It was breathtaking. It felt like being inside the beating heart of that pulsating, exotic nation.

Not agreeing with something that happened in history or with another person’s traditions doesn’t provide license to eradicate or vilify entire aspects of the past.

He told me about being in school in Shanghai during the 1930s and 1940s where he played a Hawaiian guitar, wore a lei with his friends and sang in nightclubs.

He found all of this very cool, jumping right in to join me as we got down to the serious business of Chinese cuisine.

There weren’t many foreign women living in Beijing at that time—much less zipping through traffic like I did wearing my sunglasses—with my window rolled down, radio blaring and a cigarette dangling from my fingertips.

They were so shocked to see me (a woman) driving that I never had any trouble getting okayed to proceed past checkpoints.

I noticed a couple of dark things flying in a zigzagging pattern near the lights. I wondered what kind of night-flying strange birds they could be. Upon closer inspection, I realized they were bats.

Novins had a great impact on my way of thinking and the journalist I became. Although also a friend of Walter Cronkite, he spoke to us mostly about Murrow. He had high expectations for his students.

I’d become hooked on journalism at once in college when I took my first news writing class at age 19.