Last week I talked about the horrific experience of using the public toilet at the Ming Tombs in Beijing back in my school days. This culture shock is still vivid in my mind thirty years later. However, this was not my first China shock.
My first was in 1978, during a family trip to Guangzhou when I was eight.
It was shortly after the Cultural Revolution when China was under the transitional regime of Hua Guofeng. The Kowloon-Canton through train service was not resumed until the next year, and passengers had to change trains at Shenzhen in order to get to Guangzhou. The joint inspection station was only completed in 1985; before that, passengers had to climb through the trains to get across the Sino-British border, which was not easy for travelers carrying a lot of luggage and goods to support their motherland….