Back to Angie in China

Before becoming a journalist, Caroline Buijs organized trips to China for a living. That’s how she met Chinese travel agent Angie Guo, the subject of her first professional article. Ten years later, Caroline returns to Beijing to see her again.

There she is, on a fine and sunny Sunday afternoon in Beijing: Angie Guo, standing in my hotel garden, surrounded by bamboo, little ponds and red lanterns. Give or take a few weeks, it’s been exactly ten years since I last interviewed her during my vacation to China. I met Angie for the first time in 2002, when she visited our travel agency in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. I was organizing trips to China and she was our woman on the ground, arranging everything from airline and train tickets to hotels and excursions. She was very good at it, because she understood what our customers liked (a guide that takes you to the local market and explains how to prepare unfamiliar vegetables, for example). I liked her immediately. Not only because of her intelligence and sense of humor, but also because she was making her way through the Dutch snow in stockings and shoes without complaining. Her official name is Guo Huifang, but everyone in China is given an English name by their English teacher, so she is called Angie.

For years, we emailed each other almost every day for our work, exchanging news about the weather, our children (one child in Angie’s case), and anything fun we’d been up to. When I was in China, we enjoyed some great meals together of course, because China has the best food in the world.