Nostalgia Quote by John Pomfret

There is a quiet flex embedded in that casual scene-setting: the idea that geopolitics wasn’t an elective for John Pomfret, it was ambient noise. By locating his upbringing in New York City in the late 1970s, he’s not just offering memoir detail; he’s drafting credentials. This is the era of Carter, normalization, Deng’s opening, the aftershocks of Nixon’s China trip still rearranging the American imagination. If China was “on the front page” regularly, then a kid paying attention could grow up treating U.S.-China relations less like an abstract rivalry and more like a living storyline.

The mention of The New York Times matters as much as China. It signals a household (or at least a civic environment) where elite media set the agenda and where international affairs were considered normal dinner-table material. That’s a coded argument about authority: I’m from the place where the narrative gets written; I watched the narrative being written; I learned to read the world through headlines.

The subtext is also about contrast with the present. Today, U.S.-China coverage is constant but often flattened into slogan-friendly binaries: threat, decoupling, TikTok, Taiwan. Pomfret’s memory implies a different texture: a moment when the relationship was still being invented, when the terms weren’t locked in, when curiosity could plausibly coexist with anxiety. The intent isn’t nostalgia for its own sake; it’s to frame his perspective as shaped by a formative, high-stakes news cycle that made China feel both distant and urgently consequential.