Five more days of biking in Peking remained. On a trip to Liulichang, a narrow, winding alley notable for its antique stores. I was able to browse through stands laden with painted screens, jade carvings and gravestone rubbings. But unlike the ordinary tourists who had to return to their buses or taxis, I was a freewheeling explorer and pressed on farther down the alley. I passed women busy doing their laundry in wooden tubs, observed a man reading in the sunlit doorway of his ancient compound and then came upon a silent semicircle of children gathered by a wall.

As I dismounted and drew closer, I saw they surrounded a wrinkled, tawny-skinned old man with a small workbench in his lap. Molding wads of soft, colored clay with his hands and an assortment of plastic tools, he created figures representing women with parasols and other types of dolls. As he finished each one, a child would push 10 fen (seven cents) into the man's palm and carry off the prize.

Though I had barely scratched the surface in seeing the sights of Peking, I had to leave with the tour group to fly to Shanghai. On arrival, I again borrowed a bicycle, this time from our translator. He agreed to lend me the bike but had dire misgivings about my touring the city on my own. ''I live in Shanghai,'' he said repeatedly, ''and even I get lost.''

Yuan was justified in worrying about how I would manage to negotiate the traffic in the city of 11 million. Streets in the downtown shopping district were virtually choked with humanity. Pedestrians overran the sidewalks and the bicycle lanes as well. Anything on wheels fought for the remaining asphalt and I was hesitant to join the fray.

Bypassing the shopping area, I took my first ride into the Yangpu District, which an English-speaking student had described as a typical workers' neighborhood. Crossing Soochow Creek northeasterly from downtown, I left behind the Art Deco skyscrapers, the mock Tudor manor houses and louvered apartments and entered a Shanghai that had remained virtually unchanged during the decades of colonial rule. Yangpu drew life from its docks and factories, and entire blocks bore the soot of industry.

The streets bustled with pedicabs, shoppers and construction workers. Sidewalks were being laid atop gravel, one tile at a time, and the warm asphalt of new streets stuck to my tires. I saw many elderly men and women, sewing, mending, hanging the previous night's bedding to air on clotheslines strung between spindly trees.

I was tired and stopped at a fruit stand for my usual lunch. The teen-aged counter boy answered my hunger with two apples and my exhaustion with a chair. The gesture, so simple and warm, begged a return. I dug the last penny out of my pocket - it was the only readily available artifact of America on me - and presented it to the boy. At least he could prove to any doubters that a foreigner really had passed his way.

For my second major trip in Shanghai, where we stayed for only four days, I chose the countryside. From our party's guesthouse, near the western border of the city, it took only moments to get to Qing Hu Road near the airport and then to reach open country.

For 17 miles, I rode along the willow-shaded road, meandering through the fields and crossing a gridwork of canals. There were occasional intrusions - the recorded pep talks and martial music booming from communes, a driving test for motorcycle policemen - but mostly there was the beauty, hush and intimacy of rural life.

Whatever Chinese agriculture lacks in mechanization, it makes up in personal touches. In the pampered fields, each kept as tidy as lace, grew rice, wheat and cotton, the plants picked clean by field hands whose bonnets and straw hats might almost have been mistaken for yet another crop. Watering proceeded with great care; one man drew water from the irrigation ditch and dispensed it by the bucket to workers who sprinkled each separate sprig of green. Other workers walked oxen toward their next task or drove ducks through the maze of canals. Old men and women, for the most part unapproachable in the cities, stared at me and matched my waves with unhesitant smiles.