This is my new life: I race around the old city of Beijing in my red four-wheel-drive Land Cruiser, showing up at various events – art exhibitions, fashion shows, cocktail parties, masquerade balls, political conventions, press reception, and charity events. I meet people and go anywhere that is fun and newsworthy. This is the life of a journalist and a single metropolitan woman. Because the China of today is an ever-changing one, I have no shortage of stories to keep me busy. I cover everything from politics to business to social issues.

When I was first hired by the Beijing bureau of the English news agency World News, I was assigned to an apartment in the diplomatic compound. Now, I am more than ready to move out of the compound to live in a hutong, with their narrow alleyways and simple courtyards. I didn't return to China to live in a fishbowl, but to mingle with the people that make this country unique. The many hutong that dot the landscape of Beijing remind me of a different time in Chinese history – a time that I yearn for but, sadly, may soon be gone.

Living in the diplomatic compound makes me feel like a foreigner in Beijing. Whenever my Chinese friends come to visit me, they are always stopped by the guards, and I have to personally come down to let them in. If my friends drive local cars with blue license plates, they are not allowed in at all – only cars with black license plates, registered to foreigners, are allowed. As time passes, my friends stop coming by to play tennis or eat the dumplings that I cook.

"You want to move? Are you crazy? The diplomatic apartments are in downtown Beijing, next to Chang'an Avenue, a few steps away from your office." Mother disapproves of my idea on the phone. "It has the broadband you need. It's safe. You don't want to live somewhere without guards. You know many migrant workers come to Beijing to rob or kill people for a few dollars."

I talk back. "Mom, I want to live in a hutong. I grew up in Beijing. I want to be an ordinary Beijing person."

"Niuniu, I was an ordinary Beijing person, I lived in a hutong for many years. Never again in my life do I want to queue up at the public toilets to empty the shit and piss from the night pans. How will you get used to it, child? There isn't even a place to park your car!"

"I don't want special privileges; I don't want people to think of me as a fake foreign devil," I complain.

Mother points out, "You are a fake foreign devil. You're an American citizen, your mother is an American citizen, your father is, your stepfather is, and your half-sisters are, and your stepmother Jean Fang is dreaming of becoming a fake foreign devil right now. But what's wrong with being an American devil? The whole world is working for America!" Mother, accustomed to living at the million-dollar Riviera Villa, cannot comprehend why I want to live in a hutong.

I know that special privileges are exactly what Mother likes – her life has been a roller coaster. In her early days, when China was poor and closed to the outside world, she had nothing and worked as a kitchen hand in a jail, and now she lives an affluent life and is the regular guest of foreign ambassadors. Since she suffered enough during the Cultural Revolution, Mother sees being an ordinary Chinese person as shameful. An ordinary Chinese person, to her, is the synonym of poverty, backwardness, and squat toilet. To those lucky enough not to know what a squat toilet is, it is just that: a simple hole that you squat over to relieve yourself.

Growing up in China in the 1980s and 1990s, I have the idyllic memory of China. For my generation who grew up in the city, poverty can be a prank and backwardness can be a postmodern experiment. The diplomatic apartments may be considered high-end by older generations. For me, they are a bunch of ugly concrete matchboxes, neither cool nor postmodern. They simply have no character. I don't tell this to Mother, who has no clue what hou xiandai is. With Beibei and Lulu's help, I find a traditional courtyard house in a hutong near the well-preserved section of town: Drum Tower. It is convenient and close to the subway. My yard is two hundred square meters, with two large japonica trees, a grapevine pergola, and a flower garden. I can stand on the earth. As I look up, I can see trees and the sky. It's quaint.

I paint doors and roofs in blue, and the outer walls ivory. My house looks Mediterranean from the outside. I decorate the bedroom with bright pink-and-green gauze drapery and hang brocade from minority tribes in the living room. I have gone to an antique market called Panjiayuan and brought back a round sandalwood eight-seater dining table, old-fashioned wooden armchairs, and some Ming- and Qing-style vases. My grandparents give me a birdcage, snuff bottles, and incense burners as homewarming gifts. My house is a fusion of old and new.

With my encouragement, CC also moves out of her foreigner's community and shares the courtyard house with me. Not to be outdone by my efforts, CC installs a heavy opium bed in her own bedroom. Both of our jobs require us to stay connected to this new China: to follow and document and immerse ourselves in its culture. The new China can be a bland, frivolous, and even scary place, with its endless cinderblock-shaped skyscrapers and immense shopping malls. Our new home allows us to create an escape from the busy, modern world. It takes us back to an ancient place, when my Chinese ancestors still possessed the confidence and nobility that seems to have been lost in the Chinese people of today. I love my new house tremendously.

After we settle in, CC and I hear the story of the house's previous occupant, Frank, who was not only a postmodernist but also a womanizer.

Frank graduated from a small college in Indiana and was a foreign teacher at a Beijing technology university. When he was in the States, Frank was a pure and honest midwestern lad. He was modest and down-to-earth. At university he was shy, a bit of a nerd, and couldn't find a girlfriend. After graduation, Frank came to Asia, wandering around Thailand and Vietnam, teaching English to get by. Finally Frank came to Beijing to work as a foreign teacher.

Asia completely changed him. Back in the States, no one said Frank was good-looking, but Asian girls loved his Western nose and blond hair. Frank was treated like some kind of baima wangzi, a veritable Prince Charming. Women would take him out for meals, open doors for him, and give him candy. Sometimes, when he was walking along the street, people asked to take their photos with him. Chinese TV stations fought one another to get Frank as their special guest. Frank's confidence blossomed.

Within a year of his stay in Beijing, Frank nailed down nine girls. Living in the school's foreign expert dorm was no longer convenient for him since the guards looked suspiciously at every girl he brought back to his dorm. So he moved to a hutong.

He met his tenth girlfriend that year near the City Hotel area. Her name was Grace. She was a tour guide. Frank and Grace were together for two months, Frank's record. But unlike Frank's previous Chinese girlfriends, Grace was no sucker. After Frank dumped her, she mustered a bunch of punks to beat him up. Grace even threatened to kill "this heartless bastard" for "messing with Chinese girls." Although it was Frank who had been beaten up, he felt he had brought it upon himself. He had nowhere to report it, so he just had to suffer in silence. After that, there was no way he could stay in Beijing, so he slunk back to Indiana.

Whenever anybody mentions Frank's story, everyone laughs. Wives of foreign expatriates hear about the Grace incident, and they pay much more attention to their husbands' whereabouts.