By Laurence Brahm 译/谌融

还记得1981年我初到北京时值春末夏初，机场热得像一个大烤炉，身处其中的我汗流不止。机场里没有行李传送带，只能依靠人工抛接。

我记得那时机场的天花板上装饰有红色五角星图案，我走出机场时碰见的每一个人，不论男女，都穿着绿色的军裤或者蓝色的工装裤，再加上一件短袖衬衫。我试着用蹩脚的汉语问路，但没有人回答我，他们只是盯着我。这让我感觉自己像是一个从太空掉落的外星人。

1美元一罐进口可乐

从首都机场通往北京市区的道路又窄又破，我乘坐的大巴一路上坏了好几次，这段路途由此显得格外漫长。

与大多数外国人一样，我在北京的第一站是友谊商店，一家专门接待外国人的五层百货商店。当时，它是长安街上最高的建筑。在友谊商店里，我花了1美元买了一罐进口可乐。我的中国老师得知我花了1美元买了一罐进口可乐后都惊呆了，他们觉得我太堕落了，就连当着我的面也是这样说。在那个年代，中国普通老百姓不能进友谊商店。当然，也没几个人买得起一罐进口可乐。

那时候，大多数中国人根本无钱可用，因为1981年中国的货币流通量极其有限。即便有人手里有钱，他们也没有什么东西可买。除了友谊商店之外，大多数政府运营的商店经常货架空空，或是仅有蓝色或绿色的裤子出售。

Editor’s note: Laurence Brahm, first came to China as a fresh university exchange student from the US in 1981 and he has spent much of the past three and a half decades living and working in the country. He has been a lawyer, a writer, and now he is Founding Director of Himalayan Consensus and a Senior International Fellow at the Center for China and Globalization.

It was late spring when I first arrived in Beijing in 1981. The airport felt like an oven, it was baking in a stifling flat heat. I was sweating. There was no conveyer belt for luggage.

I remember walking out of the cavernous Soviet era airport with art deco red stars on the ceiling, right into Beijing’s broiling summer heat. Everyone in the crowd waiting outside wore either green army or blue worker pants. Men and women alike wore a short sleeve shirt . I tried speaking some broken Mandarin to find my way. Nobody answered. They simply stared at me.

One dollar for a Coke

The old narrow road from Capital Airport into Beijing seemed long. There were poplar trees lining both sides. The bus broke down several times. Each time, everybody got out talking all at once and tried to fix it.

My first stop like most foreigners in those days was the Friendship Store, a five story cavernous department store reserved for foreigners. It was then the tallest building on Chang An Avenue. I bought a Coke. It was imported and cost one dollar.

龙安志（图中）与他的同学和老师们在南开大学，照片拍摄于1981年

My Chinese teachers were distraught that I paid one dollar for a Coke thinking I was totally decadent, and told me so to my face. In those days, ordinary Chinese citizens were not permitted to enter the Friendship Store. And of course, nobody could afford an imported Coke.

简言之，中国人面对的是“匮乏经济”。

身为一名大学交换生，我心怀远大理想，一心想要改善中国的经济状况。同时这也是驱使我每天用一个廉价的白色锡杯灌下一杯口味奇特的上海产速溶咖啡的主要动力所在。但很快，我改成了喝茶。每天，我肩上斜挎着一个绿色的军用包去上汉语课，我相信它将开启化解中国困境的一道大门。

当年，我站在友谊商店里喝可乐时，完全无法想象得到，20年后中国物质匮乏的状况会得到彻底扭转，30年后它成为世界第二大经济体、成为仅次于美国的最强大经济体。

那年的自行车经济

我到中国的第一年，花了好几个月的时间在天津南开大学学习中文。这座古老的工业城市曾在鸦片战争时期遭外国列强侵占，被迫开放为通商口岸。因此，天津市内的主要街道均为欧式建筑风格。

我们班的交换生是1979年中美两国正式建立外交关系后赴华学习的第二批学生。当时，中国的大门刚刚打开，我们感觉自己像是先驱者。中国处于计划经济时代，每一个人的穿着打扮都非常相似：薄而宽松白衬衫，以及绿色军裤。很快，我也入乡随俗，穿上了绿色军裤。

Most Chinese did not have access to money because in 1981 China hardly had any money in circulation. And even if someone had money, there were few commodities to buy.Aside from the Friendship Store, most state-run department stores had empty shelves, or just blue and green pants.

It was an economy of scarcity.

I was a fresh university exchange student, and very idealistic.The idea of improving China’s economic condition started as a vision and quickly became an obsession. It was the main thing that motivated me each day as I filled up a cheap white tin cup with sticky venomous Shanghai produced instant coffee. Soon I learned to drink tea. Slinging a green army bag over my shoulder I went to Mandarin class each day. Determined to learn this language, I was convinced it would be the key to opening up the Pandora’s box that was this nation’s predicament.

Within two decades China would shift from a position of complete scarcity to one of over-supply of virtually every product and service. Three decades later it would become the second largest economy in the world, the most powerful economic force to be reckoned with next to the United States.

To me it was unimaginable that this would happen so quickly.

