Chairman Mao wore lavender socks.

         Of course, they may not have started out lavender. If they were washed as many times as one of his bathrobes was patched (73, to make it last 20 years), they could have faded considerably.

           That Chairman Mao was notoriously — and commendably! — frugal is just one of his many virtues enshrined at the Museum of Comrade Mao in Shaoshan, the town in rural Hunan where he was born. Shaoshan is quite the tourist attraction, though the well-appointed buses that pass through town are filled with Chinese. Few Westerners go there, as indeed few pass through this part of Hunan. In my afternoon there I saw only one Western couple, who looked either American or Canadian.

           Being based in Xiangtan, only 20 miles or so away, I thought it would be negligent not to go – and it’s not as if Xiangtan were overflowing with weekend cultural opportunities. Stevie Nicks, my assistant in the postgrad class, had warned me that it would take four buses to get to Shaoshan from campus; Pam suggested taking a car. The other foreign teachers had either been to Shaoshan or were busy that weekend, so on Sunday morning I went down to the end of my street and, improbably, hailed a cab on the first try. “Shaoshan,” I told the driver, then pointed out the words on a computer printout to be sure he understood. “Shaoshan?” He needed a moment to take it in. He held up two fingers, which I interpreted as meaning 200 yuan (about $30) – the off-meter fare he was asking for the long trip. “OK,” I said, and took the front passenger seat. Down the main road, he briefly picked up two students, one of whom could speak a little English, to make sure I was clear about the price. “He says it costs 200 yuan,” one explained, and again I said a cheerful “Yes!” The students went on their way.

           I could see why the driver was charging what, to the Chinese, seems an exorbitant amount to spend on a day trip. (As a point of comparison, 200 yuan was the amount of a coveted runner-up prize in a speech competition I helped judge.) Off the highway, the road to Shaoshan, mostly through farm country, is long, dusty and incredibly bumpy, and could have done serious damage to his cab. At one spot all the paving had been torn up for half a kilometer. The 40 to 50 minutes I had been told to expect stretched to more than an hour before we saw big brown “Tourist Center” signs overhead and, with a confident “Deng yi xia!” I told the driver to stop. The building to which the sign pointed was no tourist center, though it may have ambitions of being one someday, and it took some exploring on foot, a roadside map and finally a 5-yuan ride offered by two young women in a car to carry me a few more miles to the museum.

          The Relics Hall, built in 1967, is filled with, basically, Mao’s stuff – more than 800 pieces of it, including his hair-grooming case (he liked to relax by having someone comb his hair), his uniforms, underwear, the formal fur-trimmed black coat he wore to the Soviet Union, chocolate tins, even his used chopsticks. His bright red Speedo-equivalents are enormous, even folded in half; Mao was a big man, 6 foot 2 in a country where I’m tall. On display upstairs is his extensive record and tape collection, which takes up several rooms, as well as two temporary exhibitions: porcelain he used in his later years, decades after the metal flasks of the Long March, and 1,291 army watches, collected from veterans nationwide to celebrate Mao’s 116th birthday. Also on that floor is the most tasteful gift shop in the vicinity.

           The running theme of the wall labels, as rendered in English, is blatant hagiography: Mao as secular saint. (The museum was built at the height of the Cultural Revolution.) Mao worked ceaselessly and tirelessly to create a “harmonious socialist society,” so much so that he often forgot to eat or sleep. From an early age, he loved manual labor (does anybody?) and laborers. He loved his family, friends and staff members, even helping them out of financial jams, but warned them not to expect preferential treatment. The message reminded me of the annual promotion ceremony in the Lutheran Sunday school of my childhood: one of the questions was “Did Baby Jesus ever cry?” The correct answer was a chorus of “No-o-o-o-o!” Judging from the Relics Hall, Baby Zedong never did, either.

             I heard “Ex-cuse me!” only once in my hour or so in the museum, from a young man who said — I think — he was a theological student. “What is your feeling here?” he asked. I wasn’t sure what he meant, so I explained why I had come. “I’m old enough to remember when Chairman Mao was alive, and he was always in the news,” I said. “So I wanted to see the museum and learn more about him.” He seemed satisfied, and after a few brief exchanges I lost him in the crowd.

