Young author saw 'frontier' of China from a dorm room

According to John Pomfret, going to live in China in 1981 was "the closest thing to interplanetary travel you could find at the time — a totally different world."

The Washington Post journalist was speaking by phone from Chicago, where his plane had just touched down. He's promoting his new book, "Chinese Lessons: Five Classmates and the Story of the New China."

The author has spent a large portion of his life in China but is now based in Los Angeles, where he covers the social and political life of the West Coast.

Pomfret was 22 when he arrived at Nanjing University as an exchange student, one of the first American students to be admitted to China after the Communist Revolution of 1949. From a cramped dorm room to the street, he was exposed to a China few Americans had seen — in the wake of Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward" and "The Cultural Revolution."

Mao had forced what he regarded as "the elite" and "the intellectuals" into "re-education camps" in the rural countryside where they did hard physical work and gained distance from the dangerous world of books and the ideas they contained.

Big Brother was everywhere.

Pomfret was young but not homesick, and he was fully engaged in this new experience. He was an adventuresome sort who wanted to learn all he could about the "new China." "Going there at that time allowed me to have a visceral understanding of the culture," said Pomfret. "It gave me a basic empathy for things Chinese and the Chinese people. I guess I was pretty adventurous. China was a frontier. I loved it."

He also said he wanted to get out from under his father's wing.

Pomfret, who never minded standing out, traveled without fear — and even fell in love with an exotic young woman named Fay. "She really caught my attention." In fact, she wanted to marry him. But with both feet still on the ground, Pomfret told her he was too young for marriage, and today he has no regrets.

In fact, he didn't marry until he was 40 — to another Chinese woman, named Mei, and they have two children. "I followed the Chinese proclamation to marry late so I can have fewer children," Pomfret joked.

In the interim between Fay and Mei, Pomfret covered several wars for the Associated Press — for eight years. "I had a flair for living in war zones. I was not scared, but I was a little on edge when things were 'normal.' That kind of life and relationships don't mix."