the alleged strike a “heinous war crime that cannot be ignored.”

Protesters in Ramallah and Nablus in the West Bank clashed with Palestinian Authority security services as they demanded “the downfall of the president,” Mahmoud Abbas.

For Arab leaders with close ties to the U.S. and peace agreements with Israel, simply being seen with President Biden was becoming a liability.

Under a mutual agreement between Jordan and the U.S., the summit was canceled, although bilateral talks continued between Arab governments and Washington, diplomatic sources said.

“The summit’s cancellation dashes some hope that there would be some leverage on Mr. Biden vis-à-vis his position on Israel,” says Jawad Anani, former foreign minister and Jordan’s lead peace negotiator with Israel.

“It would have been a good opportunity for the three leaders to have a debate with Mr. Biden on the reasons why they have to say no to the transfer of populations.”

Refugee red lines

Arab concerns run beyond the humanitarian toll and deteriorating situation of 2.2 million Gazans under a siege unprecedented in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the prospect of another Palestinian refugee exodus.

Hundreds of thousands of Gaza residents were displaced by Israeli strikes following the Hamas assault Oct. 7. Hundreds of thousands more fled to the southern part of the strip, heeding an Israeli warning to evacuate an impending battle zone as it prepared a ground invasion aimed at Hamas installations in and around Gaza City in the north.

Fatima Shbair/AP

Palestinians wait to cross into Egypt at the Rafah border crossing in the Gaza Strip, Oct. 16, 2023. As Gazans seek refuge from Israel's retaliation for Hamas' brutal Oct. 7 attack, neighboring Egypt and Jordan have replied with staunch refusal.

“What is happening now in Gaza is an attempt to force civilian residents to take refugee and migrate to Egypt, which should not be accepted,” Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said Wednesday in a joint press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

“Egypt rejects any attempt to resolve the Palestinian issue by military means or through the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land, which would come at the expense of the countries of the region,” he added.

King Abdullah, whose country hosts 2.2 million Palestinian refugees, said multiple times this week that “the expulsion of Gazans is a red line for Jordan and Egypt.”

“No refugees in Jordan. No refugees in Egypt,” the king said from Berlin Tuesday. President Sisi warned of Egypt being dragged into war.

The Arab leaders see in the current war the ghosts of the aftermath of the 1948 and 1967 wars – 5.9 million Palestinian refugees and their descendants across the Middle East.

“In 1948, Palestinians who left thought that it was a temporary transfer; they carried their keys thinking they would go back to their homes,” says Mr. Anani, the veteran Jordanian diplomat. “This is why Jordan and Arab states are working to prevent any push-or-pull factors for populations in Gaza. They fear that Israel is waiting for the humanitarian situation to get so desperate that Egypt and Jordan would be forced to take in populations from Gaza.”

Such concerns led to the impasse between Egypt and Israel over the Rafah border crossing and the entry of humanitarian aid.

Barriers for Blinken

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s shuttle diplomacy in the region this week encountered unprecedented pushback, multiple Arab diplomats said. Israel and the U.S. requested that Arab states allow Gazan civilians passage into Egypt, and that Gulf countries fund the humanitarian aid.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives in Cairo from Saudi Arabia, Oct. 15, 2023. Leaders in both countries showed frustration with U.S. positions.

In response, Mr. Sisi gave Mr. Blinken a public lecture, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman kept him waiting in Riyadh overnight before finally meeting with him and bluntly demanding a cease-fire.

Arab states caution that America’s refusal to urge Israel to rein in its military response or call for a cease-fire is only strengthening Hamas and Iran, which are rivals to moderate Arab states and have long criticized their ties with the U.S. and normalization with Israel.

Analysts say Saudi Arabia is tired of the consequences of U.S. policies.

“There is a widespread perception of hypocrisy by the U.S.,” says Aziz Alghashian, a Saudi foreign policy expert and fellow at the Sectarianism, Proxies and De-sectarianization project based at Lancaster University’s Richardson Institute.

“There is a sentiment that you wanted us to help you in Ukraine, and now with a conflict like this is happening and affecting our stability, you are not willing to use your leverage to help us.”

As President Joe Biden arrived Wednesday in the active war zone of Israel, he sought to reassure one of America’s closest allies. 

“I want you to know you’re not alone,” the president said in the midst of meetings with Israel’s war cabinet. “We will continue to have Israel’s back.” 

The point was borne out in the hours after Hamas’ brutal attacks against Israel Oct. 7 as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced that the Pentagon would be sending the U.S. Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, and the rest of its strike group to stand at the ready off the coast of Israel should it be needed. 

The goal, going beyond support for Israel, is to make sure hostilities don’t spread. To this end, defense officials have repeatedly reiterated the president’s warnings.

“For any country, for any group – or anyone – thinking about trying to take advantage of this atrocity to widen the conflict or spill more blood, we have just one word,” Secretary Austin said. “Don’t.”

Deterrence, to the military’s way of thinking, involves no small measure of flashing its big guns. That goes a long way toward explaining why a second carrier strike group, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, is also on its way from its home port in Norfolk, Virginia. 

American efforts alone don't ensure that the current conflict can remain contained. That was clear today in the face of Arab furor over a Gaza hospital explosion – for which Israel blamed a Palestinian militia – which complicated President Biden's high-stakes visit to the region. Yet the overtures do help drive home the point that a wider war would be costly for all sides, and that in an extremity America will come to Israel's aid.

Defense officials said the second carrier group just happened to be on its way to the neighborhood, but the power-projecting message is clear.

“Two carrier strike groups – I mean, that’s a lot,” says Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel who studies force structure and military operations at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It’s a large part of our deployed naval force.”

U.S Naval Forces Central Command/U.S. 6th Fleet /Reuters

The aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford steams alongside USNS Laramie during a fueling-at-sea in the eastern Mediterranean, Oct. 11, 2023.

A Marine Corps rapid response force will join the warships, and the Pentagon has put some 2,000 U.S. additional troops on notice for a potential deployment, too.

The Air Force, not to be outdone, is sending F-15 fighter jets to “build on the arrival” of the carrier strike groups and “to respond to any crisis or contingency, and if necessary, engage and defeat adversaries,” the service said in a statement.

As these military steps proceeded, President Biden won a pledge Wednesday that Israel will allow humanitarian assistance for Palestinian civilians to begin flowing into Gaza from Egypt, subject to inspections. 

Role of carrier strike groups

The big guns are not just for show. In addition to providing humanitarian capabilities for evacuation, the carrier groups’ air wings include advanced strike fighter jets and anti-submarine assets, along with destroyers carrying long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles and cruisers equipped with Aegis missile-defense capabilities, notes Harlan Ullman, a former U.S. Navy commander and senior adviser at the Atlantic Council.