             That was too bad, because I had little to no idea how I was going to get back to Xiangtan. Outside the museum, I found no indication where to go next. No buses or taxis seemed to be stopping outside the gate. But a path parallel to the road looked promising, and I followed it to the wide-open Memorial Park, where a large statue of Chairman Mao stands amid wreaths of yellow flowers against a mountain backdrop. I walked for a bit past the Memorial Hall (a giant white statue of Mao resting in an armchair – think Lincoln Memorial); the Mao family’s Ancestral Hall (closed) and Ancestral Temple (also closed). I couldn’t find the birthplace, and the one woman who spoke a little English in the Tourist Services building, a k a gift shop, could tell me only vaguely how to get a bus to Xiangtan. I was contemplating my next move when, behind me, I heard those familiar words: “Ex-cuse me!”

            Oh, no.

            “Are you a teacher at the Hunan University of Science and Technology?”

            Oh, yes!

            “We’ve seen you around. We are students there – English majors. Do you know Pam? She’s our foreign teacher.”

             Saved.

            Jenny, Meg and Catherine were my new best friends. Yes, they were going back by bus, and yes, I could ride with them. They had just come from Mao’s birthplace and pointed in its direction. “But it will take you a long time. There’s a long queue.” They wanted to take pictures with the statues, and I wanted at least a peek at the birthplace, so we agreed to meet at the park entrance in 45 minutes.

             The 10-minute walk to the Mao family manse followed a pleasant closed-off drive, past a field of irises in full bloom. The girls were right: the queue at the entrance was too long for me, so I settled for a stroll around the grounds. Mao’s birthplace is no peasant hut but a substantial building with several wings, the roof partly thatched and partly tiled; his father was, after all, a merchant who could afford a university education for his son. The green landscape surrounding it, where the future Chairman would have played and learned to love manual labor, didn’t look so very different from the fields of my Pennsylvania childhood, except that some of them were rice paddies. I inspected a long corridor of kiosks selling souvenirs, foolishly passing up a Thermos-like container made of bamboo (if I see another one, I’ll buy it) and, maybe not so foolishly, a small khaki messenger bag with a portrait of Mao smiling and a red star. It might have made a nice gift, except that the likely recipient may have issues with, say, the Cultural Revolution.

             Which, by the way, none of the students here seem to have heard of. (Nor have they heard the news from Tienanmen Square in 1989, just about the time they were busy being born.) Jenny, Meg and Catherine apparently haven’t; on the bus back to Xiangtan, they proudly showed me the gold statuettes of Chairman Mao they had bought, the kind that almost every car here displays on its dashboard like a St. Christopher. Meg became violently carsick, and the homeopathic spray that works for me didn’t seem to help. At the Western bus station in Xiangtan, I insisted on treating us all to a cab back to campus instead of taking two buses, thinking it would be faster and help Meg feel better. It didn’t. “I’m a crazy driver!” the cabbie declared, and he wasn’t exaggerating. He was delighted to hear we’d just come from Shaoshan: “That’s my home!” If only he’d been the one to pick me at the beginning of the day.

                “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

                If that lede was good enough for Jane Austen, it’s good enough for me. And it was good enough for Annie in her literature class on Friday afternoon.

                I met Annie by chance a couple of weeks ago when I arrived early for my Wednesday afternoon class.  The previous class was just letting out. “Hi, Diane!” some of my sophomores called as they raced down the hall. It was a little disorienting: shouldn’t they be arriving rather than leaving? But then I realized that was another class of sophomores. (I have four.) I opened the door, and there, packing her bag, was Annie.

                Other than the man called in to help locate listening exercises on a lab computer and two women doing doctoral study in New York, Annie is the first  Chinese professor I’ve met. The foreign teachers here operate in something of a vacuum. The university looks good because it has us and gets extra money for doing so, but we are essentially window dressing. We teach oral English but know little  about what other courses our students are taking, or how they are taught. We have no official contact with the Chinese professors who teach grammar, listening, reading, writing, interpretation and literature. The administration does nothing to encourage it. We’ve speculated about why. Some of us think that, as foreigners, we intimidate them; some think they’re afraid their English isn’t good enough. Some think the reason is resentment over the price differential: we are paid roughly twice what Chinese professors make.

