From 12 October to 13 November 1971 I listened to various forms of Chinese as it is spoken in the People's Republic. I listened with the ear of a Chinese educated – after leaving Amoy as a small child – in various dialects as they are spoken by Chinese in South-East Asia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and the United States. I was pleased both as a Chinese and as a professional linguist to discover immediately that language as well as a Chinese face remains a social passport in the People's Republic just as in Chinese communities elsewhere. I entered at Shumchun through the gate for Chinese with my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Leta. Leta is even more fair-skinned and blonde than her American father, and an army guard on the bridge was somewhat startled to see a westerner coming in that way.