at the century-old Peking Hotel, its stolid facade hiding scars from the Boxer Rebellion. The hotel had been renovated in the 1950s and a new Soviet-style wing added on, but it was always stuffed with members of the USLO awaiting quarters, with entire families often jammed into a single room for months. My friend Bill Stubbs recalls joining a newly arrived political officer and his wife for drinks. To avoid waking their sleeping children, they sipped their martinis sitting on the floor in the corridor outside their room.

You were never in danger of losing your hotel key; you never got one. A floor attendant stationed at a desk at the end of the corridor would open your door to let you in and lock it when you went out.

That, of course, left the door unlocked when you were in the room, and most doors had no inner bolt. Hotel staff could walk into your room at any time. Sandy Roy, the wife of Stapleton Roy, the deputy chief of the Liaison Office, remembers an occasion when a young female hotel employee walked in on a man, naked, heading for a bath. She shrieked, he yelled, the manager arrived. “The guest was furious at the intrusion,” Sandy said, “but the manager took the employee’s side and chewed out the guest for having embarrassed an innocent young woman.”

Unlocked doors may have threatened privacy, but they didn’t seem to affect security. I could leave my camera or a cash-stuffed wallet in my room, confident that they would be undisturbed. More than once when I was checking out, an attendant came running to give me back a discarded toothbrush or an odd sock.

Although the Americans at the Liaison Office never doubted their mission’s importance, it wasn’t always apparent to outsiders. The chief and the deputy chief had to share in entertaining visiting dignitaries, but their wives couldn’t stage a dinner party on the same night because there was only one set of formal dinnerware. And the official car was a black-painted Kalamazoo-made Marathon Checker cab. When George H. W. Bush became chief in 1974, he lobbied for a more imposing vehicle, but the State Department allocated perks by the rank of the embassy, and “USLO Peking,” as State Department cables then labeled us, was at the bottom of the heap. Exasperated, Bush reportedly gave up the fight and wired: “Send Checker; remove meter.”

Driving in Beijing could be hair-raising. The wide streets of the city were often curb-to-curb bicyclists, hundreds and even thousands of them hell-bent on getting to work or back home. Maneuvering through town, we became accustomed to seeing amazing things strapped to the bikes: wheelchairs, desks, small sofas, lumber, and the occasional full-grown pig in a custom-fit rattan cage.

After

almost six years of diplomatic limbo, the day came to take down the sign for the Liaison Office and put up one that read United States of America Embassy. Three rows of blue-coated Chinese pressed against the fence of our compound; we were still forbidden foreign territory to Beijing’s residents. Stapleton Roy introduced President Carter’s envoy, Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal, who addressed the crowd in Chinese, a language he had learned as a teenage factory worker in Shanghai as a refugee from Nazi Germany.

Minutes before noon on March 1, 1979, 14 children, arms dangling from long-outgrown jackets, faced the small crowd. At a signal from their teacher, their voices washed over the compound, “… for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain… .” Their soft singing of those words touched us all.

Strings of firecrackers exploded, sending smoke over refreshment tables holding hard-to-come-by Cokes. Two men struggled to lower the mission’s old flag, which had gotten tangled in its ropes. Stapleton Roy, destined to return as ambassador, snapped a new flag onto the halyard, and we watched it rise, the first to fly over an American embassy in China in nearly 30 years.