                Annie didn’t seem intimidated or resentful, and her English was certainly good enough. She said she had been teaching six or seven years but still had a lot to learn. I asked if I might sit in on one of her literature classes, and she seemed pleased.  She was teaching Chaucer that week. I gulped and said I was busy that day, and would come another time.

                By this week, thank goodness, she had moved ahead a few centuries to “Pride and Prejudice.” I walked into a large lecture hall with stadium seating, roughly the size and layout of Off Broadway’s Second Stage, minus the decor.  Annie was already wrestling with the computer console. (Having a “multimedia classroom” here usually means a DVD might play, if you’re lucky.) Music streamed over the speakers, and I’ve been away so long that it took me a few minutes to recognize it as Beethoven’s Fifth – “Dah dah dah DAAAAH.”  Soon Austen’s opening sentence was on the screen, courtesy of PowerPoint.

                The students, maybe 40 or so, were assembling. Even though three times the number could have fit in the room, they all huddled together in the center section – to be precise, the back of the center section, since no one wants to run the risk of sitting too close to the teacher. For good reason. “Today we’re going to talk about ‘Pride and Prejudice, “ Annie began. “Are you familiar with it? Have you read it?” Dead silence. Most students here would rather die than volunteer anything – an answer, an opinion, a demonstration – in part, I think, because of the herd mentality. They have none of that show-everyone-else-how-much-smarter-you-are attitude that drives New York. When I ask for a vote on the simplest question, rarely do more than a few hands go up. But if you call on them, they’ll stand (literally) and deliver.

                Annie wasn’t ready to get tough yet, so she launched into the basic four-line Austen biography: “Born into a clergyman’s family at Steventon. Educated at home. Never married. Died of bad health.” She ran down the list of Austen’s six major novels, showing not the book covers (which the students were unlikely to recognize) but the movie posters (which they might).  She tried to get someone, anyone, to admit to knowing  anything about the plot. That’s when she took off the gloves, in her own firm, quiet fashion.

                “Have you read the novel? Have you read the first chapter? You were assigned to read it. Who are the main characters? Who is Elizabeth?” She called on one student by number on the class roster, then another, then another., but none could or would answer. “You were assigned to read it,” she repeated. One girl rose and started to speak but then, unable to express her thoughts, switched into Chinese. ”Try to speak English,” Annie urged. The girl sat down; another rose but fared no better with either the characters or the basic plot.

                “What is the plot?” Annie hammered. “I assigned you to read it. How many of you have done the homework?” Instead of raising hands, the students looked down into their books in shame.

                    I smiled as I thought back to my classes that week — unusually energetic because they focused on language for a favorite activity, shopping. (Even my male-techie postgraduates had fun with that one.)  This class was making me feel much better — not because I’m a better teacher, but because no one in this one had done the homework, either. Here a Chinese teacher with more experience was feeling the same teeth-pulling frustration that I felt daily.

                At the break, Annie came over to say hello and vent. “They have too many classes,” she explained, to which I agreed. “And they’re all majoring in Teaching Chinese to Foreigners, so they don’t think this is important.”  Meanwhile, I had borrowed one student’s textbook, a thin paperback titled “Selected Readings in English and American Literature,” and found short excerpts from works of the usual suspects: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Woolf et al. on the British side, Hawthorne, Whitman, Dickinson, Fitzgerald and Frost on the American.  I laughed when I saw “To be or not to be,”  my proudest achievement with my Polish students. (I make them listen to the speech three times before I let them see a line-by-line Polish translation.)

                Annie soldiered on for another 45 minutes, through the Bennet girls’ reasons for marriage to the eventual happy ending. When she asked, “What is your view of marriage?” and called on a particular girl, the whole class dissolved into giggles. I couldn’t help wondering what these students would make of Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester if they ever got past the excerpt in their text and made it all the way to “Reader, I married him.”

