Three years in this city changed my life and my view of the world

In 1989, not long after I’d graduated from university and while working in an office in Geneva, a schoolmate died of a brain tumour. I decided then that I couldn’t just slip into the easy life. I wanted to escape, and in 1989, few places for an escape were as different from Switzerland as China.

I was naive. I’d never been beyond Europe. I’d been seduced by Bernardo Bertolucci’s epic movie The Last Emperor, and thought China would provide upturned eaves, dragon-embroidered robes and revolutionary idealism.

When I arrived in Chengdu to teach English, I discovered China was dusty, dark from lack of streetlights and featureless, with grey buildings under grey skies. Shoals of people in blue cotton jackets pedalled furiously on bicycles.

The day I was deposited at my flat at Sichuan University, I was stunned by the enormity of the decision that had brought me there. I couldn’t speak Chinese, I’d never had Chinese food, and I had little idea how to teach English.

But the next three years in China changed my life. It turned me into a Sinophile and opened me to another view of the world. It gave me an insider’s appreciation of an astonishing culture and a nation that would be squarely in the news for decades.

I loved the steep learning curve. I’d been bored at actual university. Chengdu was the university of life, an intellectual adventure that challenged me every day.

I’ve never had a better social life. I made close friends with students barely younger than me. The expats at Sichuan University created our own merriment in a city where there was barely any, and no English-language television. We were like Edwardians, forced into parlour games and parties and genteel excursions to view peach blossoms.

Nobody in China now cares about foreigners, but back then we were rare and caused commotion. The constant attention was too much, yet movie-star flattering. I was admired and mollycoddled like a blond panda, and paid six times a Chinese teacher’s salary.

Chengdu was mid-sized and old-fashioned, a city of wobbling bicycles, antimacassars and spittoons, skinny soldiers in baggy pea-green trousers, old ladies who leapt from intersections to harangue me about my bicycle-riding etiquette. It was barbershops that turned into late-night hotpot restaurants, and street markets hung with beheaded ducks.

Somewhere beneath China’s frenzy, Chengdu’s spirit remains. Going back reminds me of my younger spirit, too.

I whiled away afternoons at Wenshu Monastery’s vegetarian restaurant, watched by the God of Wisdom and curious locals. Or in Wangjiang Park by the university campus, cracking nuts and slurping green tea from a lidded bowl. Huge stands of bamboo creaked, and dancing ladies snapped their fans.

I lived in Chengdu just as China was on the cusp of great changes. Getting rich was newly glorious, small businesses encouraged, and modernisation afoot.

I rode the first escalators in Chengdu with farmers agog at the witchcraft of a moving staircase. I ate pizza in a new eatery – the only Western food in three years. My students were abandoning Mao jackets for pink coats and laughed at my black Chinese slippers, otherwise only worn by old folk.

The past is absolutely another country in China. For a very long time, although I returned to China, I never went back to Chengdu. Why disturb happy memories? You can’t relive the good old days.

Besides, I knew how fast and furiously China was changing. I feared my old haunts would be crushed beneath skyscrapers and shopping malls.

But I did go back, eventually, lured by a reunion of old friends. The city centre and many of the bicycles had gone but, surprisingly, Sichuan University campus remained almost unchanged. The foreigners’ compound – nicknamed the Panda Park by students – now housed retired professors. I nearly burst into tears outside the peeling yellow door to my flat.

But it was a happy reunion, and I’ve kept going back since. I’ve made peace with my nostalgia for a place and time and youth that will never return.

In many ways, my happy place no longer exists. New China is nothing like the old, when the only Western products were instant coffee and Coca-Cola. New China is deluged in materialism. It accelerates, go-gets, never pauses, and is no longer quite my bowl of green tea.

But Chengdu remains a slower, low-rise, relatively untouristed place. The Sichuanese are considered laid-back and laissez-faire by Chinese standards. The city has vast new suburbs, an underground and fashion shops galore, yet clings to its old-fashioned parks, teahouses and understated charms.

Somewhere beneath China’s frenzy, Chengdu’s spirit remains. Going back reminds me of my younger spirit, too. A familiar whiff of dust, a clink of teacups, the eye sting of spicy Sichuan cooking, and I’m in love with Chengdu all over again.