THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY AUGUST 2024 77 put food on the table during World War II, teenage Michael worked in a Shanghai chemical factory for $1 per week. It was minutes before noon on March 1, 1979. The children stood in a semicircle and sang: “… for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain.” Their small voices and those words touched us all. It was a new start: The United States and the People’s Republic of China had established embassies, an epochal event mostly overlooked today. b Standing in the crowd, I thought how far I was from what the gathering resembled, a sedate church picnic remembered from my Iowa childhood. But church picnics would not have had the leaning bamboo poles heavy with firecrackers and an armed State Department security officer looking down from the roof. And, of course, there would have been no foreign correspondents, a half dozen chatting it up with Hong Kong Press Attaché Bill Stubbs. Two People’s Liberation Army guards were at our gate in their lumpy winter uniforms: We were still forbidden foreign territory to Beijing’s residents. But guards or no guards, the isolation of China was ending. Mao’s focus on class struggle and his periodic campaigns against “spiritual pollution” were over. Chinese child prodigies no longer had to muffle their pianos with blankets, fearful of denunciation for playing a bourgeois instrument. Within just three months of the ceremony, Bill Stubbs’ staff had assisted in enrolling 3,000 postdoctoral and graduate students in scientific and technical specializations in American universities. The opening of the embassy coincided with China’s acknowledgment of the need to rebuild. The Roys would return to Beijing again in 1991, when Stape was named U.S. ambassador to the PRC, to find a cosmopolitan city bursting with construction. USLO was ancient history. “For the most part,” Sandy Roy confided to me later, “USLO was an adventure. It was definitely not Little League and ballet classes, but our family would not have traded our three years there for anything.” n
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