What was going on when I was born?

Secretary of State George P. Shultz left today on a 12-day mission to the Far East in which he hopes to ease the strains and disagreements that have arisen in Chinese-American relations. In advance of Mr. Shultz's first visit to the region since he took office last July, State Department officials stressed that they expected no significant agreements or announcements during the talks in Japan, China and South Korea. 'A Large Number of Grievances' But they said they were attaching particular importance to Mr. Shultz's four days of talks in Peking with top Chinese leaders next Wednesday through Sunday, the first such high-level talks in nine months. ''Both sides have accumulated a large number of grievances in the past few months,'' an American official said, ''and Shultz is hoping that some straight talk can at least clear up the misunderstandings and put us on a better road.'' ''I think this visit itself is a major step to broaden the relationship and to put it on a stable and sustainable footing,'' a senior official said.

Almost 10 years after the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration was created to unify efforts against narcotics, the Government is still struggling to find the best way to fight the growing problem of drug use and distribution. It has found that repeated crackdowns and changes in strategy have failed to produce long-term results, despite increased financing. The newest offensive against drugs encompasses the Reagan Administration's team approach involving several Federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Coast Guard and the Central Intelligence Agency. The money spent by the Federal Government to intercept drugs tripled from 1977 to 1981, according to a yet unpublished study by the General Accounting Office. But the amount of drugs seized represented just a small percentage of the narcotics believed to have been smuggled into the country.

DETROIT IMPORTED cars, once rare birds found at the curb of the avant-garde in university towns and in the multiple garages of the rich, have, in effect, today become the American car. They are not only the choice of some 30 percent of the car-buying public - it was less than half that 10 years ago - but they have also become the design and manufacturing ideal, the role model, of the domestic auto makers. With its sales and market share plummeting, Detroit responded to this challenge in 1980 with a four-year $80 billion spending program by the Big Three, the General Motors Corporation, the Ford Motor Company and the Chrysler Corporation. Besides new factories and production tooling, the spending program, now at its halfway point, has unquestionably produced some timely new cars. At G.M., these include the front-wheel-drive J-cars, the Chevrolet Cavalier and its cousins from the other divisions, as well as the Acars, the Chevy Celebrity and its Oldsmobile, Buick and Pontiac derivatives.

MOUNT LAUREL TOWNSHIP ''FINALLY,'' Ethel Lawrence said, ''here is the highest court in the state defending the constitutional right of poor people.'' There was a tone of weary pride in her voice, the kind that comes with the end of a long, painful conflict. The end of that conflict was the ruling two weeks ago by the state Supreme Court that held that municipalities must work actively to provide housing for the poor. The beginning was in 1968, when Mrs. Lawrence was a 41-year-old housewife who did domestic work in nearby Moorestown. Although she did not live in the Springville section of Mount Laurel, she had relatives and friends there, and was concerned about the conditions they were living in.

EVERY afternoon at around five o'clock Frank Rothman looks at the numbers. That's almost second nature for the chairman and chief executive of MGM, who occupies the same chair from which Louis B. Mayer and, later, Irving Thalberg, once examined the rising box office receipts that established Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as one of Hollywood's most powerful studios during the 1930's. These days, though, Mr. Rothman is dealing with numbers of a different kind - motion picture budgets that must be kept low enough to satisfy the tight spending limits imposed by the company's bankers but not so low that they turn away the high-priced talent vital for future box-office success. It's a tough task and one that has left the legendary MGM lion whimpering rather than roaring. Last year, despite MGM's two hits - ''Rocky III'' and ''Poltergeist'' -the film company's 17 movies averaged only $9.3 million in rental income per film, well below Universal's $25.9 million and far down on the list of major studios. And, its share of the motion picture market, though up from 1981, still lagged behind the likes of Warner Brothers, Columbia and Paramount.

THE residents of Old Saybrook, a shoreline town about halfway between New Haven and New London, have just bought themselves a beach. State environmental officials say they have not heard of such a thing in decades - although they say that as the shoreline's population swells, there is an increasing need for public beaches. Of the 78.5 miles of usable beach on Connecticut's shoreline, 60 percent is privately owned and 40 percent is public beach, state officials said.. Arthur J. Rocque, director of coastal area management in the state's Department of Environmental Protection, said that is a high percentage of private beaches, compared with other coastal states. Barbara J. Maynard, Old Saybrook's First Selectman, calls the purchase of Harvey's Beach, a six-acre beach that has been owned by the same family for over 200 years, ''a stroke of good luck - the timing was right.''

