China and I are not friends.

I first realized that long ago when, passing through one of its many airports, an unsmiling immigration officer confiscated my favorite oversized razor. And again, years later, when during a two-day-multiple-airport layover, my then-eight-year-old son and I had to beg for water because, well, we had no local currency, and no one accepted Visa.

“I don’t blame the Chinese airport and airline employees for our misery,” I wrote at the time. “It’s not their job, after all, to take care of ignorant foreigners. Oh, wait, yes, it is.”

So, you can imagine the precautions we took to facilitate our recent four-night stay in Shanghai. First, we scheduled it during our return trip from California to the Philippines to get an automatic 10-day transit passage rather than applying for visas at the embassy. We also downloaded the country’s premier paying app called Alipay. And finally, we arranged to meet up with a longtime online friend, a Chinese journalist who........

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