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Fear and elation shot through me when I heard we had been invited to China. The team was in Japan for the last day of the Tokyo World Championships, and we were all stunned by the offer. Everything we knew about China had come from history books and television news, and most of it wasn't so good: famine, violence, violations of human rights. Two team members opted out, but I decided to go since I figured we would be treated well as invited guests. Before we left Tokyo, the U.S. Embassy took our passports and used a black marker to cross out a section that forbade travel to China. That's when I knew this wasn't going to be an ordinary trip.
Dozens of journalists talked with us as we walked to the big metal bridge connecting Hong Kong with mainland China. Since they weren't allowed to cross over, they tried to give us cameras to record our stay. Some of my teammates also turned into regular news reporters, keeping notes and snapping pictures for the rest of our six-day trip. We stuck out like sore thumbs. All the Chinese wore uniforms, either gray or blue pants with high-collared tunics, while we were each decked out in typically American garb: jeans, windbreakers, T shirts. Glenn Cowan, a 19-year-old Californian, walked around Beijing wearing tie-dye jeans and a red Rambo-style sweatband. School kids followed him through the streets, which were filled with two- and three-wheeled bicycles and human-drawn carriages. On a tour of a local factory, we saw workers playing Ping-Pong on a makeshift table using bricks as a net. In the countryside around Beijing, we saw men working in rice fields with oxen-drawn plows, like they've had for thousands of years.
Of course, there was also tension. On my first day, I saw a sign in a store window that read something like: PEOPLE OF THE WORLD DEFEAT THE U.S. AGGRESSORS AND THEIR RUNNING DOGS! Later, when we went to an opera, the plot seemed be a lesson about communism triumphing over capitalism. Portraits of Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong were everywhere. One hotel had a 10-foot-tall white statue of him in its lobby. Another had a shot of him standing in clouds on a mountaintop. And most places had red books of Mao's quotations where you would expect to find bibles. On top of all that, people had on yellow or red badges with Mao's picture on them.
We played our Ping-Pong matches in an 18,000-person stadium, and even though the Chinese players were best in the world, they let us win a few games. Afterward, when we met with Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, Glenn Cowan asked him what he thought of American hippies. "Youth wants to seek out the truth, and out of this search various forms of change are bound to come," the premier responded, his eyes sparkling.
The food was probably the most memorable part of trip. Meals were routinely eight to 10 courses, four or five times a day. At first, I would ask what we were eating, but after I got answers like shark's stomach soup, chicken-feet soup and monkey's head, I stopped. Sometimes you just don't want to know.
When I got back home to Michigan, I felt relieved, gratified and dog-tired. It seemed like everybody wanted to speak with me—every group, every newspaper. But I didn't fully realize the impact of my team's trip until a few decades later, when my son found a photo of me in his high-school history book. I was standing on the Great Wall of China. When my team and I returned in 2006 for the 35th anniversary of our visit, I realized we were more than just another tour group from the West. We were the group that made such tours possible.
—As told to Tony Dokoupil