Chinese TV is full of languid, pouting skinny models and small-time actors with Taiwanese accents, dressed up like Japanese cartoon characters and playing the fool. These opium-addict-looking models would be deemed totally unhealthy by the Old Revolutionary beauty standard. After all, China suffered two humiliating opium wars. And despite winning the civil war that drove the Nationalists off the Chinese mainland and onto bucolic Taiwan over fifty years ago, mainlanders now consider a Taiwanese accent a fashion asset. You can't think of China with logic.

When I walk along Beijing Street, I run into one Starbucks after another. It seems there are more Starbucks in Beijing than in Berkeley. There is even one in the Forbidden Palace! I see fashionable women in miniskirts talking into mobile phones as they ride their bicycles. Miniskirts and bicycles: socialism with Chinese characteristics. And there are more and more people who look overweight, even by American standards. Young people wear jeans and cotton T-shirts. They consider this the new fashion, although their parents still think cotton is too cheap a fabric for clothes. Boys are growing their hair long and girls are cutting their hair short. Shop signs are in English, with laughable mistakes throughout. Everyone uses Windows 2000 on their computers. Even my retired grandfather knows how to search for fortune-tellers on Yahoo. China 's changes have taken me by surprise.

Luckily I have my childhood friends Lulu and Beibei to reacclimate me to the Chinese way. Lulu and Beibei were my old schoolmates from Beijing 's Jingshan School. Beibei is seven years older than me, and Lulu is four years older. Jingshan included grades one to twelve all on the same school grounds. The three of us met fighting with the boys over the Ping-Pong table.