Growing up in China! People often ask if I liked growing up in China. Did it feel different? Different from what? How could it feel different if the sights and sounds, and, yes, even the pungent smells had always been there in my life from the time I was born? Now, looking back on it, I suppose I can see where it was different compared to growing up in America, and perhaps can understand why people might ask. But it wasn’t different back then. No, it wasn’t then at all. Even when we were caught up in the swirl of things happening in China on a national scale, the Communist uprising, the attacks by Japan that presaged World War II, things that actually affected my life more directly in one way or another, I was only a child busy with growing up in my own little world, taking my own personal small footsteps in the Land of the Dragon.