The carriers have attack aircraft that could potentially drop bombs on positions of Hezbollah in Lebanon, should the Iran-backed group enter the fighting. The planes also have capabilities to “scoop up signals” intelligence and to provide a platform “if we ever want to use special operations,” Mr. Cancian adds. This could also come into play in the rescuing of hostages taken by Hamas, an estimated 13 of whom are American citizens.

The true success of deterrence, of course, is generally measured in not having to use these assets. Yet even as they work to de-escalate through a show of force, U.S. officials are preparing for the possibility – however remote – of wider conflict.

Evan Vucci/AP

President Joe Biden speaks as he meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Wednesday, Oct. 18, 2023, in Tel Aviv.

Carrier groups can be attractive targets for brazen if ill-advised attacks. There could be potshots in the form of suicidal fast boats or explosive-carrying cardboard drones that could avoid radar detection, Dr. Ullman points out.

Hezbollah possesses anti-ship capabilities, as well as an arsenal of some 150,000 “small, man-portable and unguided surface-to-surface artillery rockets” and missiles, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Institute for the Study of War, which has published ongoing analyses of the conflict since it began, estimates that Hezbollah’s activity on Israel’s northern border “creates opportunities for further operations against Israel.”

Such operations and the potential risks of others have been war-gamed by the U.S. military “dozens” of times and tend to show some obvious moves most likely to expand the conflict, says Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official and now senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

In scenarios in which Israel decides to strike at Iran’s nuclear program, for example, the war-gamed result is “Hezbollah launching tens of thousands, if not 100,000, missiles down on Israel.”

The lesson for this conflict is that if Hezbollah, in solidarity with Hamas, decides to launch an unrelenting barrage of missiles toward Israel, then Israel would have little incentive not to counter by striking Iran.

The fact that Hezbollah has not yet gone “all in” with Hamas’ war on Israel actually suggests Iranian command and control, Dr. Rubin argues. “This may sound counterintuitive, but Iran knows that if Hezbollah starts fighting, that Israel basically loses any reticence about attacking Iran.” 

Hussein Malla/AP

Hezbollah fighters mourn as they attend the funeral procession for two comrades who were killed by Israeli shelling, in Kherbet Selem village, south Lebanon, Oct. 10, 2023.

Such an attack would be a colossal operation that could involve more than 1,300 Israeli sorties, by some U.S. military estimates, given that Iran is six times the size of Great Britain and four times the size of Iraq – and given that many of the strikes, including on hard targets like nuclear reactors, anti-aircraft sites, and command and control, would need to be hit more than once.

“Then the question becomes, is Israel capable of doing it?” Dr. Rubin says. “The nightmare situation for the U.S. would be that Israel starts something that they’re not capable of finishing,” which could pull America into a regional war.

No fleet near Iran 

For this reason and others, President Biden will continue to dissuade Israel from operating beyond Gaza. Current U.S. military posture suggests it has some degree of confidence that Israel will heed this approach. 

If the Pentagon were truly concerned about a wider regional escalation with Iran, for example, it could park its aircraft carriers in the Indian Ocean, says Dr. Rubin, who taught at the Naval Postgraduate School for more than a decade. During frequent visits to carrier strike groups, he would ask admirals what the ideal naval posture for such a scenario would be.

“To a man, they said we should park our aircraft carriers about 400 miles off the coast of Iran.” The logic is that it would put them out of range of surface-to-ship missiles and drones, but within range of U.S. F-18 and F-35 fighter jets. 

For now, U.S. military posture in the eastern Mediterranean could be aimed in part at Israel, too – specifically, to ensure it’s not tempted to launch any surprise strikes on Iran. 

To guard against such a scenario, U.S. aircraft carrier groups could broadcast “purposefully indiscreet chatter” that could be picked up by, say, Iranian intelligence operatives in Lebanon as a sort of warning, Dr. Rubin says. This would quash the element of surprise needed by Israeli forces in any strike against Iran – Israeli pilots are not suicidal, he notes – and, in so doing, quash it.

A more likely use of U.S. intelligence assets will be in providing electronic and overhead surveillance to Israeli forces currently searching for hostages.

As for concerns that U.S. shipments to Ukraine could somehow impede the provision of arms and resources to Israel, Secretary Austin gave a clear message on that front, too. 

“The United States can walk and chew gum at the same time,” he said, and U.S. security assistance will continue to flow into both regions “at the speed of war.”

After two weeks of trying to elect a new speaker with no success, House Republicans are confronting the uncomfortable possibility that perhaps no candidate will be able to win the necessary 217 supporters. On Wednesday, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan lost a second vote on the House floor by a larger margin than before.

Some in the GOP are now casting about for a Plan B. One idea gaining currency – to let acting Speaker Pro Tempore Patrick McHenry temporarily do the job.

Like every aspect of this saga, this option, too, is fraught with uncertainty. No speaker has ever been voted out as Kevin McCarthy was on Oct. 3, and his acting successor, Mr. McHenry, is the first ever to take up the gavel under an emergency rule adopted in the wake of 9/11. The rule is not particularly clear, but some experts say it appears to limit Mr. McHenry’s powers to simply presiding over the election of a new speaker. 

“People who know the House rules inside and out disagree over what McHenry can and can’t do,” says Matthew Green, an expert on the speakership at Catholic University in Washington. “It really is a blank slate.”

Any formal effort to empower Mr. McHenry would require support from a majority of the House – meaning either the divided GOP conference would have to agree to unite around this option, or they would need to turn to Democrats for help. If neither is feasible, some suggest Mr. McHenry could just open the House for business anyway, and essentially see what happens.

The fact that we are even having this conversation, say experts, speaks to the remarkable place this Congress now finds itself in – with no real precedent and no clear guidelines. Even if lawmakers are somehow able to agree on Mr. McHenry’s role, bringing an end to the current crisis, there’s little reason to believe he’ll have any greater success than Mr. McCarthy had in leading this fractured GOP majority. An empowered speaker pro tempore would almost immediately need to deal with urgent – and highly divisive – issues, from a looming government shutdown to aid for Israel and Ukraine. 

“Electing McHenry, or someone else, as speaker pro tem does not solve the underlying problem plaguing the House GOP,” says Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It may get the House out of parliamentary limbo, but it “doesn’t solve the underlying divisions.” 

McHenry’s path to this moment

First elected to Congress in 2004 at the age of 29, Mr. McHenry has repeatedly won reelection to North Carolina’s 10th congressional district with double-digit support. He previously served in GOP leadership as chief deputy whip, and more recently, was a key McCarthy ally helping the Californian win the speakership in January. 

Alex Brandon/AP

Acting Speaker Pro Tem Patrick McHenry gavels the House into session in Washington as Republicans try to elect a speaker, Oct. 18, 2023.

He’s a party loyalist and insider, but also someone whom Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries has hinted he would be willing to partner with to reopen the House. Unlike Mr. McCarthy, Mr. McHenry voted to certify the 2020 election results, and he was a top GOP negotiator in a deal with the White House to raise the debt limit earlier this year. 

