My own interest in Chinese reading began in the early 1980s during a trip to China as a member of a delegation jointly sponsored by the United States Department of Education and the Chinese Ministry of Education.To a provincial boy like me who had grown up in the Midwest of the United States, everything was amazingly different.Men and women alike wore a simple variant of the Zhongshan suit.Streets were flooded with bicycles, people walking, occasional donkeys pulling carts, buses belching fumes and rattle trap taxis threading through the teaming mass.The only cars we saw were black chauffeur-driven Russianmade limousines carrying important people.