My First Trip
12.31.12

After Ping Pong, Before Kissinger

Robert Keatley

My first trip to China apparently began in Montreal.

It was April 1971, and the American ping-pong team had just been invited to China, opening the public part of the complex diplomacy that eventually brought Richard Nixon to Beijing and...

My First Trip
12.03.12

A China Frontier: Once the Border of Borders

Orville Schell

In 1961, when I first arrived in Hong Kong as an aspiring young China scholar, there was something deeply seductive about the way this small British enclave of capitalism clung like a barnacle to the enormity of China’s socialist revolution....

My First Trip
10.24.12

Struggling with Antonioni

Isabel Hilton

My first sight of Beijing was puzzling. It was October 1973, at the end of a very long flight, and the city seemed so dark I could hardly believe we had arrived.

In those days, flights to China were not allowed to cross Soviet airspace—...

My First Trip
09.24.12

Witnessing the Cultural Revolution at its Dawn

John Hawkins

To this day, I am not sure why the Chinese government approved my request to visit the PRC in the summer of 1966.

On a hot and humid early August Sunday, a fellow student from the University of Hawaii and I walked across the border in Hong...

My First Trip
07.09.12

Busman’s Holiday

Arthur Waldron

The train from the old Kowloon station rumbled as it passed the Chinese border fence on its way to Canton and came to a lurching halt. It was a late summer day in 1981; I was thirty-two years old and now, as I reflected with deep satisfaction, no...

My First Trip
01.19.12

Looking Back from Age Ninety

Sidney Rittenberg

May 1944: Based on a language aptitude test, I was taken out of the infantry, training in the Oregon snows, and shipped down to sunny Stanford, to be trained in Japanese. I opted for Chinese instead, thinking this would bring me home earlier. And...

My First Trip
01.03.12

The Alternative Route

Karen Smith

Twenty-one years after the fact, my efforts to reconstruct my first trip to China produce a confusion of impressions in which multiple images are fused together and refuse to be unraveled or separated. Having lived in China for nineteen of those...

My First Trip
11.26.11

The Opening Stage of China

Robert A. Scalapino

At the outset of the 1960s, the newly installed Kennedy administration attempted an opening to Beijing. In early 1961, with Secretary of State Dean Rusk in command, an offer was made to exchange journalists, as I had proposed. I had talked with...

My First Trip
11.05.11

My First Return Trip to China

Wei Peh T’i

Thomas Wolfe's admonition that “you can't go home again” notwithstanding, I returned to the land of my birth after an absence of 33 years. I was born in Nanjing and spent a good part of my childhood in Chongqing. In November 1937, Japanese forces...

My First Trip
09.30.11

With Nixon in China

Chas W. Freeman

On a chill, gray Monday morning, on February 21, 1972, I stood on the steps of the old Hongqiao Airport terminal. I had arrived in Shanghai twenty minutes in advance of President Nixon. I was on the backup plane, which arrived first, so I...

My First Trip
09.24.11

An Australian Gets to Beijing, 1964

Ross Terrill

In the early 1960s, few Westerners set foot in the People’s Republic of China. Australians needed permission from their own government to go there. Some got a green light, but Beijing guarded visas for people from non-Communist countries like...

My First Trip
09.17.11

Coming Home to a New Place Each Time

Liu Heung Shing

As a Hong Kong-born Chinese who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, it’s hard to pinpoint my first trip to China; at least, one that I remember clearly, for my real first trip was as a toddler, in 1953 in the arms of my mother who carried me to her...

My First Trip
09.10.11

Deng's Heyday

Ian Johnson

When I began thinking about writing this piece, my first trip to China in 1984 had seemed like a disappointment. Unlike today, this was the China of Great Events: the launch of bold reforms and an era of intellectual ferment unlike any since....

My First Trip
09.03.11

The Missionary Spirit Dies Hard

Jerome A. Cohen

I started studying the Chinese language August 15, 1960 at 9 am. Confucius said "Establish yourself at thirty," and, having just celebrated my thirtieth birthday, I decided he was right. I would not be allowed to visit China, however, until May...

My First Trip
07.30.11

My Long March from Mao to Now

Jan Wong

In my third year at McGill University in Montreal, a much older, married classmate suggested the two of us go to China during our summer vacation. I was 19; she was probably all of 25. When we applied for visas, she, a white Australian, was...

My First Trip
07.09.11

Nandehutu

Andrew J. Nathan

In 1972, a man named Jack Chen showed up in New York. He was the younger son of Eugene Chen, who had been an associate of Sun Yat-sen’s and intermittently foreign minister for various GMD governments. Jack’s mother was Trinidadian. He grew up...

My First Trip
05.14.11

Let the Devil Take the Hindmost

Lois Snow

China became part of my life when I met and married Edgar Snow. I had read Red Star Over China long before I knew the author but the years that followed were largely devoted to my acting career in New York. China was rather remote from...

My First Trip
04.16.11

The First American Official to Visit China since 1949

Winston Lord

Certainly, the single most dramatic event that I've been involved in had to do with the opening to China in the early 1970s. In my entire career the question of relations with China has been the most important, including not only the work I did...

My First Trip
02.19.11

Dawn in China

Perry Link

My father was a radical leftist professor. He led study tours to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and later admired Mao Zedong. That influence, in addition to the passion in the late 1960s and early 1970s within the American student movement against...

My First Trip
01.22.11

Finding the Truth about Rural China

Edward Friedman

In May 1978, at age 40, accompanied by three colleagues who had already been to China, I made my first trip to the PRC. I was a critical and independent member of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the American Civil Liberties Union....