The transaction happened at the Central train station in Beijing. Our train from Irkutsk stopped at Platform Number One: two students from Yugoslavia got out of the empty first-class car. Received by two Chinese officials, I had yet to learn about their rank or function. They were dressed in blue maoist uniforms like the rest of the people in China – all children of Mao Zedong. In my mind, the few months after the death of the great helmsman seemed an eternity, yet, on the surface, the country continued to look egalitarian. But bit by bit, things were changing. And so it was with our arrival: the Chinese were receiving two casually dressed students from Yugoslavia – me, traveling with an American military duffle bag,  who, only two months earlier, were marked as revisionists. Now, they showed us honor and respect, a subtle indication that China was about to make a turn. Not an immediate change, not on that grey November day in 1976 when I arrived. However, when Mao was still alive and the” Gang of Four,” the extreme left group, was in power, this kind of reception would not have been imaginable. The two of us were seated in the comfortable armchairs of the VIP reception hall reserved for high-level guests at the central railway station in the capital of China.

I do not remember precisely if the officials were examining and fiddling through our passports or if there was a polite, superficial conversation between us, as the occasion required. The hosts were kind to us, offering a welcoming cup of jasmine tea; it was the first cup of tea that had turned into thousands during my almost three years of study in China. Moments later, after a few sips of the fragrant tea, I lost interest in the two bureaucrats before me. My mind drifted, scanning the vast hall we were sitting in. It was predominantly covered in red velvet fabrics. Red was the one-dimensional symbol of the revolution, from the red Chinese party flags to the red little books of Mao’s quotations. If red was a totem, the furniture in the hall evoked the early fifties, with the prevailing red revolutionary paraphernalia. It was surreal. With today’s perception, I can say that the scene in the VIP reception hall was taken from Twin Peaks, which David Lynch created decades later. It felt timeless and disconnected from reality. Was this the future? The two men in charge of us were trying to attract our attention while I, more than anything else, needed to get out of that red hall and step into real China.

But what would that China be? Could one learn from the documentary Chong Kuo(China) that Michelangelo Antonioni, the great Italian filmmaker, shot about China a few years before I arrived? Antonioni received a lot of criticism for his incredible portrait of revolutionary China, which mainly exploited the images of crowds. I loved the film I saw many years later, but there was nothing one could learn about the country from those highly artistic images. Antonioni, himself quite leftist, enraged the Chinese because his film was not ideological, portraying China as a poor country. The campaign against the Italian filmmaker was intense and persisted into my second year in China.

When I bought my first camera and started taking pictures, a street barber from across the street started yelling at me, cursing me that Antonioni-like I was taking pictures of China and then showing them in the West. I tried to portray the human act of the person who looked like a jobless peasant who found himself a second job. I framed him in the late afternoon light in front of my university gate while he cut a young girl’s hair dressed in a phosphorescent orange pullover with a grey wall as the photo’s backdrop. The old man and the girl are in an act of beauty in the vast, empty space. I took the picture and loved it, as I loved many other photos I lost during my moves from one country to another. Or was it just the curse of the street barber?

So, after a cup of tea and some phone calls, we were summoned by uniformed men who led us to the other end of the VIP hall, where more hands were shaken. Then, we were escorted down the escalator to the station’s gigantic hallway supported by marble columns indicating the way to exit the building. However, standing at the edge of the empty, gigantic station platform, I felt like I was standing at the edge of the entirety of China. I felt lost, asking myself all sorts of existential questions that empty, flat, colorless space aroused in me: What the hell am I doing here? I wanted to see what was happening behind Mao’s curtain, but is this it? I tried to convince myself that I was in the brave new world, that everything was fine. I knew I was in China because I wanted to be there and discover the unknown, but also because my young and impulsive mind thought it knew enough about the West and was time for a change. If I hadn’t had that curiosity and energy to embrace and challenge the unknown, I would never have stood on the threshold of the most isolated country in the world.

With the next step, the transaction happened. Our little company swung to the left side of the station, where a small minibus was waiting. The only female in a little group of grey and blue overcoated men was also the only person wearing a colored neckerchief. She was the cultural attache at the Yugoslav Embassy in Beijing and was my representative during my time in China. Our encounter was short, with a few courteous phrases and curious looks questioning why we came to China and all the places in this world. Then, the Chinese decided that it was time to go. The person who represented himself as Chen Laoshi (teacher Chen) ordered us to the bus, and we left. I felt like we were captured. I was excited. There was an immediate challenge. When we drove across Tiananmen Square, I was staring at portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin built in giant size concrete blocks, all facing even bigger portraits of Mao Zedong, hanged on the Gate of the Heavenly Peace, surveying the immense Tian Anmen void of any people. Teacher Chen, with whom I communicated in English, asked me if I had learned Chinese before arriving. “No, I have not,” I answered, explaining that we do not have a Chinese department at the University of Ljubljana.” Well, this is great. We will be able to write the nicest letters on the blank sheet of paper,” said my new guardian in a noteworthy tone, ignoring that even I knew he was quoting Mao Zedong. I, of course, could not agree with President Mao at first because I was not at all a blank sheet of paper. Second, I thought things might change because the president had passed away. I was happy for this first promising exchange, but I was in Chinese hands now.