When I was 12 years old, my family had an amazing opportunity: we were able to visit mainland China (then, still called the People's Republic of China) for two weeks. To this day, I don't know exactly how the trip came about, except that someone arranged for a group of about 100 American college students to travel over there, and then invited some well-known Christian pastors to come and speak to the college students during the trip. My dad was one of the pastors, and they told him to bring his family along.
We flew to California, and from there, to Japan and then Hong Kong. We survived the 14-hour flight across the ocean by pretty much playing UNO non-stop. Thank God for UNO. We were able to spend several days in Hong Kong, and we loved it. The shopping...oh, the shopping! I still have some of the things we bought there, including Hello Kitty calculators and tons of jewelry. We stayed at the New World Hotel, which I still remember vividly for the rooftop pool and adjacent 7-floor shopping mall.
Then, it was on to Beijing (then still called Peking - this was 1984 and that makes me 36, in case you were wondering). After arriving at the airport in Beijing, we were informed that the man who organized the trip hadn't yet purchased our return tickets out of Beijing, and so we were required to stay in the airport until the tickets were purchased. We had to wait at the airport about 10 hours, if I remember correctly.
Not to worry - I simply whipped out my brand new Kodak Disc camera (it was the camera of the future, ya'll) and took some candids of the airport. Within no time at all, some officials came over and made it clear (though we spoke no Chinese and they no English) that I was not allowed to take pictures of the airport. My parents assured them (through gestures) that I would not do it again. The officials left, and what did I do? I snuck the camera back out of my bag and surreptitiously took more pictures. Why, Lori, why? I thought I was very cool, in a James Bond kind of way.
Then we got on a tour bus which took us to the city of Tianjin. I guess we stayed there because it cost less than Beijing. When we arrived at the hotel in Tianjin, we were starving but it was evening. The hotel was kind enough to send up some food to our rooms, which consisted of a brown paper bag containing an unwrapped hunk of meat, a hard boiled egg, and a thermos of boiled water (you couldn't drink from the faucets). Thank goodness my mom had packed granola bars and some other stuff for us to eat.
For the next week and a half, our days went like this: in the morning, my dad and the other pastors taught the students. During that time, my sisters and I and the other pastor's kids played in our hotel rooms, singing, playing games, and concocting elaborate skits and plays. In the afternoon, we all loaded up on tour buses and saw the sights...the Ming Tombs, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall. We visited a preschool (the kids were darling) and a Chinese rug factory where we each purchased a rug.
The entire time we were there, we were the center of attention wherever we went. My sister, with her blond hair, was usually surrounded by Chinese people wanting to touch her. You have to remember that the country was completely closed at this time - most people there had never seen pictures of foreigners, let alone real ones.
The food was unreal - from "brain bread" (it's not made from brains, but it looks like it) to octopus and fish eyes - we had never seen/smelled/tasted anything like it. Thank God for white rice...although it had grains of sand it in, we quickly learned how to spit out the sand like pros. We weren't given forks, so we became experts at using chopsticks.
As I mentioned, there was a group of college students with us, and since we were younger than they were, we looked up to them with rock star-like adoration. I still remember many of their names, and even though I do have an amazing (and photographic) memory, that's a little scary. One young man in particular, Derek, was the best-looking guy on the trip and we (and all the college girls) crushed on him like crazy.
I mentioned that we filled our mornings with skits and plays. We came up with one that was great (I think one of us had seen it a camp or something) and decided to work Derek into it without his knowledge. We rehearsed and rehearsed this skit until it was perfect. None of the college kids had seen it because we practiced in our hotel room while they were in their sessions.
On our last day in China, my dad let us come with him to the teaching session and perform our skit. In front of everyone, our friend Sarah (one of the kids on the trip) came out in front of everyone in a blanket and I announced that she was the ugliest person in the world, and anyone who saw her would fall over dead.
I asked if there were any volunteers, and one of my sisters came up, peeked under the blanket, and fell over. I asked again, and the other sister came up, peeked under the blanket, and fell over. Then, I scanned the audience and casually asked Derek to come up and look under the blanket. When he did, Sarah promptly fell over. The audience died laughing. It was a triumph.
We flew back to Hong Kong for another day (rejoicing to go to McDonald's after all that Chinese food) and then back to California and finally Chicago. I don't know how we brought back all of our souvenirs, but we did.
I could never record every memory of that trip, there are so many. I was 12, my middle sister was 10, and my youngest sister was 6. We were young and impressionable enough that everything we saw became a permanent part of who we are today. My love for China was so strong that in college, I majored in Asian History just to learn more about what I had seen so many years ago.
Part of me would love to go back, and part of me wonders just how disappointed I would be if everything were different from how I remember it. It was such an unusual opportunity. Maybe I will go back someday and take my own family with me. I'd like my kids to have the chance to form the same attachment to China that I did.