                As the class neared its end, I could hear fatigue setting in to Annie’s English. But I was sure of one thing: she and I would have our revenge. If our students are really going to be teachers, they’ll be facing  classes just like themselves someday.

          An old beggar woman thrust her basket between me and The New Yorker. And that’s when I lost it.

          It was near the end of a long day and a long week, when I taught two more classes than usual to make up for a sick day (bad McDonald’s.) I had about three hours between observing a Chinese teacher and teaching my own rather stressful Friday night class. It was a rare warm, sunny, day, and I like to spend those outdoors reading. I decided on the pavilion in the lake, which is out of the line of traffic and takes a little effort to get to. There, I thought, I could enjoy an hour or two of peace. Once again, I was wrong.

          Adam Dorward, an English missionary to Hunan in the 1880s, wrote of “the impossibility of obtaining quiet and privacy — the very desire for which is misunderstood by the Chinese” (“Pioneer Work in Hunan,” a free e-book from Barnes & Noble that is in residence on my Nook). China has undergone changes that Dorward could never have imagined, but this is not one of them. On the streets of New York, you can count on an certain anonymity, a certain invisibility; you can act out and no one will notice. In China, being in public implies an open invitation; people feel they have a right to my time, though I’m not if it’s because I’m a teacher or that amazing curiosity, a foreigner. Twice this week, when I took refuge in empty classrooms for an hour of downtime at lunch, a student came in and immediately launched into conversation. The first was my student Ellen, the second a complete stranger who said, “Oh! I’m sorry! I just came in for a little nap.” I told her to go right ahead, but instead she sat down next to me, started talking and, before I knew it, had my magazine in her hands. Just for the record, I don’t go into students’ dorms and interrupt their naps.

          It’s not that I’m completely anti-social, but the fact is, even a casual conversation with these students amounts to teaching, and teaching is work. (“Teaching seems like an easy job,” at least one student here has told me, and indeed, that’s the attitude of many people who’ve never done it. They’re wrong.) You can’t speak normally: you have to speak slow-ly and dis-tinct-ly, constantly judging the other party’s comprehension and adapting to it. If they don’t understand a word you use, you have to find a synonym they will understand. You are constantly called upon to explain things, not to mention represent your country. That’s what I do 16 hours a week in the classroom. When the foreign English teachers here speak to one another, we often have to be reminded that we’re talking to native speakers and it’s OK to speed up a bit.

          Within half an hour at the pavilion, I heard the familiar words behind me. “Ex-cuse me! Can I practice my English with you?” There were two girls, and two boys who hung back. The one who wanted to practice was dressed in a sunny yellow. I sighed and put down my magazine. “Maybe for a few minutes,” I said. “But I’m trying to take a rest between classes.”

          The girl sat down. She is a student at Xiangtan University, the better-off one across town, where Chairman Mao went to school. Her friend is an art student here. I answered the same questions for the hundredth time: I’m from New York; yes, I’m a teacher here; no, I don’t speak Chinese, but I’m studying it with the other foreign teachers and can say a few words; yes, I love Chinese food; yes, it’s spicy in Hunan, and I like it. Yes, you can take a picture with me. Before I knew it, my magazine was in her hands. Every few minutes, she would ask, “Do you have enough time?” “Yes, but I’m trying to rest,” I would try to explain. “Oh! You are so outgoing!” she said. No, actually, I’m not. She simply could not, or would not, read my signals.

          After they left, the pavilion grew noisy; students ran up and down the stairs, and two sitting not far from me started reading aloud. (Students here do that all the time to practice pronunciation, one of them in the front row of my classroom until the very moment the bell rings.) I moved to what seemed to be a quieter spot on the pavilion and went back to my reading. That’s where the beggar found me.

          Beggars here are every persistent, and very in-your-face. (As are many people; remember the different concept of personal body space. Last Monday morning, as I sat in the campus shuttle, an older woman startled me by walking up and, just inches away from my face, made a remark, probably something like “You’re a foreigner!”) They’re not as menacing as some of their colleagues in New York, but they don’t give up without a fight, and essentially you pay them to go away. This time, though, I had had enough. “Stay away from me!” I yelled, jumping up and rushing off the island. Faces that glanced up said, “What’s the matter with her? Crazy foreigner!” I found a bench a little distance away, then fled again when I saw the beggar heading off the pavilion bridge. I went to the cherry tree park, where I found a stone table with little matching stools, sat down on one that happened to be off balance, and immediately tumbled back onto the ground. I moved to a nearby bench to work in peace for five or ten minutes until I heard the same beggar’s cane hitting the stone path.

