Yury Oreshin The Citizen of the World.
Long Russian winter. Cold, that chills to the marrow. Moscow night. The Kremlin's star is blazing with ruby-red. And the wind of changes is blowing straight at my eyes. I am seven years old standing with my father in Red Square, one last time before we leave for China.
The spirit of the USSR has left me only two memories: the portrait of "Grandfather Lenin" (on the wall in my kindergarten), and the TV broadcast of "Comrade Gorbachev", who was saying something really serious about "Perestroika".
And so I left that "enigmatical" country without even getting to know it, to discover another one, as different from the USSR as the moon is from the sun.
The day I arrived in China I proclaim to be the beginning of my conscious life. Here I began to discover the world as my family moved into a diplomatic compound, where we joined the families of diplomats from all over the world.
Time ran fast, and September arrived: time to go to school. The Russian School in the Russian Embassy in China is a special school of general education. The best teachers from all over the USSR teach the students, who come from many different countries. There I met my life-long friends, whom I always meet when I go to Russia for my summer vacations.
For ten years of my life in Beijing I had many experiences of socializing with Chinese people. I recall from my memory the summer, when we didn't go to visit Moscow as our family usually did. I started to explore the area around our house and discovered a small Chinese village nearby. There I made my first Chinese friends, and started to learn Chinese. When the summer was over, I decided...