In 1981, I had one of the biggest strokes of luck of my life. I had long dreamed of visiting China, but access was restricted to tightly controlled tour groups and an elite band of  ''foreign experts'' who managed to find work in one of the Chinese work units as editors or translators. It was a period when China and the West, like two giant craft docking in deep space, were reengaging after the long isolation of the Cultural Revolution and the Gang of Four period. At that time, I was a very young ESL teacher and I saw an advertisement for a teaching job with an Australian college which had won an inter-government contract to supply ESL support to the Number 2 Foreign Language Institute in Beijing. I applied, and to my astonishment, got the job.

Chinese border officials these days are encouraged to be welcoming, and you can even rate their performance at the airport gate. I don' know what their riding instructions were in 1982, but I do know that Capital Airport had all the cordial charm of Ellis Island. As my passport was stamped, I gave the border guard a smile and launched my single word of Chinese: ''Xie xie.''She welcomed me with a look that would have scared a stone lion.

Sightseeing was a mixture of good and bad. Except for the demolition of the Beijing city walls, which had happened in the 1950s, most of the structures of the old Ming dynasty city of Beijing remained in place. All the old hutong neighborhoods still stood: little did we know that within a dozen years, most of them would be gone. Of course, many of the temples and historic houses open today were off limits, having been converted to offices, factories and work units during the 1960s. But with an old guidebook in hand, I would sidle along Beijing streets muffled in an enormous army greatcoat, and peek through official gateways trying to imagine the princely mansion that once stood within.

Tourists -foreign and Chinese -were so rare in those days that visiting the officially open monuments was bliss. I vividly remember my first trip to the Forbidden City, when I stood in the courtyard in front of the Hall of Celestial Harmony, and I was the only person there. The same thing happened at the Temple of Heaven. My father paid a visit to Beijing while I was there, and I still treasure a photo of him standing in front of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest, alone except for a couple of passers-by in the background. Try getting that shot today! 

My students, who were mature-age scientists being prepared for work experience placements in Australia, were wildly keen, with excellent written English, but had literally never had an English conversation. Through the class monitor, I funneled my solution: I would lunch with a different group of four each day, and we would ...talk.

Fine idea, he said, but lunch with 20 would be more efficient. I obstinately insisted: I wanted to meet with just four students and have a real conversation. Daily, the class monitor' objections piled up. It would distract the students; some would learn words that others did not know; I would get tired and fall ill. I refused to listen, and finally I gave an ultimatum: I would have the first of these lunches tomorrow. 

At lunchtime the next day, the three oldest students and the monitor appeared. Anguished, they explained that what I wanted was not possible: please drop it. I was so young and green that I had allowed my enthusiasm for my students'progress to blind me to political reality. In those days, uncontrolled contact between foreigners and Chinese was not permissible. Looking back, it's hard to credit my own bone-headedness.

I did form some wonderfully rewarding friendships, in spite of the barriers to contact. My efforts to learn Chinese were less successful. Private schools didn't exist, and freelance tutoring was forbidden. To make matters worse, there were no pinyin-based English-Chinese dictionaries. (The first one to be published appeared the year after I left, to my chagrin.)

My main mode of transportation was by bike. I had heard that the subway existed, but it appeared on no maps that I had access to, and anyway the system was off-limits to foreigners: I never conclusively identified a single station. There were no private cars -  all were the property of work units. Ordinary Chinese would work hard to get access to these cars for private errands, and their efforts reached their climax each year around cabbage time.

In those days, Beijingers got through the winter on cabbages, which were stored beneath quilts in vast mounds under stairwells, behind apartments or in purpose-dug pits. In autumn, every kind of conveyance could be seen groaning with bai cai. One day one of our work team's two smart new Toyotas went out of service with a ''mechanical problem'' It returned a week later, littered with cabbage leaves, and with a cabbage smell in the upholstery that lasted until spring.

Seeing that job advertisement all those years ago changed my life. I only spent 14 months in Beijing, but it changed me forever. My fascination for China has never waned, and it finally took me back to Beijing in 2004.

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Keywords: Expat Beijing