"There's no place you can't go, only places you haven't been." As I sat awaiting takeoff from Beijing airport to Chengdu, my eye was suddenly drawn to this slogan in a magazine advertisement. In the US, I usually ignore maga-zine ads. But in the five days I'd been in Beijing, I'd been fascinated by the signs and advertisements I saw around town.

　　I'm an American, a big-nosed, blue-eyed, blond laowai. By destiny or circumstance, I've been fascinated by China since I was a little girl. My interest led me to study Chinese in college, spend a year in Taiwan and eventually to work for an American trading company in Beijing.

　　I first arrived in China in December 1978, just as Sino-American relations were being normalized. From 1979 to 1985 I spent most of my time in Beijing, until a tall handsome Texan won my heart and I went back to the US to marry and build a home. I didn't return to China after that, and rarely thought about China; eventually I even for-got most of my Chinese. China slowly receded from my American life.

　　But a close American friend of mine had also worked in China. Sometimes we talked about our China experi-ences, which we felt were the most interesting of our lives. We promised we would someday return. My friend wanted her teenage children to have a similar China experience. So finally we decided 2001 would be the year of our China va-cation. I prepared for the trip by brushing up on my Chinese with the help of a tutor, a woman from Tianjin who lives in our small town in Texas.

　　Vacationing in China was a new experience. In Bei-jing in the 1980s, we felt like birds in a cage. At that time foreigners couldn't travel at will around the country. My few trips outside Beijing were usually "business only". Few Chinese cities were open to foreigners, and we needed trav-el permits everywhere we went. Airline flights were few, tickets were hard to get and they cost more for us than for Chinese citizens. Worst of all, our interactions with Chinese people were extremely limited. Although I could speak some Chinese, we couldn't chat freely with local people. For example, two men stood at the door of the hotelswhereswe lived, challenging every Chinese who entered. You①could say that our China experience was shallow. We hoped for a deeper kind of experience in 2001.

　　In my memory, Beijing was like a black-and-white photograph. Few cars were on the streets, only bicycles. Everyone wore dark blue clothing. In the parks, the ground was bare of even a blade of grass. The gray buildings all looked alike. But when I stepped off the plane in Beijing on 20 September 2001, the black-and-white photograph ex-plodedsintosbright color and came to life. Impressive new high-rise buildings lined the streets, which were jammed with buses, trucks, and private cars. People wearing color-ful clothing thronged the department stores and bookstores. Coffee houses, fast-food joints, and every kind of restaurant beckoned us to try every kind of food. Small children played happily in verdant parks. Is this Beijing, I wondered, or Hong Kong? I walked and gawked, like a peasant visiting the city for the first time.

　　Because I had seen the China of 20 years ago, I could compare the old with the new. The changes in material cir-cumstances were enormous, and easy to recognize. But I wanted to understand the deeper changes - in people's thinking, attitudes, lifestyles. But how could a foreigner penetrate the surface, to seesintosthe Chinese state of mind? Arriving in Beijing, I couldn't help but notice the ads and signs everywhere. So I thought, could I use them to under-stand today's China?

　　For example, the magazine slogan I saw on the plane advertised a sports utility vehicle (SUV) produced by a Chi-nese-American joint venture. I don't know who thought up the slogan, but he couldn't have imagined the unintended meaning this foreigner would glean from it. For one thing,②it showed how much automobile technology in China had improved. Twenty years ago there were only a couple of car styles in China, and they were ugly and uncomfortable. But the SUV in the magazine ad looked just like the ones I see every day on Texas roads. So then I wondered, who is the ad targeting, who is the buyer? Twenty years ago, cars were owned only by organizations; private individuals couldn't buy them. Now the standard of living was much higher, and people could buy cars if they could afford them. But this progress brought new problems: With all the cars, traffic was getting worse and worse, and pollution was ter-rible. This problem is all too③familiar in the US, and I'm afraid our citizens are becoming more alike in this regard!(to be continued)