Almost 35 years ago, in Roanoke, Va., my post-college roommate Teresa and I used to make an allegedly Chinese dish whose recipe she had clipped from a newspaper. It consisted of shredded beef and cabbage, spaghetti and as much ground black pepper as we could stand. It was oddly delicious, though we always questioned whether it was authentically Chinese. It didn’t look like anything we had ever seen at Suzie Wong’s, the Chinese restaurant in State College, Pa.

                This week I had it for lunch in Xiangtan.

                At Will Long Cake, a bakery with a dining room attached (the Junior’s of Xiangtan? Its sign is the same orange), the waitress handed me a rare English menu, and the words jumped off the page: Beef Black Pepper Spaghetti. When my tray was delivered a few minutes later, the dish looked slightly different from the Roanoke version: it was more golden in color, and instead of cabbage, it had  shredded carrots and red peppers. (In this town, every dish, even fried rice, comes with some form of red pepper — occasionally sweet pepper, as in this one, but more often slices of vibrantly colored, lethal little chilis, or dried pepper flakes.) The spaghetti looked and more like Western pasta than most of the noodles served here. But the slow-burn sensation that begins in the mouth and throat as soon as the nose detects the black pepper in the sauce  is exactly what I remember.

                Will Long may be the most upscale establishment on what I call Restaurant Row, just up the street and around the corner from my apartment. Restaurant Row couldn’t be more different from West  46^th Street. It’s lined with open-front restaurants, many of which have their cooking done at carts out on the street. There’s the dim sum lady who puts hot sauce on my pot stickers without asking; the Muslim noodle place (no pork, and don’t bring in any alcohol); the grills where skewers of meat are cooked while you wait; the carts with little round casserole dishes piled high with greens, meats and mushrooms that cook down, over high heat, to garnish the soupy rice noodles on the bottom; and the king of them all, the fried rice man. I haven’t even had a chance to try the steamed buns on my corner for breakfast.

                The fried rice man holds court in front of a charcoal burner with his wok, turning out one dish after another — fried rice, noodles on request, greens sauteed with garlic – to eat in the restaurant behind him or take away in small plastic-foam boxes. Another man, who acts as cashier, brings out a continuous supply of rice in stainless-steel bowls, and fresh greens upon request. The wok is smoking-hot, just as the eminent Chinese cooking authority Nina Simonds used to describe it when she wrote for me at The Boston Globe. The chef makes his work both and art and a science: a generous pour of oil, followed by an egg, followed by a coarse green mixture of spices I have yet to identify, then garlic, ginger, salt, those red pepper flakes and eventually the rice, which he turns and tosses for several minutes until he judges it hot enough and done. A take-away box, which sells for about 50 cents, is enough for lunch one day and breakfast the next.

                At a sit-down restaurant like Will Long (where a meal runs about $2.50, including soup and Coke) and at least one of the canteens on campus, dishes are served en casserole – meat and vegetables on a bed of rice, which tastes best when it slightly burns onto the dish to form a crisp browned crust. The canteens also serve cafeteria-style, and while most of what I’ve sampled is delicious, I’ve learned to be careful. On my first pass through the line last week, I spotted a dish that, in the low light and without my glasses, looked just like my friend Ruth’s stir-fry of julienned lamb with scallions. I pointed, and the server dished up a generous portion. I noticed that one piece of meat hadn’t been cut all the way through; three pieces were still attached at one end. As I carried my tray into the light, I discovered they were all that way – because they were chicken feet.

                The Sunday before classes started, Pam and I were invited to lunch with the family of a university administrator we met in New York, where she is spending a year doing postgraduate work. Her husband, who does not speak English, took us to a hotel in downtown Xiangtan with their 13-year-old son and a college-age niece and nephew, who do. Since of course we could not read the menu, they started out by asking us what we like;  I ventured that I generally love what the Chinese do with beef, but we agreed we would trust them. Our host took over, ordering a long string of dishes, and then, as the meal progressed, even more. First course: Peking duck, crisp-skinned and golden, head right there on the platter staring at us, accompanied as always by thin pancakes and scallions and plum sauce. One vegetable dish after another, the standout being sautéed celery with toasted macadamia nuts. Soup with tiny clams in their shells and, I’m told, eel. Two kinds of dumpling: one filled with whole shrimp, and smaller, sweeter ones that were the traditional dish for the day, the last of the two-week New Year celebration. As the centerpiece, that beef dish I had requested, but like none I’d ever seen in a Chinese restaurant: a long oval platter of incredibly tender sliced beef in a brown sauce, garnished with bright green, mild-tasting broccoli, and the shank bone placed proudly beside it. Beef with broccoli – which I explained was a very popular Chinese dish in America – was never like this. “Do you need rice?” the nephew asked politely near the end of the meal. No one did.