           I walked toward the Foreign Studies Building a good half-hour before I had planned. A student of mine, one I barely know, walked up and started asking me where I was going, what I had been doing that afternoon; “hiding,” I answered. She looked puzzled. I know I was abrupt with her, and hope I was not rude. I continued walking past the classroom building and decided to explore the back street, where I had never been at a time it wasn’t muddy. “Where are you going?” asked a student I half-recognized. I told him and went on my way.

           Now it was close to the time I usually meet Stephen, my Friday-night freshman date, in the garden back at Foreign Studies. I was still on edge, and a T-shirt, offered for sale on a clothesline strung between two trees, set me off. It bore an obscene phrase in English that the cute teenage girl for whom it was sized would be likely to wear without having the slightest idea what it meant.

         “Excuse me!” I called to the boy staffing the clothesline. “Do you speak English?”

          Deer-in-the-headlights look. “A little.”

         “Do you know what this means?” I demanded, slowly and clearly, pointing to the shirt. He shrugged.

         “This says something very bad. You shouldn’t be selling it.” I stalked off.

          Stephen wasn’t in the garden, but within minutes his friend came up, with another friend. “Are you waiting for Stephen? He said he’s a little late tonight.” The boys – electrical information systems majors — sat down next to me and started practicing their English. Where am I from? Am I a teacher? Do I speak Chinese? Do I like Chinese food?

          One more student came running toward me. After a silent groan, I brightened to see it was Andrea, the student editor who had asked me to write a short piece for the campus magazine. In her hands were two copies – my clips! So what if I was identified as Diane Dnottle – my unpronounceable e-mail name? I’m always glad to see Andrea and invited her, along with the boys, to join the evening’s class.

          That night, I had trouble dropping off to sleep. A row of Chinese characters on a white page kept morphing into black-haired young women and dancing across my mind, one after another after another. It felt suspiciously like the oral midterms I’m giving next week.

          Weekend update: On Saturday  morning the student who cleans for me was here. I told her I might go to the Mao museum in Shaoshan, but by the time she left, I decided I was too tired. Later in the day she called to ask if her two roommates could come and visit me that night. I said I was still too tired, maybe tomorrow, maybe another time. Two minutes later, she texted me to say that they were planning to cook me dumplings, presumably in my kitchen. But no one ever thought of asking if I wanted any dumplings, or company; they just assumed it would be fine.  Meanwhile, the girl who cost me my raincoat e-mailed, inviting me to an undergraduate party — just what a 55-year-old wants to do on a Saturday night.

                I’ve previously quoted the maxim from the New School’s “Cross-Cultural Communication” class that in living abroad, “seven or eight small hassles add up to one big hassle.”  Today’s are the very loud, piercing doorbell that wouldn’t stop ringing – after an hour I pulled out two wires to solve the problem, permanently – and the fact that the antiquated computer in my apartment seems to be slowly dying. It can still call up The New York Times’  home page, but any attempt to read an actual story stops dead – which at least gives me an excuse for not keeping up with The Times. As hassles here go, these are barely worth mentioning.

                Similarly, it’s the small cultural differences that add up to the bigger picture, like pixels on a computer screen or the pointillist dots in a Seurat painting. At least twice now, these mini-revelations have come over lunch.

