I remember my first visit to China in the mid-1990s with great emotion. Since I was a child I had dreamed of standing on the Great Wall of China and this dream was about to become a reality.
I flew from Edinburgh to Beijing and I remember chatting with the girl next to me who was en route to China to visit her brother and this was her first plane ride! I landed at the Beijing airport and, following the advice of friends who lived in China and whom I would meet later, I left the airport to take a taxi.
The ride from the airport to the hotel was memorable to say the least – hundreds of cars and bikes vying for space on the road. These were the days before car insurance was available and if you were unlucky enough to have an accident, you had to pull over to the side of the road and negotiate with each other about the cost of the damages and who was at fault. I arrived safely at the hotel, which was fantastic, a Japanese/Chinese joint venture which, when you looked around, was, at the time, the height of luxury! The skyscrapers that now fill the skyline were nowhere to be seen and probably hadn’t even been thought of yet. Excited, I headed towards Tiananmen Square, which was just a short walk away. The air of the city in midsummer seemed to be covered with a mist. Walking to Tiananmen Square was an adventure in itself.
These were the days before Westerners came to China in such large numbers as there are today. Being tall and very fair-skinned, everyone stopped to look at me. The children would approach me very nervously and touch me or simply scream in horror at my presence. They were all remembering the stories their parents had told them about the ‘White Devils’ that existed but had never been seen.
I soon got used to the stars and the screaming and the endless requests to photograph me! I stopped in Tiananmen Square to watch old men fly their kites effortlessly in seemingly still air. Then silence descended on the square and the huge gates of Tiananmen Square opened and the Red Army in all its glory came out like every night to the cheers of the waiting crowd: were the actions of one nation really oppressed?