Ohio Republican Dave Joyce, chair of the moderate Republican Governance Group, is reportedly prepared to introduce a resolution to temporarily empower Mr. McHenry as speaker. And after Mr. Jordan’s failed second bid for the speakership Wednesday, more Republicans seem to be warming to the idea. Simultaneously, some Republicans are hardening against Mr. Jordan as his team’s pressure tactics backfire.

“It’s a whole different ball game when you are opposed [to a speaker] on principle and start being attacked,” Arkansas Republican Steve Womack told reporters Wednesday following his second floor vote for Louisiana Republican Steve Scalise over Mr. Jordan. “And I can speak to it, because I’ve been attacked.”

Mr. Jeffries hasn’t confirmed that his caucus would support Mr. Joyce’s resolution, but he has reiterated his support for finding a “bipartisan path” forward. And that bipartisan path, says the New York Democrat, “cannot be Jim Jordan.” 

When asked Wednesday afternoon if he would accept expanded powers, Mr. McHenry said his focus is on electing Jim Jordan. 

Many Republicans are against the idea of removing the “acting” from Mr. McHenry’s current title, both because of what it would mean for House rules, and also because they are committed to electing a far-right conservative such as Mr. Jordan. 

“In order to expand [McHenry’s] powers, you have to work with Democrats to do that,” Florida Republican Mike Waltz told reporters Wednesday following Mr. Jordan’s second failed vote.  

But the number of Republicans needed to pass the resolution will, of course, be lower if some – or all – of the Democratic caucus supports a Speaker Pro Tempore McHenry.

“It hasn’t gotten much attention, but Democrats do have an incentive to get the House up and running again,” says Mr. Green at Catholic University, given that they hold both the Senate and the White House. “At some point, they are going to have things they want to get done.”

Although a bipartisan resolution designating Mr. McHenry as speaker pro tempore “ties a bow” on ending the impasse, says Soren Dayton, director of governance at the Niskanen Center, it would also hobble Mr. McHenry from the start, given that many Republicans oppose any House leader elected with Democratic help. 

Is a vote even needed? 

This has led some rules scholars and even some lawmakers to wonder: What if Mr. McHenry just started acting as speaker? 

Former Speaker McCarthy, for one, says that since the acting speaker rule was meant to provide for the continuity of government, he believes Mr. McHenry should already have effectively the same powers as the speaker.

Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma nominates Jim Jordan, currently the top contender for speaker of the House, prior to a second round of voting at the Capitol in Washington, Oct. 18, 2023.

“Patrick should have that power right now,” Mr. McCarthy told reporters between conference meetings Friday.

“Business should go on in the House of Representatives,” agrees New York Republican Nick LaLota, who voted against Mr. Jordan both Tuesday and Wednesday. “And it does not require a vote, in my opinion.” 

The narrowest interpretation of the acting speaker pro tem position – which is the interpretation that Mr. McHenry has followed – only allows Mr. McHenry to recess, adjourn, or call for a vote on the speaker. 

But some argue Mr. McHenry could just assume the full powers of a speaker pro tem without a resolution. They could establish Mr. McHenry’s powers by forcing a “test vote,” says Mr. Dayton, on an important and largely supported measure like Israel security assistance – thereby creating a new precedent.

“You use the power of the underlying political substance to force their hand on the process,” says Mr. Dayton. In other words, dare House members to vote against Israel aid simply because they disagree with Mr. McHenry’s ability to bring the bill to the floor. 

Questions would still arise over things like whether Mr. McHenry would have a place in the presidential line of succession (the House speaker is second in line for the presidency, after the vice president), whether he can take part in classified intelligence briefings, or if he can issue the oath of office to new members who are set to be sworn in following a Rhode Island special election in November. 

And if a member disagreed with Mr. McHenry’s power to act as speaker, the member could ask for a motion to constrain Mr. McHenry’s powers. 

“This is where things get really nebulous,” says Mr. Green, because Mr. McHenry could potentially then refuse to recognize that member and instead call for a recess. 

In theory, “Mr. McHenry could become a dictator. But he was picked in part for this position because he would not do that.”

Staff writer Christa Case Bryant contributed to this report.

Anjali Sharif-Paul/The Orange County Register /AP

People show support for LGBTQ+ students at a board meeting of the Chino Valley Unified School District on June 15, 2023, in Chino, Calif. California's attorney general sued the district over its policy requiring schools to notify parents if their children change their gender identification or pronouns.

The school board of Chino Valley Unified School District in California stirred culture wars this summer when it passed a controversial policy requiring staff to alert parents if their child takes steps to identify as a different gender at school. 

State officials strongly objected. The state attorney general sued the district a month later, charging that the policy discriminated against vulnerable students and put them at risk. 

The case is now winding its way through the California courts. A San Bernardino County judge will hear arguments Oct. 19 about whether the policy, which was temporarily blocked by a court order, should be allowed to continue while the lawsuit plays out. The school district’s lawyers say they are prepared to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

After several years of nationwide protests at school board meetings over pandemic mask policies, and how to teach about race and racism, the loudest uproars are now around transgender policies. Are schools, in their efforts to be inclusive toward marginalized groups, infringing on parental rights to oversee their children’s upbringing? 

The clash in Chino is far from isolated. Rob Bonta, the state attorney general, has criticized other California school districts which passed or are considering similar policies. In New Jersey, four school districts were sued by their state to halt parental notification policies on student sexual orientation and gender identity. On the flip side, parents in California, Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Virginia have also sued school districts who didn’t alert them when their child gender-transitions. It’s become a highly politicized topic harnessed by both Democrats and Republicans as matters of civil rights. 

In Chino and elsewhere, much of the debate hinges on trust. Many parents don’t trust schools to loop them into critical issues facing their children, and some school leaders point to parents who have shunned or abused children struggling with gender identity. Yet, by all accounts, most parents and most educators want what’s best for students.

Ali Martin/The Christian Science Monitor

Chino High School in Chino, Calif., on Sept. 26, 2023. The school is one of six high schools in the Chino Valley Unified School District. The district is being sued by the state attorney general over a policy to notify parents if a student takes steps to identify as a different gender in school.

“Research has clearly established – and common sense, I would argue, also establishes – that building trust between educators and families is really important. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to do,” says John Rogers, an education professor at the University of California, Los Angeles who researches the effects of political division on U.S. schools. 

Student and parental rights 

Chino and adjacent Chino Hills, just east of Los Angeles, are small cities made up of close-knit neighborhoods, many of them master-planned. The largest employers include the Canyon Ridge mental health hospital, the state men’s prison, and Jacuzzi – as in spas. Voters here in San Bernardino County skew somewhat liberal. A slight majority voted for Joe Biden, and the number of contributions to Democrats outpaced those to Republicans by 3 to 1 between 2018 and 2021.