Bicycle Economics

During my first year in China, I spent a few months in Tianjin studying Mandarin at Nankai University. The old industrial city was one of the treaty ports carved up by foreign colonial powers after the Opium Wars during the Qing Dynasty(1644-1911). So the main streets were European.

Our class of exchange students was only the second wave of Americans to study in China. We felt like pioneers. President Jimmy Carter had just normalized relations with China two years earlier in 1979. Everything was just opening.

It was still a command economy .Everyone wore the same clothes: baggy white shirts so thin you could see through them and green army pants. Soon, I was wearing green army pants.

I bought a bicycle. While a classmate and I were fixing our bikes and replacing another broken part, he pointed to an old farmer, who rode up to the bicycle repair stand. His bicycle was completely assembled from rubbish, tied and soldered together. This frugal ingenuity of the Chinese people struck me, their ability to survive and engineer with so little in

That bicycle was my first glimpse of China’s potential to financially leverage industrial reconstruction. It became my metaphor of where this place was going.

There would be streams of bicycles riding alongside the river that wound through Tianjin’s center. I would be one among everyone riding together. There were traffic lights. We all had to stop our bikes at intersections for the traffic lights. One day I was not paying attention and rode my bike right though the light. Within seconds, my bike was impounded with some kind of really simple bike cuff. The police asked me to make a public confession before all the other bike riders as I had disobeyed a traffic rule. For me this was a de fining moment of cultural identity. I realized that by saying sorry and acknowledging one’s mistake to everyone else, that one earns a different kind of respect. Moreover, it is a more practical way to just get on with other things and make friends out of those that you may have inadvertently offended.

Riding through the streets of Tianjin and going to stores that had no commodities , it occurred to me that money had less meaning in that society. It was hardly in circulation after all.A higher morality in fluenced the way people thought. They cared about respect. That is what that bike incident was all about, a greater social respect than my individual attitude.

Once I paid one mao(ten Chinese cents) more than the stated price for something I bought. The vendor chased me all over the city to give back the change. He finally showed up at the door of my dormitory at Nankai University apologizing for the oversight.

Another time dust entered my contact lens while riding my bike in the crowded street. So I stopped at a little shop and used their broken dirty mirror to re fit the contact lens. In the mirror, over my shoulders, I could see a huge crowd of onlookers had gathered to see what I was doing. Someone asked if it was another magic trick taking my eye out and putting it back.

But such innocence would not last long.After my Mandarin classes were finished, it came time to leave Nankai University. When the school held a banquet for us foreign students,teachers took home the leftovers in tiny metal boxes they had brought with them in baggy green army bags, shouldered over their flimsy shirts that never seemed to fit.

The thought did not even occur to me, as I sold my bike – on the freshly emerging black market. I was not aware that over the next three decades, I would watch China grow out of those army bags and replace them by Prada and Louis Vuitton apparel. （The article was first published on China Daily website on May 31）

我买了一辆自行车。某天，我和一个同学正在修理我们各自的自行车，他突然指向一个正在朝我们骑来的中国农民，他的自行车完全是用捡来的“垃圾”拼凑而成。中国人的节俭和聪明打动了我，他们在逆境里求生存的能力、资源匮乏仍能进行发明创造的能力，更令我惊叹。

那辆自行车让我第一次看到中国进行工业重建的潜能。在我眼中，它成为这个国家前行方向的隐喻。

那时，天津街头汽车很少，只有壮观的自行车“洪流”，我也是自行车大军中的一员。街上有交通灯，在十字路口我们需要停车等待交通灯转换。有一天，我骑车不小心闯了红灯，很快被交警拦下，他要求我就违反交通规则公开认错。对我而言，这是关乎文化认同的决定性时刻。我意识到当众认错会获得一种别样的尊重，它甚至还可以让你与曾经无意中冒犯的人重新做朋友。

骑着自行车穿过天津的大街小巷、逛逛没有什么货品可卖的商店，这让我觉得身处在那样一个社会，金钱的意义实在不大。道德左右人们的思想，他们在意的是尊重。这也是自行车被拦事件给我的启示，社会尊重大于个人态度。

记得有一次我买东西时多付了1毛钱，售货员硬是穿过整座城市、找到我在南开大学的宿舍，为他的工作失误向我道歉，并把多收的钱退还给我。还有一次，我骑车时隐形眼镜进灰了，于是我进了街边一家小店，借用他们的镜子来调整隐形眼镜。在镜子里，我看到自己的身后聚集了一大群路人，他们都满眼好奇地想看看我在做什么。有人问我，我是不是在变魔术，把自己的眼球拿出来又塞回去。

但类似的情景并没有持续太久。中文课程结束后，我们这群外国交换生要离开南开大学了。学校为我们办了一场送别宴会，宴会上剩下的食物被老师们装进小小的铝饭盒，塞到绿色军用包里，挎在永远也不合身的松垮白衬衫上带回家。

我在黑市上卖掉了自行车，当时的我完全想象不到未来30年，自己会亲眼见证中国人肩上的绿色军用包如何演变成了Prada和LV。