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PrefaceBefore
I left for the US in 1986, I lived in Beijing, Shanghai and
Guangzhou-three of China's biggest metropolises-and visited the
terra-cotta army in Xi' an, and the karst mountains and Li River in
Guilin.
That was all I saw of China.
Fast forward 16 years, I was
back in China. I have had many opportunities to visit many more cities
and provinces. It took a long absence and an outsider's perspective to
appreciate what I did not know before or what I took for granted. This
was a country I thought I knew but never learned to embrace.
The
Chinese have a saying: Read ten thousand volumes and travel ten thousand
miles. Having grown up in the latter half of the Cultural Revolution, I
missed much of the reading, but I'm determined to make up for it with
as much travel as possible. In a few short years, I have covered three
quarters of the country's provinces, autonomous regions and central
governmentled municipalities.
Every place is a revelation.
I' ve
learned to leave behind any presumptions associated with a place. The
biggest surprise has always been whenever I approach a location with a
blank mind, ready to absorb the sights and sounds afresh and hear locals
tell their stories.