The Chino Valley Unified School district is also one of the area’s largest employers, serving 26,000 students across 34 schools in Chino and Chino Hills. Just over 7% of the district’s families live below the poverty line – slightly less than the national rate of nearly 9% for families. The ethnically diverse district is mostly Hispanic (55%), Asian (20%) and white (12%). 

On July 20, the school board, by a 4 to 1 vote, passed the policy that requires schools to alert parents within three days if their child takes any action to indicate a gender transition. That includes asking to be called by a different name, using a different bathroom, or asking to play on a sports team for a different gender. In some cases, parents would not be alerted if staff felt the student would be in danger, according to the policy.

Anjali Sharif-Paul/The Orange County Register/AP

Sonja Shaw, school board president of Chino Valley Unified School District, listens to public comments at a meeting on June 15, 2023, in Chino, Calif.

A spokesperson for Mr. Bonta says California’s lawsuit against the district is not questioning the role of parents in the lives of children – rather, it is safeguarding students’ physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. 

“While many transgender or gender nonconforming youth are fortunate to have parents or guardians who are accepting of their gender identity, others are not so lucky,” his office wrote in an email. “Chino Valley’s forced outing policy endangers those who do not have accepting or supportive home environments and creates a discriminatory environment for gender non-conforming students.”

Nationally, 1.4% of students between the ages of 13 and 17 identify as transgender, according to data from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law. That figure drops to 0.5% of adults. 

Protections for LGBTQ students are embedded in state and federal education codes. The federal Family Educational and Privacy Rights Act prohibits schools from outing gay or transgender students. Other laws protect equal access to educational resources. 

Advocates are concerned that transgender youth are among the country’s most vulnerable, with suicide rates four times the national average for young people. Thirty percent of transgender adults say they experienced homelessness or were kicked out of their home while growing up, according to a March 2023 survey by Kaiser Family Foundation and the Washington Post. 

Lawyers for the Chino school district argue that the notification policy does not dilute the privacy rights of a student who is transitioning publicly. Rather, it bolsters that student’s support system by widening it, says Emily Rae, senior counsel for the Liberty Justice Center in Chicago and lead attorney for the school district. 

“This policy fosters a system and procedures that will bring everyone to the table and help everyone understand the situation,” she says. “So this policy promotes the health and safety of these kids who may be hesitant to tell their parents right away.” 

Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

California Attorney General Rob Bonta fields questions during a press conference, Aug. 28, 2023, in Los Angeles. Mr. Bonta sued Chino Valley Unified School District over a newly adopted parental notification policy.

“How it should be”  

In Chino’s parks and an after-school hangout, it’s easy to find advocates for notification. “There’s nothing a school should be able to do without the knowledge of the parent,” says Hiwot Tsegaye, as she and her five-year-old daughter walk their dog in the morning sunshine, around a pond ringed with picnic tables and a paved, tree-lined trail. 

Fifteen families received notifications of gender-changing actions in the short time the policy was active, according to school board president Sonja Shaw. 

“That’s how it should be,” says Chino parent Misty Startup about parent notifications. “It’s how it’s always been.” The mother of six, who is a nurse, points out that parents are responsible for every aspect of a child’s wellbeing until that person turns 18. What happens in school should be no exception.

“We want them to be safe. We want them to feel love. We want them to get an education,” she says. “This is about letting us parent our kids with the values, the morals, the beliefs that we have. And if our kids don’t like those values and those morals, then when they’re 18, they can say, ‘bye mom, dad.’” 

Ali Martin/The Christian Science Monitor

Misty Startup in her home in Chino Hills, California, Sept. 25, 2023. Ms. Startup, a mother of six, supports a policy in her school district to notify parents if a student takes steps to gender transition.

Chino parent Nichole Vicario is closely monitoring the state’s lawsuit. Ms. Vicario raised eight children in Chino schools – two are still in high school – and “can’t fathom” parents not wanting to be notified of something as important as a child’s gender change.

“If my child is going through something like that and they’re carrying a secret in the home, it’s torture to them,” she says. “Working through that as a family, together, I think is really important. And the state has no right to tell us that we’re not important enough in our child’s life to help them work through something like that.”

Other parents are concerned that the school district is taking away the agency of students to protect their own identity and decision to share. One Chino Valley mom, who is a teacher’s aide, has empathy for students seeking privacy over sexual and gender identity. When her daughter came out to her as a lesbian recently, this parent was upset that her college freshman had taken eight months to share the revelation. 

Still, the aide, who requested not to print her name due to privacy concerns, would have felt worse if she’d heard it from her daughter’s school, before her daughter was ready to share it herself. 

Telling parents “has to be in the child’s time when it comes down to it, I think. When they’re ready,” she says.

Getting schools and parents to work together 

It’s well established that students are happier and more successful when parents and schools work together to support a child. Educators know that – and most will encourage students to talk with their parents, says Wendy Rock, ethics chair for the American School Counselor Association. 

“When LGBTQ youth have supportive parents and families, that acts as a protective factor. And that’s so important,” says Dr. Rock. “The goal would be to work with the student to help the student share that information with their parents, but allow them to do that on their own terms and not be forced.”

The teacher’s aide explains that she cherishes her students’ trust – trust that she says would be irrevocably broken if she had to disclose confidences to a student’s parents. “[Students] are not going to feel comfortable talking to you. They may not feel comfortable coming to school. Depending on the outcome at home, there’s just unlimited things that could come of it.”

Advocates for student privacy – which includes LGBTQ organizations – say the risks associated with disclosing a gender transition outweigh parental rights. And teachers unions for both Chino and the state pushed back on the notification policy, arguing teachers have enough on their plates without taking on tricky student-parent dynamics.  

Parents and teachers are partners, says Suzanne Wu, a teacher. “I tell them as much as I possibly can and communicate with them. But you’re talking about child sexuality. That is very deep, very personal.” Ms. Wu raised two children in Chino public schools, and teaches elementary school in a different district. 

Ali Martin/The Christian Science Monitor

Suzanne Wu at a coffee shop in Chino HIlls, California, Sept. 25, 2023. Ms. Wu raised two children in the Chino Valley Unified School district and teaches kindergarten in a different district. She says a parent notification policy implemented by the district is “not fair to the kids, not to the teachers.”

If a child doesn’t trust a teacher, they can’t learn from them, she says. Ms. Wu cheered when the notification policy was put on hold. “It’s not fair to the kids, not to the teachers. It’s not fair all around,” she says, adding the school board should be more concerned with academics and teacher vacancies. 

Research shows strong school-family relationships are a pillar of academic success. But political conflict is gnawing at those relationships. “In the last couple of years, there’s been a tendency in some communities to attack school board members, attack principals, attack teachers, simply because there is disagreement,” says Dr. Rogers, who co-authored a report on political conflict in schools. 

