I was a 10-year-old country boy spending the summer vacation at my uncle’s when the 1992 Barcelona Olympics were held. My cousins and I would get up around six in the morning to watch the live broadcast on a 14-inch black-and-white TV set, with an old-fashioned antenna propped up in front of my uncle’s big wood-and-clay house by the trunk of a pine tree.

It was a truly eye-opening experience for children in a mountainous — and for that reason isolated and poor — part of south China. It’s the first time I had ever heard of the word Olympics and had got to know the existence of time difference. With the medal count being updated daily, the idea of national identity had also been imparted into our previously blank minds.

The broadcast presented us a curious world full of things urban, modern and foreign (I was struck most by Barcelona’s outdoor diving pool, with the backdrop of the city), but after breakfast we were preoccupied with helping adults harvest the rice, graze buffalo and guard watermelon fields against thirsty kids from outside the clan.

It is hard to believe that nine years later I would be on a college campus in surburban Beijing celebrating the city’s winning bid for the 2008 Games. We didn’t join the ecstatic crowds on the streets, but we were genuinely happy. The festive mood was appropriately punctuated by residents in nearby neighbourhoods setting off firecrackers late into the night.

Fast back to 1992, pre-industrial and tranquil way of life had been preserved in my hometown despite all the great revolutions of the 20th century. Villagers toiled the land in much the same way as their ancestors and even the ancient rule of men bathing at the walled hot spring after sunset and women during the daytime remained intact.

All this has changed profoundly after 16 years of dramatic economic and social reform across the country.

Most of the dozen cousins I played with on those starry summer nights travelled to the Pearl River Delta in neighbouring Guangdong province, dubbed the factory of the world, after middle school. They have worked since in plants that make anything from shoes and clothes to toys and household appliances for monthly wages of about $100, meagre by Western standards but which have meant much higher living standards back home.

May, one of my uncle’s daughters and my one-time classmate, also found a job in Guangdong after studying traditional Chinese medicine and English in college. She now spends more than six months of a year in Cambodia and African countries, selling (and also donating) her company’s special malaria cure based on a Chinese herb. During a cell phone conversation last week, my uncle told me she was currently in the Comoro Islands.

My parents have worked in a South Korean restaurant in Guangdong for the past seven years, with a couple from Busan overseeing two dozen employees including Chinese Korean chefs from the northeastern provinces bordering North Korea.

So the extended family, once insulated from the outside world, has been intertwined with the great globalisation one way or another. It’s a story shared by tens of millions of hard-working Chinese families over recent decades.

I look forward to taking my parents to Olympic events in Beijing in August. I wonder if they will have some reflections on life in the state-of-the-art Bird’s Nest National Stadium. From the starvation and dire poverty of a backward, agrarian era distrastrously compounded by revolutionary excesses, they have come a long way to become part of the wild capitalism of Guangdong, a “lively and dynamic mud pit” as some people call it.

And they are not yet 50.

Guo Shipeng has been a researcher with the political and general news team of the Reuters Beijing bureau since April 2005.