WESTCHESTER'S new Public Utility Agency, which was established to bring low-cost electricity to the county, met a new administration last week and received a very specific assignment: help keep the General Motors plant in the county. The plea came from County Executive Andrew P. O'Rourke, who said that the assembly plant in North Tarrytown, where indefinite layoffs have reduced a work force of nearly 5,000 to 2,600, ''might be closed down because of the high cost of energy.'' He said that such a decision was ''imminent,'' and could come as soon as this summer. Mr. O'Rourke outlined a proposal that he said plant officials were considering and suggested how the seven-member utility agency might help. ''General Motors would like to set up its own generating facility by burning garbage, but they need stand-by power, and this agency might be able to provide it,'' he said.

WHITE PLAINS AS blacks in the county and nationwide prepare to observe February as Black History Month, their attention will be focused not only on the past but also on the future. At a time of increasing unemployment and what many blacks perceive as an insensitivity toward the black community on the part of the Reagan Administration, the organizers of this year's observation in the county stressed the importance of focusing on the contributions and past gains of blacks in American life in order to rekindle the spirit that brought about those changes and to forge new goals. According to many interviewed last week, a growing perception that blacks have lost considerable ground in recent years and are pessimestic about the future has added greater significance to Black History Month. That concern is reflected in the theme for this year's observation: ''Where Do We Go From Here?'' ''We're trying to dispel the distortions about the contributions blacks have made to this country's history,'' said Selena Grissom, a member of the Afro-American Cultural Foundation in White Plains, which is heading this year's observation. ''We want to give our people, especially our youth, something they can feel proud of and goals they can reach for to improve themselves and to educate others to help eradicate discrimination and injustices that have been done socially, intellectually and financially.''

Governor Kean will ask the New Jersey Legislature on Monday to approve a $6.8 billion budget with no new taxes but with further increases in tuition at state colleges and in fares for mass transit. The budget is only $511 million higher than the current one, and 75 percent of the increase involves mandated rises in expenditures for pensions, Social Security and state aid. Seventeen of the state's 20 departments would be required to keep expenditures the same as in the current fiscal year. The only increases or new initiatives are in the Departments of Corrections, Transportation, and Higher Education. Will Run State 'From the Top' In a prepared message, Mr. Kean said, ''This budget imposes a system whereby government will be managed from the top down, not controlled by demands coming up from the bottom.''

The Brooklyn Bridge has been celebrated in many and varied ways, but in honor of its centennial birthday May 24, New Yorkers and tourists will be treated to a new perspective on this architectural and engineering marvel. The bridge's anchorages are actually usable pieces of real estate: The Brooklyn anchorage contains 50-foot-high vaults, which the city has used for dead storage.

FOR three quarters of a century, Third Avenue was dominated by the rumble of the El. It was a dingy,c obblestoned corridor lined with neighborhood saloons, cheap r estaurants and run-down tenements. But when the El was dismantled in1 955, developers rushed to rebuild Third Avenue, and the first of a n ew generation of office structures went up in 1956. Today, intensive redevelopment has transformed the avenue into Manhattan's newest, most eclectic office thoroughfare - as radical a change as any in the city's recent history. In the prime 20-block strip from 39th to 59th Streets, 34 office towers have been erected and form a near-solid wall. In the last two years, three new towers were completed and two more were begun, and construction will begin on another later this year, leaving fewer than a half a dozen sites for further redevelopment. Yet as this final phase in Third Avenue's transformation nears its end, real-estate brokers report diminished demand for the buildings, community leaders are dismayed by the changes in the neighborhood, and urbanists are criticizing both the planning and the architecture.

A GUST of wind sent Thomas Halsey's DN-Class iceboat flying across the ice on Mecox Bay. Little heralded, Mr. Halsey has been on the bay in the last few days getting ready to compete for the world championship in iceboating, a sport that Long Islanders have been enjoying for more than a century. Mr. Halsey, a Water Mill farmer, descendant of one of the Island's first English settlers and the current Long Island champion in the DN Class, will join three other East End skippers when the International DN Ice Yacht Racing Association world cup regatta begins tomorrow, weather permitting, at Sodus Bay, north of Rochester. The little known but fiercely competitive event, run annually in Europe or North America since 1973, draws well-equipped and apparently well-financed teams from the Soviet Union and Poland, where iceboating is a very popular sport in certain latitudes. Skippers from Sweden, West Germany, East Germany, Canada and the United States as far west as Montana also compete.