Travel by DAR

China: Bicycle Bells

(First published in The Sunday New York Times Travel Section, Back Page Essay)

I can't sleep. My mind's abuzz with the sound of bicycle bells - 1.2 billion of them. Partly I'm jet-lagging, but it's more than that: It's a question someone asked me a few hours ago when I got home from a month in the off-the-beaten province of Shandong, China - that peninsula sticking out like a hitchhiker's thumb through the Yellow Sea toward Korea. The question was whether I ever felt at home in China, and by it the questioner meant: Was there ever a moment when I felt my sensibility fused with the Chinese people, when we were brethren despite our astonishing barriers? Briiiing, briiiing!

It being my third trip there in a year, I expected to feel pretty cozy. But things were both more and less exotic right from the gong: On the flight over the four of us in our group, sole Caucasians aboard, got to watch the eternally bellicose Sylvester Stallone, in ''First Blood,'' relive such terrifying flashes of Viet-era torture at the hands of inscrutably sadistic Orientals that our Chinese plane-mates (benign-looking, in that underbaked way people have at 30,000 feet) felt compelled to nod and send us bland reassuring smiles. The notion kept hitting me over the head that I was not only hobnobbing with former enemies but hobnobbing with them on the other side of the planet - it may as well have been the dark side of the moon. I'm not talking about Shanghai, where in the last 12 months all sorts of cross-communications have evolved, making commonplace the sight of Chinese in Cardin jackets craning at stock quotations amid the ubiquitous year-round Christmas lights (a symptom of post-Mao jollity), and where it's possible to lounge in the splendor of your hotel room watching a TV rerun of ''Gone With the Wind.'' Nor am I talking about Peking, where there are now helicopter rides at the Ming Tombs, the Forbidden Palace has become Bullhorn City, with the inflections of central Texas seeming to fill the place, and the dusty junk store of yesterday is today's neon-flashing Antique Mall.

In both cities giant strides have been taken in the preparation of coffee, which is now distinguishable from ox broth; in towels, which are clean; in salad dressing, which is fresh. There's been a great leap forward in the proliferation of plastic laundry bags, pay toilets and the likelihood of bumping into people like Andy Young or Rod Stewart - just as in any other fancy world center. To be sure, you still feel the old totalitarianism in these places, when after a kung fu match, for instance, the entire stadium rises to leave in lock step. But generally you sense that the world's homogenization is furthered here. (Which is sad, in a way - China has been one of the last places on earth where you could still witness the breathtaking play of sunlight on bamboo without, at the same time, hearing the strains of ''Love Story.'' Two cheers for progress.) But no, I'm talking about the sticks, where Westerners are still regarded as space invaders, when they are regarded at all. This is where I spent my month this time, where the few cars drive in darkness and snap on their headlights flashbulb-style every six seconds to bleach the eyes of bicyclists like startled rabbits. Where kids swat at bats wheeling in the dusty gloom of remote roads, and there are rows and rows of poplars (''Let there be trees,'' Mao had said, and in these regions the trees had sprung forth); and no more flies as in the old days (''Let there be no flies,'' he'd said, and each peasant had killed 10 a day). Where the click of the abacus still mixes with the clack of the taps on everyone's shoes, and no one speaks English: If I picked up the phone, the operator on the other end would panic at one word and hang up. Out on the street schoolgirls giggled, babies burst into tears, grown men would catch one glimpse of me and fall off their bicycles. It took me three minutes to buy a pair of black slippers in a department store, and by the time the transaction was over I had attracted 200 people to study how I bagged my Topsiders.

For about two weeks, the four of us found ourselves sending each other the thumbs-up signal all the time, the way scuba divers do in potentially perilous situations to show everything's still O.K. But about the third week we began to split up to make our peace with the place individually - I went off by myself to mingle with the thin-suited men enplumed in serpentine columns of smoke (the Chinese look as though they learned to smoke watching ancient Belmondo flicks); and listen to a woman tearfully tell me the story of how she and her husband were separated three years during the Cultural Revolution and he traveled clear across China so he could speak with her for 10 minutes at a wintry train station (the Chinese ''Dr. Zhivago'' has yet to be written, but it will be a doozy); or put through a call to my two kids from my hotel room one evening before they were leaving for school.

That was nuts: talking to them about Crockett and Tubbs and then going back to the banquet room where another century was quietly taking place, the hot water bottles at each place setting along with the nib pens and ink pots and antimacassars on the chairs. There were my Americans without a care in the world, still gobbling down their scorpions and jellyfish and duck's feet and toasting our hosts a little cross-eyed from the maotais but otherwise not noticing how deeply bizarre we'd become. It was at that moment that I guessed we'd been made to feel at home. But rapport?

Communion? That didn't happen till I was 1,200 feet above the pine tops in a cable car climbing Mount Tai Shan and busily extrapolating dire thoughts about the state of Chinese mechanics from my observation that no shower spill-off drain I'd yet encountered had been placed closer than completely across the bathroom floor. I exchanged eye contact with an old Manchu who was having similar dread. We kept contact throughout the eight-minute climb, hanging onto each other's irises for dear life, and when it was over I think if I wasn't his son at least we were nephew and honored uncle. (We didn't even look at each other as we climbed out, embarrassed the way close relatives would have been.) And there was one other moment, more brotherly, or generational, when I was homesick in Jinan, the capital of Shandong, and around twilight stumbled onto an amusement park filled with sedately screaming children and their parents, and I began to realize that they were my age; they were the Red Guards all mellowed out as we at home were the student activists of the 60's, all more or less discontentedly quiescent.

They were as tender with their children at the merry-go-round as I was wishing all month I was with mine, and two kids adopted me and waved to me each time they went around, in so loving and sensitive and ceremonial a way that for about 10 minutes I felt like one of the family. Of course I stuck out like a sore thumb, but the kids kept waving, the parents kept grinning; something took place in that drab and dusty park and for a moment in the twilight I swear we all felt related. We were no longer, remotely, at war.