Exchange of artifacts

In April 2025, Retelas traveled to Quzhou, a city in Zhejiang province, as part of a cultural exchange between the USS Hornet Museum in Alameda, California, where he has volunteered for years.

The Doolittle Raid Memorial Hall in Quzhou traded an eight-inch piece of steel torn from a B-25 bomber with the Hornet Museum. In return, the museum sent an original reel of 16-millimeter film showing the Doolittle Raiders training for their mission. Retelas, who proposed the exchange, carried the film to China and brought the steel fragment home.

"This exchange was about much more than artifacts," he said. "It was about honoring a shared history and building relationships that continue to matter today."

While in Quzhou, Retelas met and interviewed several elderly Chinese men who were children when their families sheltered US airmen.

Retelas returned to China in December. By then, the people he had met in Quzhou were no longer strangers.

He visited sites in Jiangxi province where US airmen had parachuted down more than 80 years ago, now marked with small memorial markers put together by a group of Chinese volunteers who have spent years scouring the countryside for B-25 wreckage and honoring the spots where the flyers touched down.

"There was a group of volunteers that, over the last few years, have made it their personal quest to go and find fragments of the airplanes and help put together little memorial sites," Retelas said. "They are an amazing group of men and I consider them all great friends now."

The markers moved him in ways he had not anticipated. In France, he knew, there were sites where US pilots bailed out and French villagers came to their rescue, places marked in English, visited by tourists, and written into the popular memory of the war. The Chinese sites felt different: quieter, less known, more quietly tended.

"For me, it was very touching to see Americans from 80 years ago being remembered, and seeing these markers in English," he said.

"The volunteers who put those sites together — you could see the passion in their eyes. It was like looking at someone who cares as much as I do, but from across the ocean. We went to dinner every night, kept ordering more beer, kept talking. I've never felt closer to so many people who live so far away from me."