Dec
27
Adventures of a Pakistani Boy in Peking, 1966-68
Filed Under China, Pakistan | 4 Comments
by Imran H. Khan
On a drizzly cold night in Dec of 1965 I found myself traveling with my father to see the Tienanmen Square from our Sinchou hotel located close to the old city. I had just arrived from Pakistan via Canton on an ex-PIA Viscount turbo-prop of CAAC, the Chinese airline, and it seemed that I had landed on an alien planet. Everything was different here. The bread was white (steamed bread), music was string percussion, no one spoke English and bicycles were everywhere. Traveling on a two piece electric bus that silently carried the huddled Chinese in their quilt coats was a novelty for an eleven year old. I had seen photos of the Tienamen Square, but experiencing it at night for the first time with well light anchor buildings was a sensory overload. This was my introduction to the Pre-Cultural Revolution China, where my sense of novelty was only matched by the curiosity Chinese around me. I later on got to realized that I was only a handful of foreigners in the city and country where PIA’s Boeing 707 was the only jet servicing the whole country. Here was a dark kid with a pointy nose in a mass of not so dark and not so pointy nosed people. Read more