When I was 10 years old, my parents did something crazy.
They took our family on a month-long trip to China.
Now, on the face of it, this might not sound so outlandish. People go on exotic vacations all the time. And China is an emergent tourist destination, filled with the capitalist façade of the western world — particularly in the years since it hosted the 2008 Olympics.
But this was in 1998. And it was the first trip outside the United States for both me and my sister, who was 7 at the time.
So, yeah. It was pretty crazy.
The unusual decision my parents made becomes more sensible with context.
When I was six months old, my parents hosted a young woman from the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, who had emigrated to the U.S. with a Green Card. She became an integral part of our family, quickly gaining the honorary title of “Chinese sister.” She served as my babysitter initially, and later attended college in Vermont.
After graduation, she landed a position with JP Morgan in Hong Kong. Yet, she would make the long trek back to New York at least once a year to visit us.
After a few years, she approached my parents with a novel proposal. What it we all rendezvoused in China?
Hong Kong had been transferred from British to Chinese rule by then, enabling easier travel between the mainland and the territory. So, our Chinese sister could travel with us on much of our journey. She also offered to cover the round-trip plane tickets for my sister and myself — which was no small feat.
The plan was set. It was on to China.
In the weeks before our journey to the Far East, I felt anxious. I had only ventured outside of the Northeast twice, and one of those trips happened when I was too young to remember it. I had only been on an airplane a handful of times, and never for more than 6 hours. And I knew nothing of life outside of the U.S., aside from what I’d seen in a few movies.
My father tried to reassure me, but he was also brutally honest about what to expect. He said that instead of toilets, some Chinese restrooms just had holes in the ground to squat over. (This turned out to be true, but not on a wide scale.) He said that not everyone in China would understand English. (This was a massive understatement.) And he said many restaurants would not have forks. (This also turned out to be true, so we brought a reusable plastic silverware kit with us.)
All of this only exacerbated my anxiety, so I tried not to think about the trip until I was en route. That was probably for the best, because I had no idea what I was in for.
The journey started with a cross-country flight to San Francisco. After a day venturing around the City by the Bay, we got on a 2 AM flight to South Korea.
The Transpacific flight felt like an eternity. I stayed awake the entire time, watching the GPS tracker on the overhead TV screens and looking down at the clouds and the ocean below. By the time we landed in Seoul, I was exhausted. Yet, the morning sun was blinding, so I forced myself to stay awake after our subsequent flight to Beijing took off.
After a couple more hours of staring out an airplane window at the sea and sky, I heard an announcement from the captain asking us to prepare for landing. I was confused, because all I saw around us was a giant cloud. Surely, we couldn’t be about to land. Could we?
We descended through the cloud, and I heard the landing gear deploy. At the last second, the clouds cleared and I saw the runway come into view. We touched down safely and the plane taxied over to a dilapidated airport terminal.
Welcome to China.
I would soon learn that the cloud the airplane had descended through was no cloud at all. It was actually haze from China’s rampant pollution.
That haze never really subsided. During our week in Beijing, there was sunshine in the forecast on all but one day (when it rained). But I never saw blue skies. It just looked dreary and overcast.
I had never seen such thick pollution before. And I’ve yet to see it since.
But the haze was only the tip of the iceberg. After we got to the hotel from the airport, my sister and I took a nap. Suddenly, our mother woke us up, insisting that we go for an afternoon walk to adjust to the time change. It was on this walk that I noticed how different things looked.
There were no glass skyscrapers in our midst. The city buildings looked old and uniform. So did the vehicles roaming the massive boulevards, which were six lanes in each direction.
Crossing the street was an adventure, as drivers seemed to ignore traffic laws at will. We had to join a throng of people to cross some streets, and use underground pedestrian walkways to cross others.
I got the keen sense that we had not only traveled to a new land, but had also traveled back in time. There was a very 1950s feel about 1990s Beijing.
The subsequent days were full of misadventures. We took a Chinese tour bus for a day trip — even though no one on the bus spoke English, and none of us spoke Mandarin. I passed out from dehydration while climbing the Great Wall in the nearly 100 degree heat. And my father argued with a cab driver who didn’t start the meter on his taxi. It turns out the restaurant we were heading to was around the corner, and the taxi driver didn’t want to charge us what amounted to a 5 cent fare.
