Dan's China diary - day 8

In May 2006, silicon.com senior reporter Dan Ilett travelled to China, seeking to get behind some of today's most interesting tech and business stories. This is his warts-and-all diary, which appears daily this month. For in-depth coverage of this fact-finding trip inside China, including analysis and exclusive stories, click here.

Saturday 13 May, Beijing

Weird day.

Susan takes me to meet a Chinese family. She doesn't know these people and is vague as to how the introduction came about. I stop asking questions when the taxi driver drops us in the middle of what looks like a run-down council estate.

Mrs Rao, a woman in her 30s and matriarch of the family, greets us and takes us up to the flat. The two-bedroom apartment is home to six people in all, including two children. We all meet each other but no one gives their name - it's a bit strange but everyone gets on just fine.

The family has just moved to Beijing so everything is still in boxes. Mr Rao, a writer of kung-fu novels set in the Tang Dynasty period, has moved the family here because he's writing for TV now.

None of the family speaks English but Susan talks to them in Chinese. I feel a bit redundant so help to make dinner - beef stew.

Susan's getting excited about a story Mrs Rao is telling. I keep peeling potatoes in the sparse kitchen. These guys don't have much but are more than happy to share their food with a complete stranger, which makes them pretty cool in my book.

Susan later tells the story: "Mrs Rao opened an internet café in the late 1990s, which was quite unusual then, in a relatively poor city called Anhui.

"The owners of the internet cafe were the first people who taught the people how to surf the net at that time. And Mrs Rao was doing that job in her internet café.

"But life was very hard then. She had to sleep in the cafe because she had no money to rent a flat. One day the police came to the café and found out someone had surfed for porn websites in her café.

"She was told she could either tell the police the name of the person who viewed the porn website or she had to give some money as the punishment.

"The police asked her to find a scapegoat. At that time there was a high school student at the café and she didn't want to get the student involved. So she gave all the money she had to the police.

"But she couldn't run the café anymore. She didn't own the café, it was owned by her ex and an old friend, who both blamed her 'foolish' behaviour for not finding a scapegoat.

"They closed the café and she went back to her hometown. Mrs Rao didn't know what to do but surf the net day and night and talk in chatrooms."

It was then that Mrs Rao met her husband.

"One month later, she took a 20-hour train ride to meet him and the pair got married - just like a fairy tale."

The couple now have a six-year-old daughter and are doing well.

Susan and I take a trip to the markets, have a couple of drinks and say a quick goodbye. I have no idea how I'll get on without her in Shanghai.

Tomorrow follow Dan's progress as he gets to Shanghai.