I was born in a Beijing that has vanished. The way my mother tells it, I forced my way into the world a month early so my birthday would be associated with the biggest political festival of the year. It was the early autumn of 1968, and as revelers shouted “Long live Chairman Mao,” my parents raced to a hospital during a parade commemorating the birth of communist China. As my mother screamed in pain, fireworks lighted the sky over Tiananmen Square.

Like a ghost, I had returned to the land of my birth after 20 years in America, not as a comrade but as a correspondent for an American newspaper. Officially, I was a foreigner dispatched here to tell the story of a changing China. In my heart, it was also a homecoming, a time to recapture memories of my childhood in a lost world.

It could have been easy to forget that I grew up in Beijing. No trace left of the Soviet-style apartment where I lived, the classroom where I unknowingly snitched on my mother, the school where I trained as a diver but failed miserably to serve my country.

As I come to the end of my eight-year tour, my mind swims with the tales of people I have met and what they tell me about China. But rarely have I paused to consider my own story as part of the tapestry of change.

The first time I left Beijing I thought I’d never go back. Not that I didn’t want to, but because it seemed impossible. Chinese people rarely travelled in the 1970s. Going abroad was like flying to the moon. Even if it could happen, you had to be prepared to be gone forever, leaving behind the people you loved.

... contd.