But ultimately, the strangest thing for me was posing for pictures with strangers. Many people in Beijing had not ever seen an American kid before. One by one, they asked my sister and I to pose for pictures with their children — some in broken English, others through the form of vehement gesturing that transcends language barriers. After a day of this, I felt like Mickey Mouse.
Beijing was an eye-opening experience for me. But there were plenty more surprises to come.
I have no idea what the typical tourist trail was in China in 1998, but I imagine it would include visits to Beijing, Shanghai and the Great Wall.
Our itinerary was different, for two main reasons.
First, we were obliged to travel to Inner Mongolia to meet our Chinese sister’s family.
Second, we had all grown fond of the Sesame Street movie Big Bird In China, in which the iconic bird with the obnoxious voice travels off the beaten path to explore China’s hidden beauty.
So, with these objectives in mind, we broke from the standard tourist script. Instead of boarding a flight to Shanghai, we took an overnight train to Inner Mongolia’s capital, Hohhot.
Hohhot was a prairie outpost compared to Beijing. Yet, in a nation of more than a billion people, even the smaller cities loomed large. Broad boulevards stretched for miles on end, the bike lanes as wide as the main lanes. And apartment buildings stretched as far as the eye could see.
Our Chinese sister’s parents lived in a modest apartment 15 minutes from the center of town. The apartment’s bathroom didn’t have a dedicated shower in the bathroom — just a shower head near the ceiling and a drain in the floor. So, we had to plan out when we were washing up, and when we were taking care of other business.
Sometimes, neither option was available. There were rolling power and water outages; electricity and water pressure were rarely functioning at the same time.
Some of these outages might have come from Hohhot’s daily afternoon thunderstorms, but I believe poor infrastructure played a role as well. After all, the preferred way to remove garbage in Hohhot was to put it in a neighbor’s backyard. That neighbor would then move it to another neighbor’s yard, and so on.
Behind the apartment, contractors worked day and night to build a massive new complex. In the week we were in Hohhot, these workers completed an entire floor. This amount of progress would be seemingly unthinkable back in the U.S., where construction projects seemed to languish for months in the 1990s.
Aside from these tidbits, my most vivid memory from our time in Inner Mongolia was our trip to the grasslands. We took a two-hour car ride into the most remote scenery I’ve ever encountered. Rolling, grassy pastures stretched out to the horizon in every direction, and there was nary a tree in sight. Puffy clouds dropped small shadows on parts of the landscape. Shadows that danced and drifted as the clouds moved across the sky.
We set up in a Yurt — a fortified Mongolian tent with an open roof — and then went on a long horseback ride across the grasslands. Unfortunately, I got heatstroke on the ride, and had to return to the Yurt to recuperate. I slept for 12 hours, missing the spectacle that evening when my father got drunk on a potent barley liquor.
I had never seen my father drunk before, so I was quite confused when I woke up the next morning and noticed he was not acting like himself. My mother alternated between taking care of him and tending to me. I was still feeling the effects of dehydration, so the car ride back to Hohhot was harrowing. But once we got back to the city, we found our form in short order.
Just in time, too. We had a train to catch.
Our next stop on our China tour was Datong. Home to iconic attractions, such as a cave filled with chiseled Buddha statues and a monastery suspended from a cliff, Datong was nonetheless the most backwater city we visited. The streets were barren of the shopping malls I’d seen in Beijing and Hohhot. There weren’t many restaurants. And our hotel was horrid.
Datong was very much a coal town. Dump trucks would barrel by me on the street, covering me in soot. It also seemed quite poor. Homeless people wearing soiled rags begged for change outside the train station, and some of the homeless were women with young children. I had never seen this level of poverty before. It was jarring.
After a few days in Datong, we took an overnight train to Xian. Home to the Terra Cotta warriors — a massive phalanx of porcelain soldiers an ancient emperor commissioned to protect him in the afterlife — Xian was the place where I discovered the phenomenon that is KFC in China. We paid the Colonel a visit so my sister and I could get a taste of home. But we quickly learned that finding a seat in the restaurant would be a difficult proposition. It was strange to see a fast-food joint so packed, but it was also refreshing to see how there was some food the Chinese and I both enjoyed.
