The first time I rode a public bus in China, in 1985, a young woman came up to me and ran her hand up and down my arm to feel the body hair. Foreigners were like rare animals then: precious, strange, probably dangerous. Surveillance was constant and labour-intensive. At the Beijing Friendship Hotel, there were staff assigned to go through the trash, read any diaries or letters left in the apartment while the resident was out, check mail and listen to phone calls. A Canadian friend who switched into French in the middle of a call home was interrupted by a secret listener who asked him please to stick with English. A phone call that a journalist friend made from my apartment to a writer named Liu Binyan—who was considered dangerous—earned me an investigation as a possible spy.

In the early days of Communist China, many foreigners who lived there had come for refuge, not for interest in China itself, and few wanted their lives to collide with those of average Chinese. China was an island of escapees from political persecution of the right or left. There was an embittered Spaniard who had fled Franco for the Soviet Union but had been expelled and could not return to Spain. There was a Shining Path guerrilla from Peru who had left North Korea after making the inexcusable mistake, while editing a Spanish edition of one of Kim Il-sung’s works, of drawing a line through the Great Leader’s name and writing ‘el’ (he) in its place (the North Koreans required that a bubble be drawn around the name to maintain its sanctity). An elderly German-Jewish woman had fled the Nazis and stayed on in China when her whole family in Europe was murdered. A mysterious old man was said to be a Nazi who had left Germany when the Allies won. There were Argentian communists who had escaped the military junta, Filipinos who had left during Marcos’ reign and refugees from the Ugandan civil war—many or most carrying their personal histories quietly and alone. China was where these people went when they had nowhere else to go.

• Tags: Anne Stevenson-Yang, China, Issue 26