Mao to Now

People are speaking out now. A year ago the regime suspended its old rules for foreign journalists. Until October 2008, we can talk to anyone willing to be interviewed, without seeking permission from local authorities. As soon as the new rules took effect in January 2007, my phone rang. It was an activist named Liu Anjun, who had spent two years in jail for "disturbing public order," inviting me to visit him and do a story. "Everyone else is being interviewed," he urged. "Why don't you come and talk with me, too?" I still recall the Gang's show trial, and I worry about what will happen after October. But senior Beijing Olympics official Tu Mingde told me he has faith: "China can only continue to open up. There's no going back."

Perhaps he's right. Outside my kitchen window the country's future is under construction. Each morning as I sip my coffee I watch the steady rise of Beijing's tallest building, the China World Trade Center Phase 3. Next to it stands the crazy, angular CCTV tower designed by Rem Koolhaas. Many Chinese still can't believe it's a stable structure. From my western balcony I see parks, subway stations and luxury apartments where people once struggled for a living in squalid low-rise hovels. At night, decorative lights trace fanciful shapes—palm trees, rainbows, you name it—above the intersection where the PLA massed its tanks in 1989.

And society has changed as radically as the skyline. Footloose expatriates like me once seemed like creatures from space, even when ethnically Chinese. Now Westerners can find all sorts of niche jobs, like an American in Shanghai who plays the role of an ordained Christian minister at splashy weddings for Chinese couples acting out a church ceremony as part of their celebration. But the real proof of how things have changed is the rising flood of Chinese returning home from life in the West. People here call them "sea turtles" because of their migrations back and forth across the ocean. Many fear missing out on the newest developments if they stay away too long. My niece's husband, who grew up in Beijing but met his bride-to-be in California, still marvels at the pace of things in China. "I came back from the States after a couple years and didn't even know what my friends were talking about," he says. "What did they mean by business 'platforms'?"

My father, turning 91 this Christmas, insists he'll be in Beijing for the Games. He can expect to find much of our clan waiting for him. Guangyuan's daughter Joyce, her husband and their two kids are among the "sea turtles" who live here now. Guangyuan, now retired, spends much of his time in Suzhou, his old hometown. After years of work in the States, he and his wife live comfortably in a 3,000-square-foot penthouse apartment there; it has a rooftop terrace where they like to watch night fall in the charmed city below. Their old hovel on Jade Phoenix Lane was torn down years ago to make way for a shopping mall. But it is good, they say, to be home.

© 2007