What was going on when I was born?

The Commerce Department said today that it is investigating whether Chinese textiles and apparel exported to the United States are being illegally subsidized. The department said it started the countervailing duty investigation Monday. It was set off by complaints filed last month by several domestic textile and apparel groups that the Chinese textiles are subsidized through dual exchange rates and therefore can be sold in this country below their real production costs.

The Speaker of the House, Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., said today that the House would take no action this year on a comprehensive bill to revise the nation's immigration laws, but the White House asked him to reconsider his decision. The Speaker's comments, at a meeting with reporters, suggested that such legislation was dead at least until January 1985. Members of Congress said there was little chance the bill would be taken up the House in 1984, an election year. In explaining why he did not want to bring the bill to the floor of the House, Mr. O'Neill said that it was opposed by many Hispanic Americans, including Hispanic members of Congress, and that there was no clear constituency in favor of the legislation.

Quotation of the Day ''First there was Saturday football, then there was Sunday football, then all-day Sunday football, then Monday Night Football and now there are Thursday night games and new football leagues playing almost all year.

A cascade of petrodollars over the last 10 years has dramatically transformed the contours of life in the Persian Gulf. But it has also brought economic and social problems that remain unresolved. And the decade of apparently limitless wealth is ending with the clear realization that oil revenues, although huge, are indeed finite. Oil production has slowed, and the global recession has shrunk the markets that the region's shiny new industrial installations were designed to serve. This is raising serious questions about whether the OPEC members along the Gulf have spent their billions wisely, and whether they have acquired the political leverage that these billions should have brought them.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1983 Companies Some $60 million in precious metals may not exist, despite the sale of the assets to thousands of small investors, an audit of a little- known gold dealer suggested. The audit was made in connection with the suicide last Wednesday of Alan David Saxon, chairman of the company, Bullion Reserve of North America. (Page A1.) Mary E. Cunningham resigned from Seagram, saying she had completed her task of devising a strategy for its wine division, which recently purchased Wine Spectrum from Coca-Cola. According to industry sources, however, the Spectrum deal was actually at variance with Miss Cunningham's recommendations. (D1.)

''Walk in please. Behave yourself now,'' the uniformed guard said sternly, as he opened the Felt Forum at Madison Square Garden yesterday morning to the first of some 1,200 people who came to hear about the $2.25 billion in Washington Public Power Supply System bonds that may well be worthless. The guard's admonishment was somewhat superfluous, however, since those who attended the closed- circuit television session had no chance to question, or even see, live people discuss the fate of their investment. Instead, they watched giant television screens with two Chemical Bank officials and three attorneys calmly explaining the depressing status of the supply system's bonds and the largest municipal bond default in history.

The following article is based on reporting by Pierre Franey and Bryan Miller and was written by Mr. Miller. WHILE it is easier than ever to find kitchen equipment, building a basic kitchen battery has become, in certain ways, more complicated than ever before. Anyone who has browsed through the bumper crop of kitchenware shops sprouting around the metropolitan area can't help but be dazzled and somewhat bewildered by all the gleaming pots and pans, colorful casserole dishes, gracefully designed bowls and platters, powerful food processors, electric pasta and ice cream makers, fanciful gadgets for every conceivable task and enough varieties of knives to launch a butcher's school. As one New York cooking instructor recently remarked, ''Many people can easily become equipment junkies rather than serious cooking students.'' We can't agree more. Since part of our job is keeping up with all the kitchenware products that flood the market annually, we are exposed to everything, from the ingenious to the inane.

IN Spain, where cooking schools are not the popular phenomenon they are in the United States, one in Madrid has earned a special reputation. The Alambique, a cooking school and specialty kitchenware shop founded three years ago, is considered by far the best of its kind there. Clara Maria Amezua de Llamas, who is one of the four principals in this thriving enterprise and who is considered one of the finest cooks in Spain, arrived in America recently to Recipes are on page C8. participate in Madrid Week in New York. The celebration of Spanish culture began Monday to promote friendship and understanding between what have been proclaimed as sister cities. When I invited Mrs. Amezua de Llamas into my kitchen not long ago to explore a few fine points of Spanish cooking with me, she explained that the opening of her cooking school had had its genesis in New York.

The Big Three auto makers ended the 1983 model year with a 16.7 percent increase in sales, the companies reported today. It was the first time since 1978 that the domestic auto makers had been able to report a year-to-year improvement in sales. The increase in sales has brought a dramatic turnabout in the financial outlook for the industry, which reported combined losses of more than $8 billion during 1979, 1980 and 1981. The increased sales, combined with new labor contracts and other cost- cutting measures have led analysts to estimate that the Big Three will report combined earnings of about $5 billion for the 1983 calendar year.

Saying that her task to devise a strategy for the wine division of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons was complete, Mary E. Cunningham submitted her resignation to the company yesterday. Miss Cunningham, who joined Seagram in March 1981, leaves the posts of vice president, strategic planning and project development, and executive vice president of its wine division effective Oct. 14. In a telephone interview, the 32- year-old executive said she wished to devote her full attention to the Semper Corporation, a venture capital and strategic consulting firm Miss Cunningham formed some months ago with her husband, William Agee, former chairman of the Bendix Corporation. Miss Cunningham, who is president and chief operating officer of Semper, had previously been an executive at Bendix. She married Mr. Agee in 1982.

The Supreme Court's 5-to-4 decision Monday night to deny a stay of execution for a condemned Texas killer signaled a significant departure from the way the Court has handled similar last-minute appeals. This morning, at the last minute, Associate Justice Byron R. White blocked the execution of the condemned man, James D. Autry. But that action, on a separate appeal filed in Mr. Autry's behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union, did not alter the importance of the Court's new approach to capital punishment cases. In its decision Monday night, the Court for the first time refused to block the execution of a prisoner who had not yet filed even one Supreme Court appeal from the lower Federal courts' denial of his petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Indeed, the appeal papers of the condemned man were not scheduled to arrive at the Supreme Court until Nov. 2, four weeks after his scheduled execution by lethal injection.

The Reagan Administration, ignoring the recommendation of an interagency advisory group made shortly after the Sept. 1 destruction of a South Korean airliner, has decided against tightening controls over exports of oil and gas equipment to the Soviet Union, Administration officials said today. The decision signals a reluctance to put further bars on trade with the Russians, and helps the United States avoid new trade frictions, such as those arising from last year's sanctions against selling equipment for construction of the natural gas pipeline from Siberia to Western Europe. Currently, the Administration restricts the sale of most high-technology equipment to the Soviet Union. But the Administration has permitted the sale of some pipeline construction equipment, such as conventional drilling rigs, that involve less advanced technology. Most recently, equipment to help lay pipelines has been removed from the restricted list.