“Can you get us into Sichuan?” I asked Mu Lan. She said, “Well, I'll try.” Then one day I got a call from the Chinese consulate in New York City with an invitation to go to Sichuan.

Now, I didn't have an assignment to go to Sichuan. I hadn't proposed a project to go to Sichuan. So I called the editor and said, “I have this invitation to go to Sichuan. Can I go? Would you finance it?” And he said, “Why would I be interested?” I said, “Well, it's closed to foreigners.” He said, “Go, that’s good enough.” All I knew from Mu Lan was that the food was better.

So landed in Sichuan in 1983.

Now, Mao was dead. Deng Xiaoping was in ascendancy. And if you came into Chengdu, you would think for all the world that Mao was still there alive and ruling the country.

But even though Mao was getting his annual scrub from the fire brigade way up on top of a scaffolding, I noticed he was relegated to the broom closet in a tea shop.

When the Chinese delegation came to National Geographic and the editors showed them the pictures I had made including Mao, they said, “Oh, you can't publish that.”

So what was really happening—Deng Xiaoping had picked Sichuan because it was isolated as a good place to experiment with what he was calling a new kind of socialism. Now you can correct me if I'm wrong, but to all the world, it looked to me like it was actually a version of capitalism.