China used to be a strange and exotic land for foreigners. But it is far less so today, especially in the cities with their ubiquitous Starbucks and other imports from the West, and with indigenous technology.

Indeed, every time you get in a taxi in Beijing, the taximeter plays a little recording in Chinese AND English. Most public signs in the cities are in English, or at least some version of it.

I sometimes think back to how it was for my grandparents, who lived in China from 1921 to 1926 as Methodist missionaries. In the letters they wrote back to their family in Ohio, they describe a land almost unimaginable today. Here’s an excerpt from one letter my granddad wrote on Sept. 18, 1921, shortly after arriving in Nanjing, where he and my grandmother spent a year learning Chinese. (Nanjing was known as Nanking in those days.)

Getting around the cities was a far greater challenge in those days.

“Boston was a hard place to find ones way around in, but Nanking is worse (as is any Chinese city of any size), for several reasons. For one, the streets are more crooked, narrower and with fewer distinguishing features. A greater reason is that we cannot ask anybody passing by how to get to such-and-such a place. You walk on and on till you find what you are after, and if you can’t find it, you return to your starting point, if you can find that, and then start out again.”

“Wednesday I thought that I would walk over to the language school. I started out and made what I thought were the necessary turns but the first thing I knew I was outside the city wall. I came back to my starting point, and started over following a different road. After walking some distance I landed at the gate of a Confucian temple. Later on I discovered that the Confucian temple I visited is the temple we see from our window in the opposite direction from the house that I started toward.”

“I came back to the house to try to start again. First I thought I would try to ask somebody the way. All the Americans were out, Ada and Mrs. Steinheimer having gone to a shopping district together. I started to ask the servants but could not get any response till I began questioning the amah (The amah is the nurse maid for Steinheimers’ nine months old baby). The conversation was as follows:

“Do you speak much English?”

“Yes,” was her answer.

“Do you know where Nanking University is?” was my next question.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Can you tell me how to get there?” I continued.

“Yes,” she said.

“Well, how DO I get there?” I asked in desperation.

“Yes,” she again replied, and I gave up questioning her further.