A Homecoming

It could have been easy to forget that I grew up in Beijing. No trace left of the Soviet-style apartment where I lived, the classroom where I unknowingly snitched on my mother, the school where I trained as a diver but failed miserably to serve my country.

As I come to the end of my eight-year tour, my mind swims with the tales of people I have met and what they tell me about China. But rarely have I paused to consider my own story as part of the tapestry of change.

The first time I left Beijing I thought I8217;d never go back. Not that I didn8217;t want to, but because it seemed impossible. Chinese people rarely travelled in the 1970s. Going abroad was like flying to the moon. Even if it could happen, you had to be prepared to be gone forever, leaving behind the people you loved.

My father couldn8217;t join us on the journey to America. My mother had been granted a student visa to study music in California. I was later told that someone in the US Embassy took pity on her and allowed me and my sister, 11 and 6, to go along as family. For me, it felt like we were fleeing a sinking ship and my father had given us the only life raft, with room enough for just three.

My parents had married out of political convenience. On their wedding day there were no rings, no white gown, no walking down the aisle. My mother and father bowed three times in front of a portrait of Chairman Mao and passed out hard candies to their guests. Their marriage seemed doomed from the start. Soon after the wedding, my mother was sent to a labour camp along with her entire school of elite musicians.

The rest of their marriage was defined by long physical separations as well as emotional distance that grew with time. So it probably was no surprise that my mother jumped at the chance to start her life over in America.

As a child, I blamed the family breakup on President Nixon. His historic 1972 trip to the Middle Kingdom set the stage for the normalisation of relations in 1978 between Washington and Beijing. With that came the opening of China to the outside world, and we were among the very first to bolt.

My mother raised us by herself in northern California, where she gave piano lessons in our living room and drove her beat-up Ford Pinto at night to play Chopin and Send in the Clowns at restaurants and hotel lobbies to supplement our meager income. A trip to China once every four years for her two kids was all she could afford. But she wouldn8217;t come along8212;she refused to set foot in China again until the 1990s. In 2000, I came back to China as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. The country had changed beyond recognition.

While I was gone, China had morphed from a closed communist society with few material comforts into a market-driven economy in which anything seems possible, and purchasable. A new generation of wealthy Chinese jet-sets around the globe, drives its own cars to work and owns apartments or villas with names like Palm Springs and Orange County. They shop at Hermes, sip coffee at Starbucks, play golf on the weekends with former Red Guards-turned-millionaires. Their children drink imported infant formula, play at pricey Gymborees, listen to music on iPods and blog on the Web.

I wanted to show my husband, who was born and raised in a small town in eastern Shandong province, something of China that he hadn8217;t seen before8212;the China of my childhood. But my old walk-up apartment is gone, replaced by a residential complex that bears no resemblance to the neighborhood I knew.

My children would have to imagine where Mommy was a youngster not much older than they are now, begging with all the other neighborhood kids for a chunk of ice from the industrial fridge kept by the local bus mechanic. Those were days long before the invasions of the Haagen-Dazs cafes. It was even before the arrival of refrigerators, air conditioners and running hot water. All summer long you could hear children pleading, 8220;Tong zhi, gei wo men diar bing Comrade, give us some ice.8221;

Class struggle permeated every aspect of our supposedly egalitarian society. Even as a child I was branded a capitalist because of my grandparents8217; education abroad.

I was in first grade when the teacher asked us one day to tell the class the names of people we knew who had visited Tiananmen Square during a counterrevolutionary gathering. It was a spontaneous people8217;s movement to commemorate the death of Premier Chou En-lai and considered a precursor to the 1989 pro-democracy protests that led to the bloody crackdown. I was only 8 and I had no idea that my teachers were trying to trick me. So I raised my hand and volunteered my mother8217;s name.

When I told my parents, they panicked. My mother went into hiding, and I had to live with the guilt of betraying her.

As these stories come back to me, I realise what a great thing it is that China has changed as much as it has.