2 days ago
- General
- Wall Street Journal
Liberated by the Smiling Giants
I lived in China in the mid-1980s, when it was a much different country. There were no high-rises, few cars and lots of bikes, and people still wore Mao jackets. The small apartment I lived in had about two minutes of hot water at a time, so once in a while I went to a Western hotel where I would sit in the sauna, take a long shower, and have dinner in the coffee shop.
One night in 1986 there was another man sitting on the sauna bench—a businessman from the Netherlands, passing through Beijing. He had been born in Asia, in the Dutch East Indies, today's Indonesia. Judging his age, I asked what happened to him during World War II.
