China and their enduring friendship with Jack.
On July 1, 1980, the Morleys’ Australian tour group arrived by plane in
Hangzhou from Beijing and was transferred by bus to the Shangri-La Hotel on
West Lake, the same hotel (then the Hangzhou Hotel) where President Nixon
and his entourage had stayed eight years earlier. David recalls being shown the
suite where the First Couple had stayed, allocated to their tour leader, complete
with “plush, red velvet toilet seats, which we three children were fascinated by.”
The next day the Australian group’s itinerary included a boat trip on West
Lake, followed by a visit to the nearby tea plantations and on to the Liuhe (Six
Harmonies) Pagoda before returning to the hotel for dinner at 6:30
P.M
. Taking
advantage of the “free evening,” David and a young woman called Keva whom
he had befriended on the trip snuck across the road from the hotel to the park
opposite, overlooking West Lake. There they
proceeded to play with matches,
practicing the art of “match flicking” that she had taught him. This involved
standing a match upside-down with its head on the striking surface and flicking
it with your fingers and watching it spiral off to, David recalls, “hopefully an
uneventful extinguishment.” Fortunately that day, the park didn’t catch fire. But
David and Keva’s antics
did
catch the attention of a fifteen-year-old boy—Jack
Ma.
David recalls, “It
was on that free evening, flicking matches in the park,
that I was approached by a young man wanting to try his newly acquired English
skills on me. He introduced himself; we swapped pleasantries and agreed to
meet in the park again.”
On July 4, their last day in Hangzhou, David introduced Jack to his sister,
Susan, and invited him and some other local children to play Frisbee with them
in the park. David described the scene to me: Marking
out a playing area with
shoes and other items “we were soon surrounded by hundreds of Chinese
spectators.” Jack’s father, Ma Laifa, took photos of the game.
David’s father, Ken Morley, once described his first impressions of Jack as
a “barrow boy,” or a street hawker. “He really wanted to practice his English,
and he was very friendly. Our kids were very impressed.”
David described how the family stayed in touch: “What followed that
meeting was a pen pal relationship that I kept up for a few years until my father
started to take an interest in helping this young man.”
Jack would correspond
regularly with Ken, referring to him as “Dad,” who asked him to “double space
his letters so that any corrections could be sent back in the spaces.” David
explained, “The original with corrections was returned for learning purposes
with the reply letter. I believe this greatly helped and encouraged Jack to
continue with his English studies.”
Jack Ma, age fifteen, with his new Australian friend David Morley by West Lake. David is wearing his
Australia China Friendship Society ID card.
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