YICHANG, CHINA — First of all, we don't sing, unless you count the shower.

So what on earth were we doing in a Chinese riverbank park, on a sultry summer afternoon, in front of a crowd of 200 smiling souls, cordless mikes in hand, belting out "Jingle Bells"?

And "Edelweiss."

And, finally (mercifully, for all concerned), "Auld Lang Syne."

We still blame each other for getting us into such a fix.

"We didn't want to sing, but they forced us," we try.

Max corrects us, with that roll of the eyes that comes so naturally with being 15. "Geez, Gramma, all I remember is them putting microphones in our hands and you saying, 'OK.' "

Max is the second of our grandchildren to go on what we've taken to calling "our grandkid trips."

It all began a few years ago when we two got talking over lunch about how we might help our six grandchildren discover themselves and their place as global citizens, at the same time allowing us to know them better before they grow up.

We decided that when each one reaches their teens we'll take them to any foreign country they choose.

Max's sister, Ashley Wallace, took us to Australia a few years ago.

Max is a quiet, good-looking kid, a high-school sophomore on Whidbey Island. He plays soccer and tennis and once considered Albert Einstein something of a hero.

Why China? Because he considered it as exotic as Australia but "more different."

The athlete in him wanted to hike miles on the Great Wall. The student in him wanted to see the army of life-size terra-cotta warriors that lay buried for 2,300 years beneath a mound of dirt near the backwater town of Xi'an.

The mischievous boy in him wanted to eat something weird (to him at least), like stewed snake or a fish with the eyes still looking at you. The budding photographer in him wanted to go to a place where he could point his camera in any direction and take "art, not snapshots."

"I studied a lot about China in middle school so I knew something about it," he says now. "I could have said let's go to Europe, but places like that are so similar to us."

That's how we found ourselves in June in Yichang, a small-by-Chinese-standards city of about 4 million with a lovely park on the Yangtze River, waiting for a cruise ship to take us upstream past the Three Gorges — arguably China's most photogenic region — and the enormous Sanxia Dam project.

Every afternoon at about 3, retirees who live nearby gather in the evergreen shade of the park to catch a river breeze and entertain each other. Some bring a folding chair and an "erhu" (a two-string instrument that looks something like a cigar-box guitar with a very long neck). Others pack a talent for singing whiny (to our ears only) Chinese-opera favorites.  "I don't sing"

Max was shooting pictures on a park path ahead of us and our guide, Pony Hu, when the musicians caught sight of him — tall enough to stand out, brown buzz-cut hair, wide hazel eyes. They crowded around Max, talking, smiling and motioning with a mike toward the grassy stage area in front of their folding chairs.

"I don't know what they want," Max pleaded with Pony when we caught up to him. There was a touch of panic in his voice. "I think they want me to sing, and I don't sing."

"We don't know any songs," we chimed in.

"Sure you do," Pony said with her mother-hen authority, lining us up on the makeshift stage area, squaring our shoulders to face our audience. "You sing, 'Jingle Bells.' "

Twenty minutes later, when the conductor tucked his baton away and nodded that our gig was finally over, we told Pony how embarrassed we were. She shushed us.

"You don't know what you did for those people," she chided. "They'll go home and tell their families about the Westerners with the boy who came to the park and sang for them. They'll talk about you for days."

As we headed for the docks and our cruise ship, we agreed to get over it.

"Nobody has to know," said Max, his face still flushed from teen angst. "Besides, maybe we'll never see those people again."

Right, we said, turning our attention to the muddy old Yangtze, with its mystical gorges and heartland villages.

The river snakes its way through countryside that's gorgeously, gaspingly green — photo-art heaven. Hamlets and farms cling to great shaggy heaps of earth that rise, steeply terraced, to dizzying heights from the water. Farmers stooped to tend crops on the stepped fields. People waved to us from rickety sampans tied to the shore.

"I really wanted to get off the boat there," Max says now when we talk about what the trip meant to us. "I wanted to see those towns. If I ever go back to China, that's what I would do, stop and see those people."

A thick tan haze hangs over all of China in June, a combination of dust from Mongolia and residue from burning coal to power a nation that's about the same geographic size as the U.S. with almost five times the population.

Fixing China's air

  The dam, a few days' cruise upstream from Yichang, is the largest water-conservancy project in history. It's supposed to help fix China's sickly air by replacing coal power with electricity, and to save lives by providing flood control over the Yangtze. By the time it's completed in 2009, it will have raised the river more than 500 feet, drowning 570,000 acres of farmland and the cities and villages of 1.5 million people, who even now are moving into newly built towns higher on the hillsides.

"I wasn't for the dam," one guide told us. "I think it's an ecological disaster. Power is better done with nuclear energy. The floods were caused by cutting forests upstream, and that's over. And the dam presents a target for terrorists."

The complexity of the project didn't escape Max.

"I know it's controversial, moving all those people and changing the land," he says earnestly. "But we didn't see much blue sky the whole time we were in China, only in Xi'an. And now that I think about it, I don't remember seeing blue sky in the pictures in my textbooks either. There are drawbacks to it, but good things, too, if it gives them bluer sky and longer life."

In Xi'an's airport, a young woman introduced herself as our guide.

"I'm Jing," she said, "as in 'Jingle Bells.' "

She turned abruptly and motioned us to follow her out of baggage claim toward our van. We couldn't tell if she was smiling.

"Geez, Gramma, you don't suppose Pony e-mailed her?" Max moaned as we struggled to keep up.

"Nah," we consoled him. "Forget it. It's just a coincidence. That's her name, Jing."

