I turned twenty-four while travelling in China alone, in 1986, after the friend I was with had become too miserable to continue. Things had started to sour for her on her first night in Hong Kong, awaiting my arrival the next day: at a youth hostel, housed in a building full of sweatshops, rats had gnawed through her leather bag to get a piece of cheese she’d left inside it. My friend’s spirits lifted once we crossed into China, taking a ferry to Guangzhou (Canton, we were still calling it), a city full of tea shops and sunny gardens. We paid for individual beds in a clean hotel, which, lik...