Moving past conflicts to respectful dialogue takes a lot of work. “You create spaces where you’re … not just trying to engage in public relations or trying to convince people that this is what to do,” says Dr. Rogers, who also heads up Center X at UCLA, which develops educators. 

“[It’s] really important that the educators act in humble ways, in ways that are respectful of the communities that they’re serving. Having said that, parents and family members, it’s important that they treat their public schools with the respect that public institutions deserve.”

Editor’s note: One source in this story requested her name be removed for privacy reasons; we agreed to do this.

Something’s amiss. After a 12-hour train ride, I’ve reached a remote village on China’s Loess Plateau, where I’m searching for a teacher I wrote about 30 years ago. I can still picture Bai Guiling juggling lessons for four grades in a dim cave classroom carved from the yellow earth. Her dedication to the needy village children was unforgettable. Now, I want to revisit her story as a window into education in rural China today. 

But no one in the dusty hamlet in northern Shaanxi province has heard of Teacher Bai or even remembers the school. Worse, my trip unexpectedly coincides with a visit to Shaanxi by Chinese leader Xi Jinping, so security is extraordinarily tight. Plainclothes police are tailing me everywhere. 

I flip through my notebook looking for the phone number of the only person who might be able to help – a Chinese American woman who years ago took a special interest in Teacher Bai. 

Sitting in my taxi while the police watch from down the road, I tap her U.S. number into my phone and wait for what seems like forever.

“Hello?” a frail but chipper voice answers. It’s Lin-yi Wu.

A few days earlier, in mid-May, I’d tracked down Ms. Wu, a retired librarian, at a senior living home in Walnut Creek, California. The nonagenarian was recovering from a fall – taken while jazz dancing – but was in good spirits. “Every time I hear jazz, my feet get itchy!” she said with a laugh. She, too, was eager for news of Teacher Bai.

Born the daughter of a well-to-do Shanghai antiques merchant in 1933, Ms. Wu received an elite education that bore no resemblance to Teacher Bai’s bare-bones cave classes. She rode rickshaws to a stately Shanghai middle school run by American missionaries. After graduating from the top-flight Peking University, she was retained to teach French. A formative moment came when Communist Party authorities exiled her and her husband-to-be, English professor Hung-sen Wu, to labor in a hardscrabble mountain village outside Beijing in 1958, during Mao Zedong’s commune movement.

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

“People are dying, and they celebrate the big harvest? That was the last straw. I could never live under a government that tells such a lie to the detriment of its people.” – Lin-yi Wu, who fled China with her husband in 1961 amid a deadly famine and later co-founded a nonprofit in the U.S. that funded construction of numerous schools in rural China

“My eyes were opened to see how the majority of Chinese lived,” Ms. Wu told me. For that, she was grateful. But she also witnessed how Mao’s failed communes slashed farm output, leaving bok choy wilting in the fields and piglets dying in the street. A massive famine ensued, forcing villagers to eat leaves and corncobs. “It was horrible,” she said. From 1959 to 1961, tens of millions of Chinese starved. 

Once back at Peking University, Ms. Wu was shocked when authorities spread propaganda about a bumper harvest, rejoicing with music and gongs. “People are dying, and they celebrate the big harvest? That was the last straw,” she said. “I could never live under a government that tells such a lie to the detriment of its people.” In 1961, the couple fled via Hong Kong to the United States, only to be labeled traitors in China.

Forging a life in America, the Wus never lost the desire to help their destitute countrymen. Then, in April 1992, they opened The Christian Science Monitor and read my article about Teacher Bai’s struggles. At once, they each decided – without a word between them – to use their savings to build the village a proper school. 

“We didn’t even have to discuss it – we wanted to do something,” Ms. Wu said. She penned a letter to me in Beijing, asking to contact Teacher Bai.

But where is Teacher Bai now? I ask over the phone. “I don’t know where she lives, but I remember her village was in Ansai County,” Ms. Wu tells me. “And I have her daughter’s phone number.”

I open my road atlas and scour the map of Ansai, two counties away from where I am. Suddenly it makes sense – there are two villages with the same name, Yangjiagou, and I’m in the wrong one.   

Her smile and warmth are infectious. After 30 years, I instantly recognize Teacher Bai when I see her waiting for me at the train station in the nearby city of Yan’an, a meeting arranged by her daughter. It feels like we never lost a beat.

Driving a borrowed car, she whisks me into the rugged countryside, winding along steep ravines and terraced fields, and then turns down a bumpy dirt road to Yangjiagou. The plainclothes police grow distant in the rearview mirror and fade away.

Teacher Bai grasps my arm and helps me climb the overgrown path to her former cave schoolhouse, where we met in the spring of 1992.

“Look at this old classroom!” she says, peering through the worn wooden lattice of the cave’s front window at the peeling mud-and-straw walls. “I taught here for five years. We were so poor,” she says in her lilting local twang. 

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Bai Guiling stands in front of the cave classroom where she taught three decades ago. Carved from a hillside in the village of Yangjiagou, it had no electricity and very few books.

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Bai Guiling teaches primary students of different grades in a cave classroom carved from a hillside in the village of Yangjiagou in April 1992.

Back then, she had to overcome huge odds just to become a minban teacher – the low-paid, minimally trained villagers who made up 40% of rural primary teachers. 

Born in 1964 to a farming couple in a cave high on a barren hillside a few miles away, Ms. Bai was the eldest of five children – four girls and a boy. Food was scarce in the wake of China’s famine. They ate boiled thistles and cornhusk buns. “That counted as good food,” she says. Her mother was illiterate. Her father only went to primary school and shared a traditional bias against educating daughters. But, for reasons she never discerned, he made an exception for his firstborn.

Wearing pigtails, a white blouse, and a red kerchief, she ran down the village path to a 1950s-era dugout school. Run by the commune, it bore a single red star. Despite turmoil in education during Mao’s 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, she graduated from primary school in 1975. Studying late under an oil lamp, she excelled in middle school. In 1983, she became the first person from her village to earn a high school diploma.

Recruited to teach, she finished a correspondence course. Then, as a new wife and mother, she loaded her belongings into a wooden pushcart and moved to Yangjiagou, while her husband labored in a distant city. With no electricity, few books, and the ever-present risk that the cave – dug from soft, silty soil – could collapse, she began lessons for two dozen students in different grades. Her goal: to battle widespread illiteracy, discourage dropouts, and instill a love for learning that transforms young lives.

“I want to popularize the importance of primary education,” she told me back in 1992. “People who are educated can easily use new farming technology – others can’t.” Her dream: to rally the villagers to build a new school.

Now, as wind rustles through the trees and cowbells ring from a herd plodding down from the hills, Teacher Bai recalls the day we met – and how a downpour and mud-clogged roads forced me to miss my plane, giving us more time to visit. 

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Bai Guiling stands with her children, Nie Yan (left), Nie Nan (right), and Nie Wei, outside the Dianfangtan school, built by FORCE in 1995, where she taught. They lived behind the school in a cave.

