It was about 8 A.M. when I walked my Flying Pigeon bicycle past a teen-age guard and out the gate of the Friendship Hotel in Peking. A push with my right leg, a hop onto the seat and I was instantly swallowed in the spinning wheels and bobbing heads of rush-hour traffic in Peking, about to see China as the Chinese do - on two wheels.

Down Baishiqiao Road pedaled students bound for morning classes at People's University, early shoppers dangling string satchels of produce from the handlebars and laborers hauling anything from cabbages to suitcases lashed atop the rear fender.

I was visiting the People's Republic with a science and trade group headed by my father. The Academy of Sciences, the body in overall charge of basic research in China, had invited him to exhibit his firm's cancer research and microbiology equipment and to arrange lectures by American specialists in virology, immunology and genetic engineering. Thanks to nepotism and past studies in Chinese history, I was permitted to tag along.

The three-week trip took our group of 10 to Peking, Shanghai and Canton. Exhibits and lectures kept the scientists and businessmen occupied most of the day, but those of us not involved in the daily programs were on our own and enjoyed a degree of freedom not often accorded ordinary tourists.

Months before leaving for China, I had decided that I wanted to see the country on two wheels, and I spent my first day in Peking convincing Zheng Feng, a student at the Institute of Microbiology, to lend me her Flying Pigeon bike. Borrowing a bicycle is not the only option open to visitors; they can bring their own or even buy one in China. (For details, see the If You Go box.)

The bike that I borrowed from Zheng Feng, like most vehicles in China, was not especially new and did not have gears, but it bore the caring touch of an owner who had spent a month's wages to purchase it. I never underestimated the inconvenience Zheng Feng's kindness cost her, for it was the inverse of my own benefit and joy in borrowing her bike.

Finding myself caught in a human logjam of bicyclists shortly after leaving the hotel, I decided to avoid the busy downtown streets and head out of Peking on my first trip. I aimed for the Summer Palace, six miles from the hotel, and beyond to the small towns dotting the countryside in the northwest. I knew I could not count on asking directions in English, and the romanization of street signs seemed incomplete, so I selected routes that followed bus lines and provided me with a series of lurching, honking red beacons.

The route to the Summer Palace hardly taxed my sense of direction, since a line of tourist vans, city buses, official sedans, and other bicycles cut a clear course to the former imperial residence. The major buildings, cast in an electric rainbow of colors, lined the shore and hills above Kunming Lake. On one arbor alone each crossbeam bore a complete and different mural. A marble boat, built to prove the staying power of the Manchu Dynasty, sat moored for eternity amid the lily pads.

As utterly Chinese as the palace was, part of its aura seemed as familiar as a boat ride to the Statue of Liberty. Soldiers on leave posed for pictures with their sweethearts or rowed them, with the delightfully laconic strokes of lovers, across the lake. School children on field trips chirped away, hugging each other, laughing at anything, pressing to the counter of an ice cream stand, and then scrambling up the stone steps to the top of Longevity Hill. I stood there, too, and the sight of temples rising, needle-like, on the northwestern hills sent me back to my bicycle to try to reach them.

Past the Summer Palace, the last of urban Peking fell away, as the rows of new apartment buildings yielded to tile-roofed compounds set amid the communal fields. Like most rural roads, and even many urban streets, this one ran between rows of shade trees and afforded a grassy shoulder for rest almost anywhere. I stopped to watch a detail of farmers separate wheat and chaff on a gas-driven thresher, and climbed atop an aqueduct where two women washed their laundry in the flowing water. Gradually, I was making my way to Xiangshan, about eight miles from the palace, and I sensed I had arrived when I suddenly ran into a traffic jam.