                Today I’ve just come from an English-speaking lunch with some graduate students: home-cured bacon to die for (think French lardons); eggs scrambled with tomatoes; spicy chicken and tofu; a winter soup of radishes and ribs; and, to top it off, a hotpot of fish soup, to which greens and delicate long-stemmed mushrooms were added for quick-cooking throughout the meal. On the way home, I stopped at Restaurant Row for something to take home for dinner later or breakfast, if there was any left by then. (At last! A place where no one thinks I’m eccentric because I like Chinese food for breakfast.) The fried rice man wasn’t there today; someone else was making pizza-like pancakes at his station. I went to his competitor, a woman who fries the rice on a flat grill. It’s very good but somehow lacks the je ne sais quoi of the cart down the street.

                So far, despite the produce market right around the corner, I’ve had no temptation to cook for myself; why bother, a New Yorker thinks, when all this is right outside and sells for next to nothing by our standards? In previous incarnations I did a fair amount of Chinese cooking, mainly when living in places where there were no passable Chinese restaurants. In Roanoke, besides the Beef Black Pepper Spaghetti, I mastered moo goo gai pan, again from a newspaper recipe. Happily, there is no moo goo gai pan in sight in Xiangtan.

                For much of my first day in the apartment that comes with this gig, I lay on my back on the extremely firm (not to say hard) bed staring at the ceiling and marveling: “I left my French doors and 10-foot ceilings and sconces and cat for this?”

                “It’s like high-end camping,” Pamela swears she told me when, back in New York, she showed me the pictures of her old apartment downstairs. After a week, I have to admit that she was right. At first glance, the apartment did resemble her pictures. It has the same oversized kettle on the double gas burner; the same massive, highly varnished dark-wood armchairs with zero cushioning; a one-armed section of what I remember from Pam’s pictures as a whole well-padded sofa. But the pictures did not prepare me  for the electrical wires crisscrossing every wall (outlets are at shoulder height), or for the desk and armoire that lose another piece every time I pull a drawer, or for the dust – think the post-9/11 cloud, only yellower —  that is everywhere, indoors and out. The bare white walls have not been painted in some time and show the marks of furniture-moving every semester or so.

                Then there is the matter of the bathroom:  there isn’t one, not as we know it. When I first walked in, all I saw was the toilet sitting by itself in a small room, and I panicked: don’t tell me there’s a communal bath outside? But no, there’s a showerhead in the toilet room, which means the floor is wet most of the time, requiring an elaborate system of slippers and towel-on-the-floor to prevent footprints throughout the apartment. (Maybe this is why the Japanese have dedicated toilet slippers.) There’s no sink, nor would there be room for one; face-washing and teeth-brushing are done in the kitchen. The mustard-yellow paint on the wooden door and trim flakes off like the side of an old barn from the constant moisture.

                Eventually I roused myself from the bed and started singing my own little chorus of “Brighten the Corner Where You Are.” A week later, I can see all kinds of ways this apartment is just like home.

                The computer desk now faces a double window in the living room, just as mine does at home. The vanity that incongruously stood in the central room has changed places with the desk that took up too much space in the bedroom. I’ve tidied up the various wires, especially the tangle around the two computers, my laptop and the resident desktop. Both are in constant use: the desktop for its quirky but reasonably high-speed Internet connection, the laptop as my writing desk and home entertainment center. The one-armed sofa segment faces its screen. Today I’m mulling how to create an exercise studio – enough floor space for my City Ballet and Pilates workouts via DVD, which I’ve been doing on the bed. One of those big wooden chairs just might work as a ballet barre.

                The toilet/shower is just like the ones on sailboats; I’ve learned to use it strategically. Dishwashing, too, reminds me of boat life: since I’m living on takeout (and what Chinese takeout! More on that another time), I just wash a few pieces at a time, but here I don’t have to worry about conserving water. The tall, slender coffeepot holds just enough of my chilled bedtime tea for three nights, just like my little green pitcher made by Ruth Strauss. Leksi is half a world away, and doing fine, I’m told, but in his honor I bought the White Cat brand of dish soap.

                The washing machine is modern, and works. (It drains to the bathroom floor.) So does the heater, except when I push the wrong button in the middle of the night; I can get the temperature in the living room up to the level of my beloved 90-degree apartment, though the bedroom remains chilly.  The refrigerator is good, in fact too good: the eggs I hard-boiled for handy protein froze.

                And I felt very much at home when, at 5:30 one jet-lagged morning, I found the kitchen flooded, just like at home. I’m still not sure if it the leak came from the drinking-water tank or the sagging ceiling board overhead, but it did remind me of my New York neighbors known as the Idiots Upstairs, who’ve flooded me more than a dozen times in four years, including the night of my going-away party. In fact, this apartment has given me insight into why that keeps happening: their washer, of questionable legality, must drain through an open hose like the one here.

                And what could feel more like Hamilton Heights on a holiday weekend than the sound of  firecrackers popping outside my window? Here, though, Sunday’s double celebration – marking the end of Chinese New Year and the beginning of the semester – went on for hours, white flashes in the daylight and bursts of color seen from my kitchen window in the evening. The only thing missing was a Dominican block party.