“That was wonderful – our good fortune,” she says. “The article you wrote changed my fate, and the fate of three generations of my family.”

Not long after my 1992 trip, a local official came to find Teacher Bai. Breathlessly, he told her a group of overseas Chinese and Americans wanted to build a new primary school at Yangjiagou – and they named her to be in charge.

Teacher Bai’s mission to bring learning to village youths had just vastly expanded – as would the challenges ahead.

Back in the U.S., Ms. Wu excitedly tallied the funds. After a benefit dinner, greeting card drive, and garage sale – combined with her $4,000 in savings – she’d amassed more than $8,000 as of 1994. It was enough to build Yangjiagou a new school, the first by her new organization, Friends of Rural China Education (FORCE).

Still, Ms. Wu was worried. Her mistrust of China’s authorities was exacerbated by recent reports of widespread corruption. How to get the funds securely into Teacher Bai’s hands?

Through a Catholic church with contacts in Hong Kong, she found a nun who would soon travel to mainland China to teach. They arranged for the nun to hand-deliver $8,000 in cash to Teacher Bai at the train station in Guangzhou, across the border from Hong Kong. “I will never forget what Teacher Bai told me,” recalls Ms. Wu. “She said, ‘I will guard this money with my life.’” 

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Teacher Bai, now retired, holds a picture of herself as a young teacher helping to build a new primary school in Yangjiagou village in 1994.

Teacher Bai did that and more. After teaching all day, she shoveled dirt and laid bricks to help build Yangjiagou’s new primary school. Once it was finished and full of her students, she began planning for the next FORCE school. “I decided which place was suitable based on how old and broken the school was,” she says.

Ms. Wu kept pace by raising more funds. Within two years, she was receiving donations from 22 U.S. states and as far away as Italy, Jordan, and Australia. Energized, she started teaching tai chi and donating her earnings.

Grieving the loss of her husband in 1996, Ms. Wu found solace in the work of FORCE. “The mission really inspired my mother and helped her get through my father’s passing,” says her son, Tse-Sung Wu. “It transformed her and became the center of her world.”

As a motto, Ms. Wu adopted the words of Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, who wrote that he wished to see – 

Tens of thousands of
mansions
Housing the laughter
Of every penniless scholar
Under the skies.

After FORCE built five schools in Ansai County, Ms. Wu and her children flew to China to visit. Hundreds of people lined up to greet them. Villagers wearing white head cloths and red sashes beat waist drums and danced an ancient folk dance.

FORCE was not done building schools in China. But at that moment, decades after fleeing her homeland, Ms. Wu had come full circle. Even her Peking University classmates, who had denounced her, welcomed her warmly.

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Second graders attend the Dianfangtan school, May 19, 2023.

“I was no longer a traitor,” she says.

Stepping out of her high-rise apartment building onto a tree-lined street in Ansai’s district center one recent day, Teacher Bai and I walk only half a block before a former student greets her.

After a 36-year teaching career in Ansai, Teacher Bai constantly runs into past pupils. She takes pride in the successes of the generation she helped educate. “He’s the general manager at a big hotel,” she beams.

Ansai – like much of rural China – has made strides in reducing illiteracy and dropout rates. Education levels remain low but are rising. For those ages 15 and above, average schooling has increased from five years in 1990 to just under nine in 2020 – meaning most complete middle school, according to official data. School buildings are safer and better equipped with books.

Overall, however, education for China’s large rural population – 54% of the total by household status – lags behind. Rural workers are still far less educated on average than their urban counterparts. Two-thirds of China’s 800 million-strong labor force lacks a high school diploma, and most of those are rural workers – jeopardizing future economic growth.

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Bao Yanlei is principal of the Dianfangtan school, built in 1995 in Fengjiaying village by a U.S. nonprofit co-founded by Lin-yi Wu and later expanded.

Long-standing challenges for rural schools – lower teaching quality and funding shortfalls – have persisted as China’s economy slows and local government debt skyrockets. Meanwhile, new problems have arisen, such as lack of support for millions of rural children left behind by migrant-worker parents.

“In China now, rich places are really rich, and poor places are really poor. The difference is huge,” says Teacher Bai, as we head to one of the Ansai primary schools that she and Ms. Wu helped build, and where she taught. 

Set against a hillside, the original one-story Dianfangtan primary school that FORCE built has been expanded with new classrooms and dormitories, as part of China’s rural school consolidation since 2000. Migration to cities and a falling birthrate led China to close most village schools and concentrate students in bigger primary schools in towns. But that means about 30% of rural primary students must live at school starting at 6 years old, an expert told me. 

“Some of our students only go home once a month,” says Principal Bao Yanlei. “There’s no one at home to take care of them,” she says. “They are like left-behind children.” 

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

Many of the school’s 100 students are raised by their grandparents – as are an estimated 30% to 40% of rural children overall. More than 65% have divorced parents, making child care harder, says Ms. Bao.

“My parents work out of town, so I only go home if my relatives come get me,” says Tuo Jingxing, a second grader. Teachers care for as many as 20 students left behind each weekend, one of many hardships that make rural teachers tough to recruit. 

“There still aren’t enough teachers,” says Teacher Bai with a sigh. Indeed, the uneven progress of education in rural China is playing out in the fortunes of Teacher Bai’s own family.

Our car climbs deeper into the ravine, passing clusters of cave dwellings flanked by terraced fields of corn and potatoes. 

We pass the dugout with the faded star that housed Teacher Bai’s childhood primary school, now abandoned. Crossing a stone bridge, we arrive at her parents’ quiet cave home. Goats graze in the pastureland above, and bees hum in the apricot trees on the adjacent hillside.

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Teacher Bai stands in front of her childhood primary school in Liu Ping village, May 22, 2023. She was the first in her village to graduate from high school in Shaanxi province, China.

“You’re here!” says Li Jinlan, her mother, wiping floury hands on her apron after rolling out homemade wheat noodles. 

Though no longer facing hunger, Ms. Li and her husband, Bai Yunfu – both octogenarians – live frugally and work hard. Their home has an outhouse and lacks running water, apart from a well with a pump. Ms. Li grows tomatoes, peppers, and other vegetables to feed the family. She scales the hills gathering firewood to heat the family’s communal earthen bed, or kang. 

Teacher Bai’s three sisters – all illiterate or semiliterate – are farmers, like their parents. Her brother graduated from high school and left farming to open a men’s clothing shop in the city of Yan’an. But competition from e-commerce forced him to shutter his shop, and the pandemic kept it closed.

“This is my life experience,” says her brother, Bai Xu, now unemployed.

As the only son, he is duty-bound to support his parents, who have a tiny income. But he can’t afford to finish a project he started to fortify their house. Also looming is the high bride price for his own son’s marriage.

“My life is a little tense,” he says.

