Every President that went to China, I would meet them and have dinner and talk about the past and the future. That was in the '70s.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I would have a democratic process for people to get together and talk about the way they want the government to conduct business with China.
Whatever China I'd been born into, I would probably still have become a painter - I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn't been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer.
And then I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to go to China in 1980, which was quite early.
I first came to China as a child on a visit with my family in 1978.
I was fourteen when Kissinger made his secret trip to China, and then there was subsequently Nixon's trip to China, and I was very much seized with an interest in China.
On the morning of Thanksgiving, I would wake up to the home smelling of all good things, wafting upstairs to my room. I would set the table with the fancy silverware and china and hope that my parents and grandmother wouldn't have the annual Thanksgiving fight about Richard Nixon.
Ronald Reagan, when he was campaigning for President, said that he would break relations with Communist China and re-establish diplomatic relations with Taiwan. But when he got into office, he pursued a very different policy of engagement with China and of increasing trade and business ties with China.
I've been going to China every year now for more than a decade.
I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.
I want Chinese history to remember me as Carnegie is remembered. I want Chinese people to remember me as they remember Marx and Lenin.