Reminiscing about my first time in Beijing, back in 1987 (追忆我第一次访问北京)

Now that China is in the news every day, I can't help but think about my first time in China, more than 20 years ago, and how much it has changed since then, mostly for the better.  I had just finished by sophomore year in college in 1987 and went to China with one of my professors to help out with some research.

I still remember vividly our arrival in Beijing.  We arrived late in the evening.  We deplaned the old-fashioned way, down a stairway that had been rolled up to the side of the plane, and we boarded rickety old buses that took us to the terminal.  I remember there were soldiers with rifles standing around on the tarmac looking bored.  Their uniforms were clean but they still seemed disheveled.  The bus, which I am pretty sure was diesel, shuddered to the terminal.  This was the old, awful, original terminal.  We approached the customs inspection and before we reached it, our host showed up waving a piece of paper that exempted us from inspection.  We finally boarded a car that took us to Peking University, which is where we were staying.  We dropped off our bags, then went to an apartment of our host.  It was already late and I was tired after a long flight but I was excited at being in China for the first time.  At the apartment, we had a fabulous home-cooked meal.  Unfortunately given my exhaustion I probably wasn't up for it, especially the glutinous rice (zhongzi) and I ended up throwing up everything that I ate, right there in the apartment.  I was fine afterward though.

Even though we were staying at Peking University, we were working downtown, so every day we either took a car or more often a series of buses from Peking University to downtown.  The buses were really an experience.  These were the crowded, old, diesel, yellow, articulated buses that rumbled down the streets.  We had to fight to get on, and usually to get off.  After each stop the conductors would mutter "卖票儿" in Beijing accent.  We usually had lunch at hole in the wall places in the general vicinity of the Imperial Palace, though on a few occasions we went for hamburgers or other Western food at the Jianguo Hotel, at the time the height of luxury.  There wasn't much air condition where we were, but it was OK.

At that time in China, foreigners were not supposed to use renminbi, and were supposed to only use FEC (外汇卷) to buy items at specific shops designated for foreigners.  In practice, this meant that whenever we needed anything, it required an expedition to the Friendship Store on Jianguomenwai.  Last time I looked at the Friendship Store, it was pretty sad, but back in the day, it was a real oasis in the desert for foreigners, with all the necessities, like shaving cream and razors, and shampoo, and instant coffee, and peanut butter, and all sorts of other goodies.

That summer we also spent some time in northeast China, especially Shenyang.  My most memorable meal in Shenyang was one where we brought two bottles of Johnnie Walker we had bought at the Friendship Store in Shenyang at a shopping expedition.   Our hosts, of course, provided beer and distilled spirits (baijiu or 白酒).  We gorged on northeastern dishes and toasted each other.  Outside the restaurant, there was some kind of road repair underway, and the workers were taking turns pressing their faces against the windows of the restaurant to get a view of us.  At some point during the dinner, my stomach under assault by all the northeastern dishes, the beer, the baijiu, and the whiskey, I began to feel unwell, so I excused myself and went outside to where the road repair was underway.  The workers had dug a ditch alongside the road, presumably to lay some drainage pipe, and I bent over and threw up in it while the workers looked on in amusement.  Once I was done, I stood up, smiled, gave them all a thumbs-up, and returned to the meal, where with my stomach voided, I was free to continue eating and imbibing.

Another vivid memory I have is a visit to the apartment of a famous doctor who was a family friend of the professor I was working with.  He had an IBM PC, which was quite rare in China at the time.  But he was one of the most prominent doctors in China, so it wasn't entirely a surprise.  He and his family lived in a modest apartment with perhaps two bedrooms.  That was luxurious by the standards of Beijing at time, but remarkably small considering his prominence as a doctor.  He had been having problems with his PC and the professor I was travelling with had volunteered me to come take a look at it to see if I could figure out what was going on.  I played with it a bit and as far as I could tell, the hard drive (I think a whopping 10mb or something) was failing and that was about all I could say.

Another odd memory was that when we took the train from Beijing to Shenyang, after we settled into our compartment in 'soft sleeper' (软卧), another American suddenly materialized and settled in.  I can't remember his name, but it was all very odd.  At the time it was very hard to get train tickets of any sort, and ours were purchased quite some time in advance.  He had some strange story about how something had come up in Shenyang and he had just decided to take the train up at the last minute, which is why he had no luggage.  He spent most of the evening asking us about our business in China, but was vague about what exactly he was doing in China, or how he was able to procure train tickets at short notice.  After we arrived in Shenyang, we never saw him again.   I seem to remember that he was skinny, red-haired, and very intense.  All very strange.  I wonder who he was, and what he was doing.  We had our theories but they all seemed sort of implausible.

Looking back, it really is remarkable how much China has changed, again mostly for the better, since that summer.  While some things have deteriorated, like the air pollution, and perhaps social inequalities, all in all it is now a much better and I would say freer place than it was back then.  At that time, there was a palpable barrier between foreigners and Chinese as a result of the political atmosphere.  Chinese, for example, were not allowed into international hotels.  If they had foreigners as visitors, they had to write reports afterward explaining to the neighborhood committee (街道办事处) explaining themselves.  There was considerable self-censorship in all interactions.  What we would think of as basic necessities were rationed, and difficult to obtain.  People who were unhappy with their jobs had difficulty changing them.  Everything was politicized.

All that is gone now.  When I visit Beijing now, it is completely different.  People speak their minds to each other and to foreigners.  While there are all sorts of things going on now with regard to the internet and the media that are of concern, people now enjoy remarkable freedom in their daily life.  They can speak their mind freely without worrying that their neighbor or coworker will inform on them.  So whatever is going on right now in China, I keep thinking that the general trend is a positive one.  It will always be 'two steps forward, one step back', but when I compare China now with what I remember from my visit in 1987, the changes are almost unimaginable.

My dad was in Beijing even earlier, in 1983.  He visited as part of an academic delegation.  They stayed in a guesthouse at one of the universities in Zhongguancun, Beijing Aeronautics University (北航). They didn't have Western-style toilets.  Every morning, a cook who knew how to fry eggs came out from one of the international hotels or state guest houses to help prepare breakfast for the delegation.

I just wish I had taken more pictures when I was in China in 1987.  But it never occurred to me that everything might change so completely, and that everything I saw then would be gone in a few years.  I still see people I met then, and they are all doing well, at least as well as can be expected given aging.  It is partly because of my regrets at not having much in the way of pictures from that early that I now take pictures everywhere I go, motivated by fear that whatever I see will be gone in a few years.