This sense of being stuck, of having advanced as far as they can, is prevalent among some members of Teacher Bai’s family – but not all.

In the old cave school where Teacher Bai began her career, a 4-year-old girl with ponytails and bangs wrote on the ground with a stick as she played behind her mother’s desk.

“We couldn’t afford paper and pen,” recalls Nie Yan, Teacher Bai’s oldest daughter. “Even a book was a treasure for us,” she says. “When the first [FORCE] school was built, it was the first time I had my own book. It felt amazing, like ‘Wow, you are really a student now.’

“That was the beginning of my education.”

Ms. Nie and her younger sister and brother followed Teacher Bai to the second FORCE school, Dianfangtan, where Ms. Nie started fourth grade. The school had 10 teachers and “even a music class,” she recalls. “I learned to sing.”

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Bai Guiling (second from right) poses with her sister, Bai Fengru (far right), and (from left) brother, Bai Xu; mother, Li Jinlan; and father, Bai Yunfu, outside her parents’ home in Liu Ping village, where she grew up, May 22, 2023.

FORCE co-founder Ms. Wu met Ms. Nie when she was a middle schooler in Ansai and remembers her as “a very shy little girl, hiding behind Teacher Bai’s apron.” But when Ms. Nie graduated from high school in 2004 with no prospect of college due to her family’s poverty, Ms. Wu’s friend and FORCE supporter, an American named Richard Katz, made a surprising offer.

“I can help her,” he told Ms. Wu one day. A widower and World War II Army veteran, Mr. Katz adored his late wife, a Chinese American woman he married after the war. As a retired federal government employee, he wasn’t wealthy but lived simply and didn’t have any children of his own. He had sponsored several students, including a young man from China in the 1980s, Jonathan Li. 

Teacher Bai was overjoyed. “There’s a very generous American willing to sponsor your college,” she told her daughter.

Ignorant about the world beyond her hometown, Ms. Nie randomly picked a college in a place “with a name that sounded far away,” she says. It was Zhuhai, on China’s southern coast. Her parents bought cheap tickets, and they all stood for 30 hours on the train to get there. Then she glimpsed the ocean, “like endless water,” she says. She began learning Mandarin, as no one in Zhuhai understood her thick Shaanxi dialect. Mr. Katz wrote her letters; she wrote back a few words of broken English.

After her college years, in 2008, he quietly opened a new door to graduate school in the U.S. Scared and still unable to speak English, Ms. Nie nervously boarded a plane from Beijing to Tampa, Florida, where Mr. Katz met her at the airport. They spoke in sign language. He got her settled at an English-language school and gave her a phone.

“He called and talked with me every day, so I got used to the language. Slowly, I picked up what the words meant,” she says. In three months, she could speak.

Then Mr. Katz taught her to take in the world around her. “You just need to observe,” Ms. Nie recalls him saying. “You have to be in the environment; then you can learn more.”

“I didn’t get it at first,” she says. She was too used to memorizing what her teachers told her. She held back. 

“I wasn’t curious. I didn’t have the ability to push myself to go and find things, and discover, until he slowly guided me to do it,” she says. “But when I understood, I was like ‘Wow, I should do that’ – you will find new things every day! 

“After that, I could just go to a park and sit there and talk to people in the park the whole day. I never did that in China,” she adds. “I became more confident and outgoing.”

During summer breaks, they packed up his Toyota Corolla and hit the road. There was a “history trip” up the East Coast, where she learned about slavery in Atlanta and saw where the Wright brothers built their first airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Next was a meandering “music trip” to country music concerts in Nashville, Tennessee, and jazz venues in New Orleans. He taught her to drive.

They talked about everything – her friends, the news, books. He spoke to her of his Christian faith, but he never pressured her. “I want you to know about these ideas. Then you can make up your own mind,” she recalls him saying.

Her view of him changed. “Richard was not only kind and generous,” she says. “He was very wise. Over time, he became like my family. He called me ‘granddaughter.’ I called him ‘grandpa.’”

During eight years in the U.S., Ms. Nie would earn two master’s degrees, one in business and one in journalism. “My life changed because of the news. When they built the first school, I saw the power of writing,” she says. She wanted to be an investigative journalist in China, she says, “to change the lives of others, like happened to me.”

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

“When the first [FORCE] school was built, it was the first time I had my own book. ... That was the beginning of my education.” – Nie Yan, a marketing professional in Suzhou who explored the U.S. with her sponsor, Richard Katz, whom she describes as “my family, my teacher, my friend”

After returning to China in 2016, she briefly tried journalism but found government restrictions on media too constraining, so she switched to marketing. Now working for a solar energy firm in the cosmopolitan city of Suzhou, she often travels internationally. 

Ms. Nie and Mr. Katz stayed in close touch, meeting in Vietnam in 2019. She asked the nonagenarian to come to Suzhou, where she could care for him, hoping finally to repay his kindness. They were planning the move when the pandemic struck, thwarting it.

Still, they spoke often, talking about the news and life. Then, in late May, Ms. Nie was at a weeklong trade show in Shanghai. After returning to Suzhou, she checked Facebook. A friend from the U.S. had messaged her, “Hey, did you know that grandpa passed away?”

As I walk along a river with Ms. Nie on a recent moonlit night in Suzhou, her grief and love for Mr. Katz overflow. “He was my family, my teacher, my friend,” she says, her voice breaking. “He gave me an incredible gift.” 

In Chino, California, where Mr. Katz lived his last two years, his American and Chinese friends and family gathered in June for a memorial that was streamed online. 

Mr. Li, whom Mr. Katz sponsored in the 1980s, opened with a hymn in Mandarin. “He loved people,” said Mr. Li in his eulogy. “He has a sacrificial love.”  

Ms. Wu and FORCE built at least 11 more schools, serving thousands of students in poor border regions such as Yunnan province.

She now enjoys memorizing Tang dynasty poetry, taping verses to the seat of her walker to read while cruising the halls of her senior home in Walnut Creek.

Teacher Bai is preparing to move to Xi’an, Shaanxi’s capital, with her
preschool-age grandson, whom she’s raising since his parents work long hours. The two will live in Xi’an until he graduates from university. 

“I don’t want to leave Ansai,” Teacher Bai confides on my last day there. “All my friends and family are here.” Yet she wants to give the next generation the best chance. “Education is better in the big city,” she says. “Maybe one day, he can study in America.” ρ

How can a nation heal from unspeakable tragedy? For Odile Gakire Katese, or “Kiki,” as she’s known, celebrating life must take precedence over the details of death. Ms. Katese is a Rwandan playwright, performer, director, and cultural entrepreneur. She uses her talents to create a different legacy around the 1994 Rwanda genocide, in which more than 800,000 people are estimated to have been murdered, in her work, “The Book of Life.” 

