It was 1974 in Hong Kong when a colleague showed me her family's business at Aberdeen.  They made votive candles, she said, so I was expecting a storefront shop in one of the buildings.  I was shown a highly mechanized production of candles for Hallmark and the operation made them afford a 20-story building when Aberdeen was just a fishing village.  They also lived in a compound on classy Pok Fu Lam Rd.  It did not hurt that her father also traded the ingredients for making candles into what cities use for fireworks and armies used for armaments.

 

She was the eldest in the family who attended college in Regina, Saskatchewan, cut short when her father died.  She wanted the best for her family.   She wanted to bring it out of HK as Britain and China began talking about the return of the colony to Beijing's administration.  I met her in the Philippines on her first trip to scout possible investment in real estate.  She had no qualms about China.  In fact, she had the classical "round face" of the Tang Dynasty, and the full plump body to go with it!

 

I came through Kowloon nine years earlier on my voyage to San Francisco as a student bound for the US via Kobe, Yokohama, Honolulu before going under the Golden Gate.  I remember being asked when I was eight after I opened a Postal Savings Bank account that my mother equaled any deposits I made, what I would do with the money.  I answered, "I will take a trip to China."  I was twenty when I made the trip to Hong Kong.  The coolie-drawn rickshaw and the deceptively rowdy but well-orchestrated sidewalk chow mien noodle shops at night were China enough to my imagination.

 

In 1989, I finally visited the mainland, hitting Beijing's Tiananmen Square and its Forbidden City four months after the June workers' uprising, the Xi'an of Qin Shi Huangdi's terracotta army, then Shanghai with the Bund looking abandoned and dilapidated, Huangpu overcrowded and the French Quarters neglected, to the well-tended gardens in Suzhou and the tranquil West Lake of Hangzhou.  It was an experience traversing the space by air and rail when Deng Xiao Peng and China went into reform and opening up in earnest.

 

I was in and out of HK in the '70s and early 80s, then in and out of the mainland since '89 to the present.  Thus, it came as a big surprise to read the Oct. 5 online edition of Time Magazine quote David Shambaugh of George Washington U's China program as telling the New York Times that China was going through its most repressive period in 25 years.  That would be since 1989 when I first visited Beijing.