First Impressions, Lasting Images

If I close my eyes and let my mind drift back a couple of weeks, I can still see the Great Wall of China dusted with silver in a gently falling snow.

It was the first snow of the season in Beijing, and it gave the wall a mystical appearance as it snaked upward over the hills into a gray mist.

Always when I think of the trip from which we have just returned I will think of that scene, glowing like a water-brush painting in that place of the mind where we store significant memories.

That, of course, isn’t all there is to China and it wasn’t all we saw during a three-week odyssey. We bounced around to half a dozen towns, saw the terra cotta army of Xian, cruised the Yangtze, shopped in booming Shanghai and spent more hours waiting in airports than I ever hope to spend again.

We also witnessed snippets of repression under a Communist regime which, though mellowing, remains firmly in place over a people whose inclinations seem anything but warlike.

The Chinese, in fact, are the sweetest of individuals, both amused and tolerant of the well-meaning Westerners who try with somber intent to absorb in a few days what it took 6,000 years to build.

All those images will fight for space in memory’s cluttered cabinets, but the one that will always emerge will be that of the Great Wall in the silver snow. Dominant impressions always linger.

Which brings me to L.A.

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When you’re a newspaper columnist, the city you cover is rarely out of mind. I went about as far away as I could and was still confronted with impressions of L.A. by people who don’t know it at all.

To them, we’re either Disneyland, Hollywood or bloody murder.

What they know is what they pick up in tidbits of information. They might know, for instance, that Demi Moore is trying hard to adjust to life after Bruce Willis, but they know nothing of our struggle to emerge as the new American cosmopolis of the 21st century.

They see us as giddy, celebrity-obsessed, potentially violent people whose main export is a Coca-Cola culture that includes baggy pants, loud rap music and KFC.

But they love us anyhow.

Because their history is rooted in the very dawn of civilization and ours is a tick on the cosmic clock, they also view us as boisterous children on the world scene, kicking and screaming for attention while they wait patiently for us to reach adulthood.

But at least all the rhetoric of the Cold War is gone in the China we saw. The people reach out with willing hands past memories of the Red Brigade and the Cultural Revolution to embrace a globalization that includes us all.

Even L.A.

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Their curiosity about us is insatiable, but their information is minuscule. In conversations with those who spoke English I tried to capsulize what L.A. really is today, but that was an exercise in futility. It would take volumes.

Neither could I tell you in these few words what Shanghai is except to offer a slim visual impression of its crowds, its sea of bicycles, buses, taxis and motorized rickshaws down a glowing Nanjing road in a city gone mad building new skyscrapers.

With a population of 14 million, Shanghai is China’s largest city, the Paris of the East, the Pearl of the Orient, and is roaring toward the millennium at full throttle.

By comparison, L.A. putters ahead, unable to get it all together enough to build an adequate public transportation system, much less spike the sky with a dozen new towers of commerce.

I explained to those who chuckled at our “downtown” that unlike Communism that rules from the top, we rule from, well, the bottom. Democracy is the real people’s government, and it takes longer to get where we’re going. But, I promised them, we’ll get there.

If I were coming to L.A. for the first time the day we flew home, my impressions would be mixed: the open attitude of its people, the sweep of its shoreline, the glowing expanse of its ocean . . . and, against all that beauty, a young policeman shot to death in the line of duty.

I would simultaneously see L.A.’s grandeur and hear the words of a little boy saying goodbye to his policeman-daddy. I’m sitting here even now hearing those words as the image of the Great Wall fades.

I’m back and I’m still trying to form an impression of the city whose streets I endlessly walk.

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Al Martinez’s column appears on Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com