Welcome to Kind World from W-B-U-R.

My name is Carolyn Reeves, and I'm a historian of China.

It was 1986.

I had graduated from college. I had

studied Chinese, so I was in China looking for a job

which was pretty unusual in the 80s.

Being a foreigner put you in the spotlight.

I was blonde and there were lots and lots of Chinese who had never seen a foreigner.

People are staring at you all the time because you're different.

It had been closed under the Maoist regime and so to go in the 80s you felt like you were stepping into

just a great unknown.

The train station in Canton was a major major hub. This huge concrete space just filled with people and there were those steam trains takkah chukah chu chuu!

It would be like O'Hare when all the flights had been cancelled and there was going to be delays for three days.

Babies and Grandma and everybody wearing mow suits, these blue and gray suits,

a seething mass of humanity.

I'm a New England gal. I do not like the heat, right?

And it was hot.

And so I was wearing just a little sundress that had these little straps with buttons on them.

I'm a full-figured gal, but it was too hot to be wearing underwear. I was not wearing a bra. I was wearing

panties. I don't think that there was much to them. And I had this big, heavy backpack on my back, and I thought, okay, it's time for me to get my ticket out.

And you know how you sort of move your shoulder forward, and then you slip the back pack off your shoulder forward,

and then you slip the backpack off your shoulders.

...