Xi'an, at the eastern end of the Silk Road, is where China's first emperor, Qin Shihuang, buried an army of warriors fashioned in life-size from clay. They were to protect him in his afterlife. Qin was the first leader to unify China politically, with Xi'an as its capital. He standardized weights and measures and a system of writing, and gave the order to start construction on the Great Wall.

Na Zhao's cave house

"Do you want to see how some people live now near where Qin buried his warriors?" Jing asked Max. "They live in what we call cave houses. They're dug out of hillsides made of loess soil, a kind of clay."

We drove to a village in the countryside and pulled up to a wooden gate in a high red-brick wall alongside the roadway. Jing got out of the van and "hello'ed" through the gate. A young woman in a denim overall skirt and white T-shirt answered and agreed to show us around.

Na Zhao was home for lunch from her job at a pharmacy. She led us through a dusty courtyard to a cool, dark cave — a room with a high, arched ceiling and lumpy walls and floor of packed dirt. The family uses the room as a kitchen, dining room and storage area. A dim lightbulb illuminated lunch on the table — watermelon, tomatoes and a big bowl of noodles.

Circling the small compound were several small brick houses, individual living quarters for Na Zhao and her new husband, his parents and various other family members. "I was really surprised by the cave house," Max said. "I didn't expect a Chinese house to be so big. And they have everything we have. It's different, but it's the same, too."

It used to be shameful to be so rich, Jing told us, but no more.

Developing country

In 1976, Deng Xiaoping took power, initiating economic reforms to encourage foreign investment and more personal wealth. China is still considered a developing country, but now 10 percent of Chinese people own a private apartment and a car.

"That's my definition of a middle class," said Norman Zhang, our Beijing guide.

Freedom, on the other hand, is relative, Max learned.

"We Chinese have freedom of speech," one Chinese man told us. "We can say anything we want about our government, as long as we don't criticize our leaders."

And a computer-savvy Chinese person can check anything they want on the Internet, another confided, "unless they're looking for information on Tiananmen Square, Tibet or Taiwan."

"That seemed really strange," Max said.

He was charmed, but so were the Chinese we met.

"Why did you choose to come to China?" they asked when they learned it was his dream trip. "Why us?" they asked over and over again.

"Because your culture is different than America," he explained patiently. "And I wanted to see how different."

Even people on the street surprised him.

"I expected them to ignore us," he said. "When you walk past people in Seattle, people mind their own business. But in China they looked at us and smiled. And lots of them spoke English. I think they're not self-focused as much as we are."

But the encounters he may remember in far better detail when he's older were with kids his own age.

Jing had pizza and dim sum brought to the Tang Dynasty art museum in Xi'an one afternoon for a party in Max's honor. She'd invited four teens (two girls, two boys), who entered the room giggling and poking each other as buddies and best friends do.

Max smiled shyly and sat stiffly in the middle of the group, thinking how they weren't dressed too differently than the giggling girls and his best buddies at South Whidbey High School. He asked if they play soccer (they do), and told them he plays bassoon in the band ("What's that?" they wondered).

The Chinese teens had studied English since grade school and had taken English names for their classes. Wang Mengxiao's mother chose the name Dream for her when she was 8. Gao Han likes soccer player David Beckham, so he goes by David. Li Cheng chose Clover "because I want to be lucky." Tang Hao picked Tom "because it sounds like my Chinese name, Tang."

Ma Zhi Yuan

They came up with a Chinese name for Max: Ma Zhi Yuan. It's similar to the name of a famous Chinese poet, they explained, and it means something like "Max goes far."

"No," we said adamantly a day or so later, when Max suggested trying to go far by bicycle on Beijing's teeming streets. There are nearly as many cars as bicycles in Beijing these days, but two-wheelers, buses and rickety carts still rule a chaotic commute.

"It looks dangerous," we said firmly.

"Geez, Gramma," Max begged, backed by Norman, our guide, who said he already had bicycles lined up for us. "I've always wanted to ride a bicycle in China. Please. Pretty please."

This is a grandchild, remember.

So we found ourselves peddling apprehensively behind Norman, looking like a gaggle of ducklings following their mama, clanging our bicycle bells to let the other traffic know to look out for us.

When it was over, we breathed relief.

"That was great," Max said, grinning. "Geez, Gramma, I told you you'd love it."

Hiking the Great Wall

The next day we took our places in the same order behind Norman to conquer a four-mile portion of the Great Wall. Max is a Boy Scout who did a 50-mile hike in the mountains the summer before. And as a guide, Norman has hiked that rugged ruin many times.

"Geez, come on, old-timers," Max prodded us along while Norman regaled us with stories about the Americans who couldn't make it up the uneven stone steps and cobbled pathways.

When it was over, they were both saying uncle.

"I really didn't think you old-timers could do it," Max allowed magnanimously.

"Learning all this stuff from textbooks is fine," he said later. "But it changes your perspective when you actually see something. Now I've actually seen the Great Wall and how big it is and how they constructed it, and it means more to me."

On our last day in China we went to Beijing's Temple of Heaven, a large, tree-shaded park that dates to 1420 and the Qing Dynasty. At 8:30 a.m., the temperature was in the 90s, the sky a now-familiar gray-tan. And the park reminded us of the one in Yichang.

A woman tried to coax us into a paddleball game. A little distance away, a man practiced calligraphy, drawing his letters on the concrete with water he gathered onto his brush from a bucket.

 Sally Macdonald is a retired Seattle Times reporter. John Macdonald retired as The Times travel editor.