I was born in 1966, the year that the "cultural revolution" began. And I was too young to read the headlines in the 1970s when Malaysian leaders were part of efforts to normalize relations between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the so-called Free World. But as a Malaysian, Chinese culture and society was all around me. Evidence of its civilizational reach, beyond its borders, was more than present. China was never truly "foreign."

In fact, one particular person in our family brought with her a residue of China's pre-revolutionary history. "Amah," as we called her, worked for my relatives as a domestic worker: Born in China in the early part of the 20th century, she pledged herself to a sorority, remained single, and found herself working on the streets of Japanese-occupied Singapore selling cigarettes and dodging soldiers, before being engaged by my aunt and uncle. She returned to her home village and retired there after a long life away. She passed away just as China was emerging as a model of spectacular social transformation.

My mother grew up in a small town at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. It was the 1950s, when the writer Han Suyin practiced medicine there. Han would go on to author several books that served as a sympathetic window on China, in an era where the Cold War shaped the questions we asked and feelings we were allowed to have about the PRC. Needless to say, Malaysians were encouraged to view it with deep suspicion. But literature has a way of cutting through the cruder representations of history and people.

As I graduated from folktales, I dipped into a mixture of film, books and visual art: from Chen Kaige's Yellow Earth to Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern, from Mo Yan's The Republic of Wine: A Novel to Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem. Mostly art-house, some best sellers; nothing that would suggest that I have explored anything other than the surface.

Over the decades though, events that have convulsed China have forced me to want to consider the country more deeply. Events like Hong Kong's return to the motherland in 1997 spurred reading or casual inquiry. Then and more so now, the enormity of China makes an adequate understanding of it seem unlikely for an outsider. The downside is that I find myself and others referring to the same theories, repeating the same insights from the latest book or essay on the country.

While I had traveled to Chengdu in Sichuan Province, Hong Kong and Macao previously, traveling to Beijing recently placed me in the middle of a spectacle that has flooded my social media for the last decade. At the risk of sounding like every other tourist, I offer a word salad for what I found: new but ancient, ordered and futuristic, monumental but easily navigated.

As a journalist, my inner impulse is to find the edge, to pick at the veneer and to peel back the surface of the experience of Beijing. Art helps, shopping malls don't: An exhibition of Beijing-born artist Yang Fudong's works titled Fragrant River at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in the 798 Art District in Beijing was arresting in its presentation of another China, far from the glossy images of neon and concrete. No less beguiling, just different. And perhaps that is the path best followed in experiencing contemporary China.

Having said this, for me, the experience of China resides in the people I met. The poetic place names, the hutongs and palaces, the mix of cuisines that recall the rich history of this northeastern citadel—all a perfect setting for future conversations of consequence. Ones that recognize that even in what seems to be the safest corner of the world, the ground under our feet might shift dramatically. BR

The author is a journalist with the English-language talk-radio station, Business FM, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson 

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