Upon leaving Xian, we flew to Guilin in the southern part of the country. Guilin was perched along the winding Li River, surrounded by rice paddies in the shadow of scenic mountains with rounded tops. Big Bird had once visited this area. Now, we were seeing it with our own eyes.
As we cruised in a boat down the Li River to the village of Yangshao, I couldn’t help but think that the scenery was even more beautiful in person than it was on a VHS tape. For the first time in three weeks of travels, I felt comfortable and relaxed in the Far East.
Those happy vibes went away by dinnertime, however. As we sat at a sidewalk restaurant in Yangshao, I noticed that dog and snake were on the menu. I thought it might have been a bad translation to English at first. But then I noticed a caricature of a snake next to the snake dish, and a picture of Snoopy next to the dog item. This was no accident.
I had heard before that people in other countries eat dogs, but seeing it listed on the menu still rattled me. Frankly, it still does today.
Yet, aside from that issue, Guilin and Yangshao were among the more memorable segments of the trip for me. It was the point in the journey where I finally found some inner peace.
The final stop in our journey was Hong Kong. It was refreshing to hear English again, and to see a modern skyline. The weather was hot and steamy, but the city was picturesque, with skyscrapers and a mountain peak rising up from the harbor.
Since the elevation on Hong Kong Island changed so drastically, many people took a series of outdoor escalators from the high-rise apartments up the mountain to the Central Business District. We were staying in our Chinese sister’s apartment on the mountainside, so we rode the escalators right along with the natives when we went sightseeing.
Our time in Hong Kong was jam-packed with activities. We took a speedboat to the then-Portuguese colony of Macau for a day, had dinner on a floating restaurant on a boat anchored offshore, and made an ill-fated trip to an amusement park on a 102 degree day, among other things. All in all, it was the perfect way to end the trip.
As we took the long train ride back to the Hong Kong airport, I was filled with dread. I had come to enjoy my time in China, and was not looking forward to 18 more hours on a plane. Truthfully, I was no longer sure what was real and what was not anymore. Did my life before our trip to China exist? Or was it a figment of my imagination?
After a short flight to Seoul and a much longer flight to New York, I was back in America. The humid summer night air felt hauntingly familiar, everything looked the same as it did before we left. The skyline, the cars, our house, they were all the same as it had been a month before. If not for the pile of New York Times sports sections I’d asked my grandparents to collect for me while I was gone, there would be no sign I’d even left.
I was elated, overwhelmed and confused. I broke down and cried.
I have traveled abroad plenty in the years since our China trip, although I haven’t had my passport stamped for more than a decade now.
I’ve been to Europe and the Middle East. I’ve been to three countries in South America. And I’ve crossed the border to Canada and Mexico.
Yet, I have not returned to the Far East since that seminal journey in 1998.
I know China is far a different place now than it was then. South Korea and Japan, as well. Heading to Asia now would be an entirely different journey than it was before.
Maybe that’s why I have little desire to go.
You see, the trip to China impacted me in ways I can’t fully explain.
I recognized that the moment I came back home and started sobbing. The world hadn’t changed, but my understanding of it certainly had.
Despite all my anxiety about traveling, despite my refusal to eat many of the strange meals , despite my bouts with heatstroke and dehydration, the experience had been invaluable.
Seeing a starkly different place — one filled with poverty, polluted with coal dust and saddled with poor infrastructure — made me recognize just how fortunate I was to enjoy the trappings of American life. Even if those trappings were a blue sky overhead and an electric grid that worked 24-7.
The China of today isn’t saddled with many of the issues it once was. So my experience was as much one of time as it was of place.
I am keenly aware of this fact. And I am appreciative of the time I spent on the other side of the Pacific.
I wouldn’t have done what my parents did. If I were a parent in the 1990s, I wouldn’t have taken my kids to China for their maiden international voyage.
But looking back, I sure am glad they did.