                When you spend time living in a foreign country, as opposed to just passing through, you settle in. You find your restaurants, your grocery store, your bus routes. You have opportunities to experience the best and worst of local life and culture. Last week I had one such opportunity, and a rare one: an examination at a medical clinic in Changsha.

                Despite the battery of tests my New York doctor had run to fill out the three pages of forms required for my teaching job, I was sent with the two other new foreign teachers, Paul from London and Nahoko from Kyushu, to have our health records examined and accepted in the provincial capital. It was the usual routine: no breakfast, only liquids. A driver picked us up and took us across a very smoggy gray landscape to the clinic.

                Inside, our first stop was the main office, where the driver worked his way to the window with our paperwork. We were each photographed with a webcam, then given sheets of bar-coded labels and asked to verify that yes, our names were correct. The driver indicated that Paul and Nahoko should take seats while he escorted me through the process.

                In America, a doctor will not so much as suggest you take an aspirin in public for fear of violating privacy laws; most procedures are done serially in the same private room. In Chinese medicine, the concept of privacy seems not to exist. Case in point: my first stop, phlebology. That means bloodwork, never my finest moment, involving as it does needles and blood. Scare stories about the Chinese using recycled needles didn’t help. AIDS prevention posters on the walls made me roll my eyes, since getting stuck with a questionable needle here could be my best shot at contracting H.I.V. Behind a window, a technician determined that, yes, I was the person in the picture, and then asked publicly in English – not that anyone else could understand – “You have period?” I waited behind a couple of patients until they vacated the low stools in front of the windows and followed the drill, sticking my left arm through the window for a swab of disinfectant my elbow. Two tubes of blood were drawn. Instead of a Band-Aid, I was given a long-stemmed Q-Tip to stanch any blood flow.

                The driver motioned me down the hall to the next stop: urine samples. He handed me a lidless plastic cup and pointed me toward the women’s restroom – a single, Asian-style. Imagine being a middle-aged woman with a disc problem and balance dicey at best, using a squat toilet and trying to touch absolutely nothing in the room. Now imagine adding the cup. When I finished, I carried the cup around the corner to deliver it to the window, praying no one would bump into me – remember, it had no lid — then returned to the sink to wash my hands, thoroughly.

                In the chest X-ray room, anyone waiting in line could watch through a square window. Luckily, the X-ray involved no undressing or flimsy paper robe; I was pointed to stand on two yellow footprints on the machine and told – more accurately, shown —  how to position my torso, with hands on hips. The technician gave me another direction that I didn’t understand. Weren’t my hands already on my hips? Did he want me to stand closer? Finally I understood that he wanted me curve my back and touch my shoulders to the machine in front of me. A flip of the switch, and on to the next station, the electrocardiogram.

                Here the assembly-line nature of the exam really kicked in. This queue of mostly men moved more slowly than the others. The curtain didn’t seem to move as male patients went in and out,  but was drawn firmly when a woman went in.  At two chairs at the front of the line, men removed their shoes and socks. So did I when my turn came, and from chair level I couldn’t help noticing that someone hadn’t washed his feet that day. I’ve never had to take off footwear for an EKG before, but then, I’ve never before arrived in the examining room for one fully dressed, either. When my turn came, the curtain was again drawn, and I pulled my black turtleneck over my head, lay back and thought of England as the technician clamped my arm, my chest, my ankle. Routine.

                The last station was most mysterious, and the wait the most irritating. “B. type,” the sign over the door said. Did this mean another sticking? Couldn’t they figure out my blood type from the two vials already taken? Did it maybe mean body type – would I be pinched with calipers and labeled an overfed, overweight Westerner? For most of the 20 minutes I spent standing in a snaky line, I couldn’t glimpse what was happening on the other side of the wall. People emerged wiping something off their midsections, and those waiting were shooed away from watching the procedure.  When I neared the front, I could see the feet of a body lying down, feet turning from center to left to right and bending as the patient changed position. Good God, could this be a rectal? But no. When I lay down, the technician – who was startled to find a foreigner in her cubicle – indicated I should pull up my sweater. She rubbed gel on my stomach and sides, then starting moving something over my skin. An ultrasound? As I rolled from right to left, I couldn’t help asking: “Do you speak English?” 

                “A little”

                “What is this test?”

                She scanned her memory for the word: “Lee-ver.” When she finished, she handed me a paper towel and I, too, wiped my middle clean.

                The driver, who had looked in a few times to check that I was still in line, led me back to the main hall, where he insisted on giving me a milk box and two wrapped cakes. Paul and Nahoko were waiting.  “How did you both get out before me when I went first?” I asked.

                “We didn’t do a thing,” Paul said. “Just sat here.”

                “Only you,” Nahoko added.

                It’s still not entirely clear why I was singled out, except that perhaps I’d been expected to bring my actual test results – the EKG graphs and the actual chest X-rays – to China along with the forms my doctor signed. In a land where you don’t speak the language, you don’t ask questions like that, or expect answers if you do. You do as you’re told and consider it part of the adventure.