Discovering America through a hodgepodge of popular culture, highbrow and low, helps a young man connect with the real and the abstract, Raymond Zhou, columnist of China Daily, recounts his American experience over the past three decades. The following is the first installment.

My earliest impression of the United States was positively negative.

Back in the early 1970s, America was one of the bad elements, together with bourgeois and the "Soviet revisionism", that we were supposed to "struggle against". It popped up in slogans during mass parades and in limericks for children, preceded by "down with" and followed by "imperialism". It had a face, too, in cartoons with the eagle nose as the most striking feature. We also learned that American soldiers would put up a white flag in war without much provocation, hence the term "paper tiger".