Chinese President Xi Jinping has an unexpected, decadeslong tie to rural Iowa, maintaining a friendship from across the Pacific with an 87-year-old Iowan woman from the city of Muscatine.

Xi is headed to Washington on Thursday for a much-anticipated state visit with President Donald Trump as the United States grapples with how to approach frontier artificial intelligence while racing with China in the industry. But Xi, the leader of the U.S.’s biggest competitor in economic and technology fields such as AI, has ties to the U.S. of his own, with friends in Muscatine.