In the fall of 1987, Michael Jackson was about the biggest star alive. His Bad tour was selling out stadiums all over the world, and almost everywhere he went the crowds and the cameras came with him.
One day that October was different.
On Oct 23, 1987, during a break in Hong Kong, Michael crossed the border into China. His stop was Zhongshan, a city in Guangdong province. There was no big announcement and barely any press. He traveled almost like a regular tourist, with a driver and a young local guide who’d been handed the job that morning.
The guide was Liu Guangzhi. He was 23, and he didn’t know who he was about to pick up.
“I didn’t know whom I was going to pick up until they gave me the tourist name list,” he told China Daily years later. And even the name didn’t mean much at first. A lot of people in the area simply hadn’t heard the records that had made Michael a household name back in America.
So Michael got something he almost never got anymore. A normal day.
He spent it walking through a village and meeting the families who lived there. He stopped for photos with little kids and with older people, most of whom had no clue they were standing next to the most famous singer on the planet. He wasn’t in a hurry. He let folks come up to him and take their time.
That day clearly meant something to Michael too, because he didn’t just leave and forget about it.
Months later, back home, he mailed signed photographs to Liu through his agent, little keepsakes for the people he’d met along the way. Many of the villagers still had them more than 20 years on. “It’s a cherished memory for us all, and Michael helped us to keep it,” Liu told the paper.
And there was one more thing he did with that day.
When Michael put out his autobiography “Moonwalk” in 1988, he slipped in two pictures from that quiet trip to China. One of them shows him with a little one, and under it he wrote a simple line: “I can’t resist babies. In China, 1987.”
A man who got mobbed almost everywhere he went chose a day when hardly anyone knew his name, and put it in his own book.
No cameras followed Michael through that village, so there’s no footage of the day to watch. What’s left are the photos, including the two he picked for “Moonwalk,” and the memory of a 23-year-old guide who showed up for an ordinary job and spent it driving the King of Pop around his hometown.