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Living with Change

The traffic was maddening. I had two choices in getting to work on time or near to it at 8 a.m. I could leave my house at 5:30 a.m. before the heavy rush hour and get to work at about 7 a.m. or leave at about 7:30 a.m. and arrive at the office a bit late at 8:10 a.m. Leaving at any other time would mean a two-hour trip with no greater certainty of arriving on time.

Either way there would be delays in trying to get from my home to the feeder road and to the freeway and then from the freeway entrance ramp to my office, a 20-minute trip at 2 a.m. in the morning, but not less than an hour during rush hours and often more.

I chose to begin my trek at 7:30 a.m.

The commute gave me plenty of time to gawk at people in other cars. Most were locals, black, white and brown, yet others appeared to be from places all around the world. There was an Arab in a dishdash, a Hispanic fellow in a cowboy hat, whose pickup truck had license plates from Mexico, various Asians. From time to time there were mad gesticulations as cars suddenly changed lanes without notice; horns were honked, and fights sometimes broke out when fenders got crumpled and tempers flared.

Gasoline cost a fortune, and this was doubly annoying when you were using it to simply cool your heels in traffic, while spewing auto exhaust fumes into already polluted air. It reeked of idiocy, this way of living.

The dollar? Well, it didn’t go very far.

There was trouble everywhere it seemed; some people were even talking about boycotting the Olympic Games, although a previous boycott had been a disaster, accomplishing nothing. I sometimes wondered how these or other world events might affect my next sales trip or even my career. The future for me and my family seemed quite uncertain. In fact, it was.

The setting for all of this in 1983–84 is now a composite in my mind. The infamous 1980s oil and real estate bust was about to slam Houston, Texas, like an economic hurricane, revealing all of its weaknesses and insensibilities and prompting my own switch to journalism.

I often compare my thoughts and feelings of that time in Houston with the Beijing of today. In fact, when I returned to China in 2004, I came from the very same city, where freeways now move traffic along quite well even during rush hours and where mass transit is being used to ease the commute for thousands of downtown workers and people who use its airports each day. There was even a new light-rail line when I left that conveniently connected the downtown area with recreational areas such as the Houston Zoo and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. But, of course, nothing on the scale of what’s happening in Beijing.

Back then, no one had much trust in the officials’ assertions that Houston’s worst problems could be and would be fixed, that problems such as racism and crime would be curbed or that traffic would be eased.

The officials’ request to “give us some time,” fell on deaf ears. Yet, despite twists and turns, the job got done, and Houston was a much more open and accessible city, with a much more diverse economy and better quality of life when I departed in 2004 than it was 20 years before.

And yes, the Olympics in Los Angeles went on just as planned, with China’s flag flying alongside those of the other teams of the world. Everyone had a good time, history was made, and along the way, people around the world learned a lot more about how the United States really was: except, of course, those who didn’t show up at all.