Alienated with this new strange place

On many occasions strolling through downtown Beijing, I would often think about whether my father would recognize Beijing if he were alive today. He used to brag about his familiarity with almost every downtown street in the city where he graduated from high school and college. But after giving it some more thought, I think Beijing would be a strange new place to him.

Even I, after witnessing the constant changes here in the past two decades, find it difficult to find some store or restaurant on a street that used to be so familiar to me.

In the book Stranger to Its Motherland, an author attempts to better understand the motherland by traveling from its most northeastern town to its most southwestern end. It is a book with many sentiments that I share.