My father couldn’t join us on the journey to America. My mother had been granted a student visa to study music in California. I was later told that someone in the US Embassy took pity on her and allowed me and my sister, 11 and 6, to go along as family. For me, it felt like we were fleeing a sinking ship and my father had given us the only life raft, with room enough for just three.

My parents had married out of political convenience. On their wedding day there were no rings, no white gown, no walking down the aisle. My mother and father bowed three times in front of a portrait of Chairman Mao and passed out hard candies to their guests. Their marriage seemed doomed from the start. Soon after the wedding, my mother was sent to a labour camp along with her entire school of elite musicians.

The rest of their marriage was defined by long physical separations as well as emotional distance that grew with time. So it probably was no surprise that my mother jumped at the chance to start her life over in America.

As a child, I blamed the family breakup on President Nixon. His historic 1972 trip to the Middle Kingdom set the stage for the normalisation of relations in 1978 between Washington and Beijing. With that came the opening of China to the outside world, and we were among the very first to bolt.

My mother raised us by herself in northern California, where she gave piano lessons in our living room and drove her beat-up Ford Pinto at night to play Chopin and Send in the Clowns at restaurants and hotel lobbies to supplement our meager income. A trip to China once every four years for her two kids was all she could afford. But she wouldn’t come along—she refused to set foot in China again until the 1990s. In 2000, I came back to China as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. The country had changed beyond recognition.

... contd.