Instead of focusing on the horror, Ms. Katese, who grew up in exile with her family in the Democratic Republic of Congo, makes retelling the life stories of those who have been lost the centerpiece of her performance. “The Book of Life” features a collection of letters written by the living to the dead and a spider fable told with cut-out projections. Throughout, the drummers of Ingoma Nshya – Rwanda’s first all-female percussion group, founded by Ms. Katese in 2004 – provide accompaniment. 

“The Book of Life,” which premiered in Toronto in 2019, made its debut in the United States this June in Charleston, South Carolina, at Spoleto Festival USA. The show starts a run in Boston on Oct. 18. 

Ms. Katese recently spoke with the Monitor via Zoom about her creative process, hope, and how to heal. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I’d love to hear more about the creation and production of “The Book of Life.” 

I started the project in 2009 for the 15th commemoration of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. ... [I]n 2004, I worked on another show on the commemoration of the genocide. ... I collected testimonies and built a play about that that toured in schools and villages, even in prisons. But I was realizing that I was causing trauma everywhere I was going with the testimonies about what happened in the 100 days of the genocide. ... And I remember deciding that I had to find another way.

How did you decide to frame letters in this project, and how did you go about collecting other people’s stories?

My parents were in exile when they had all their children. I came back to Rwanda when I was 20, not speaking the language of the country, not knowing the story, and not necessarily knowing the people that were lost. So I realized that I had lost a big part of my family. ... And also, as a mother, I knew that I didn’t want to translate stories of death to my children. And so it was important to find a way to remember, in another way, to really remember people. That means you first meet them. We come to know who they were, and that’s why the letters were important, because also at that time, Rwanda was rewriting the history of Rwanda because it was full of the seeds of division and hatred – and that was written by the colonials – and in order to end this cycle of violence, we had to talk more about what brings us together, than what separates us. ...

J.L. Preece/Courtesy of ArtsEmerson

The drummers of Ingoma Nshya – Rwanda’s first all-female percussion group, founded by Odile Gakire Katese in 2004 – provide accompaniment in "The Book of Life."

In Rwanda, we have over 200 small memorial sites all over the country. ... But I had the feeling every time I visited the memorial sites that we archive death, we archive our failures, and this is the legacy [passed on] to the next generation. But I want, yes, to confess to the next generation that we failed in 1994, but we tried to undo that in some ways. And the letters [are] one of the ways to try to undo what we did, because if we kill the people in 1994, we can bring them back to life through the letters.

In the process of healing, why is hope so important? 

Because otherwise you lie down and die. So it is important to stay alive, because after death there is life. And life, life is about hope. It is about faith. ... For me, the bridge between life and death is something that gives strength and power and hope for the future because you didn’t lose [the victims of the genocide]. You still have a space where you can still find them and go meet them and carry them through your life. It is important that they stay alive, not necessarily in our hearts ... but in [our] daily lives, in books, in songs. Their stories have to be told so that we don’t forget. If we forget, they vanish. And this is the worst scenario.

People are capable of both destruction and unity. So how did you grapple with this when you created “The Book of Life”?

I mean, we failed in 1994, but we are also capable of doing good things and we need to be given those opportunities so that there is a balance. But if we keep telling the stories of killings and blood and crimes, if this is the only thing we do, we can be stuck in those places ... and then it also affects our relationship with the perpetrators and it’s going to fuel the cycle of violence. We have to find the balance there and forgive ourselves –it’s not forgiving the perpetrators only – so that we allow ourselves to emerge from that. ... So it is important to also feel that hope, that vision, and remind people that yes, we are capable of the best and the worst, and now it is important to work to undo what we did in some way.

How can grief create a collective? 

I think this is what happened with the drummers. We are all from a different side of the genocide. We are orphans, widows, children of perpetrators or wives of perpetrators. And we came together because the genocide has affected all of us. Not only the survivors, [but] the perpetrators also. ... We are living in the same country that was destroyed. We have the same challenges. We all need a place to gather, to live together, because loneliness is not a good thing for anyone. So that pain can be an opportunity to transform you and can be an opportunity to bring people together if they want that – it is important that they want that – and give ourselves a second chance to rebuild. ... So, somehow the genocide also brought the people together and forced them to live together, to make the right choices. And it has been quite a miracle that Rwanda was able to grow together again after the genocide. 

What are you hoping audiences take away from the performance? 

I think it is literally said in that myth of the grandmother spider bringing the sun [featured in the performance], that out of darkness, there is light. As simple as that.  

And maybe to think also again about the way we remember or we don’t remember. But remembering means also making the choice of forgetting something ... and the thing we choose to remember helps us to become better people or to live together. But it means that somehow you have to forget the things that still divide you.

Reuters

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani arrive for a meeting in Lusail, Qatar, Oct. 13.

For three-quarters of a century, since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, power in the Middle East has largely been measured in guns. President Joe Biden seemed to reinforce that point during his brief, extraordinary trip to Tel Aviv today. He vowed to ensure “Israel’s qualitative military edge” in its conflict with Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that launched a deadly raid Oct. 7.

The hand-delivered message was a warning to Israel’s enemies to resist escalating the war. Mr. Biden arrived just hours after an explosion at a hospital in Gaza City killed hundreds of Palestinians.

Yet Mr. Biden’s real message of deterrence may be in something else he said. “When we are faced with tragedy and loss, we must go back to the beginning and remember who we are,” he told reporters. “We are all human beings created in the image of God with dignity, humanity, and purpose. In the darkness, to be the light unto the world is what we’re about.”

That insight captures a trend that has been quietly remaking the Middle East over decades. Despite the current winds of war, the region’s leaders and global patrons are more inclined toward quiet diplomacy than toward warfare.

As the Middle East Institute in Washington pointed out in a report last May, “The Middle East is undergoing a historic transformation with unprecedented opportunities to build new relationships, de-escalate tensions, and foster conditions for stronger integration.”

Mr. Biden’s trip was only part of a flurry of diplomatic activity. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was in Cairo exploring solutions to the Gaza crisis with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pledged by phone to form a coordinated humanitarian response to the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Representatives of all 57 members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation gathered in Saudi Arabia today, seeking ways to prevent an escalation of the conflict. Foreign ministers from the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council gathered yesterday in Oman. These meetings rest on the emergence in recent years of countries like Egypt, Oman, Turkey, and Qatar as regional peacemakers.

The shift from war to dialogue shows that the definition of power in the Middle East is undergoing a profound transformation. Diplomacy, or soft power, finds strength in trust, transparency, and compassion. It seeks one’s own good in the welfare of others. Its effects can be immediate. By the time Mr. Biden had boarded Air Force One to return home, Israel had already announced it would lift a blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza.

“The Arab world is undergoing significant changes,” Mohamed Kamal, a Cairo University political science professor, wrote in Ahram Online in February. “We, as Arabs, must think of ourselves as partners in a single initiative and one that is ultimately positive. If the losses of one country affect all the others ... the gains of one are the gains of all.”