                A few weeks ago, I went out to the back street behind the Foreign Studies Building with Jane, one of the juniors in my Thursday lab class, for fried rice made fresh while you wait. As we sat on a bench under a tree, eating our rice and having what I thought was a normal lunchtime conversation, she abruptly asked, “Do you always talk when you eat?”  For  a moment I stopped talking or chewing; had been talking with my mouth full? No, she meant, do I always keep the conversation flowing during a meal? Well, doesn’t everybody? Not the Chinese, apparently. Jane’s idea of having lunch together meant sitting side by side and eating our lunches, enjoying the sunshine, the food and the company in silence. I had never really thought about it, but I told her that Americans – especially motormouth New Yorkers – tend to feel we’re somehow letting the other person down if a moment of silence, even so much as a pause, drops into any conversation. Which may explain why we talk so much small talk (the topic of a future class with my postgraduates), and may answer one student’s question: “Why do the foreign teachers talk so much about the weather?” We want to predict the weather, analyze it, plan for it. The Chinese just carry umbrellas at all times. (Jane and I have had lunch again, and this time she was the one keeping up the conversation, while I was enthralled by a Chinese cat cartoon on the canteen’s TV.)

                Today my Monday lunch with the other teachers fell through.  There was a light drizzle, so after a run to the back street for fried rice and a quarter-pineapple on a stick, stepping ever so gingerly over the mud, I took my lunch back to my classroom, blissfully unoccupied for the next two hours. “Alone at last!” I thought. (Never mind that I had spent most of the weekend alone in my apartment, and a most productive weekend it was.) Before I could read one column of The New Yorker – my equivalent of a lunchtime nap – one of my afternoon students came in, carrying her own lunch.  “Diane! Why are you here so early?” Ellen asked. I explained, and she said, “So! We can have our lunch together.” And then, in a classroom with 40 empty seats, she sat down in the one right next to me. Americans like to spread out, and an American student probably would have kept a certain distance from a professor. But the Chinese need to be as close to one another as possible at all times. In the beginning I thought it was the large classes or the lack of heat in the classrooms that made them huddle together, six or seven to a row.  Today, even in a class of 19 rather than 32, they all huddled in the center section, leaving the sides empty. Our culture is individualistic, theirs relentlessly communal. They can’t believe I’m going off to Shanghai and Expo 2010 for five days, all alone, and far less that I’m happy about it.

                What Ellen cost me in reading time she more than made up in insight. I asked her what she wanted to do with her English, and she said that – unlike many of her classmates majoring in Teaching Chinese to Foreigners, she really does want to teach Chinese language and culture. She admitted, though, that she was a little confused, specifically the value of her education here. “Before I came here, I heard that this university is like a high school,” she said. “And it is.” I agreed. It was the first time I had heard anyone, let alone an undergraduate, put my own misgivings – about the students’ naivete and sometimes immaturity, about the level of instruction they seem to expect – into words. They remind me of my own days at a university as oversized as this one, where nothing was so important as football.

                Then I told her how mystified I was by my Friday night class, “Cultural Backgrounds of English-Speaking Countries.” What little direction I had from the university – namely, a textbook handed to me – gave me the impression that I was to cover history, politics and culture. The lecture notes I later found on my apartment computer suggested that the previous teacher had closely followed the book. My students are having none of that. They constantly talk and text in class; they have no interest in history; they want activities and entertainment. The most successful class to date was last week’s, when I showed a DVD of site-specific dances commissioned for national parks, thereby killing two requested birds  – scenery and entertainment – with one stone.  “I can’t understand it,” I told Ellen. “This is an elective, and I know they’ve paid extra to take it, but they don’t seem to want to learn anything or do any work.” Ellen nodded. She could tell me exactly how much they had paid, but they weren’t paying to learn; they were paying for a line that would look good on their transcripts. “They want an extra certification,” she explained. But earn it? As we say in New York, fuhgeddaboudit.

                I was an undergraduate once, and I know the importance of that extra line on your transcript or resume; maybe our cultures aren’t so different after all. But the “Cultural Backgrounds” class may be in for a shock come Friday night.  One of the tasks I accomplished during that productive weekend alone in my apartment was writing their first take-home exam. There’s only one question they can answer from that DVD. The rest is going to take some work, and, like Mrs. Hartz in fourth grade, I mark hard.

                This was the week things started coming together and I began to feel I’m living something like a normal life. On Monday, there was broccoli rabe. On Tuesday, I went to the movies in China for the first time. On Wednesday, in a burst of lesson-planning, I discovered I had mapped out the rest of the semester for three of my courses and wasn’t missing much for the fourth. Thursday was, as always, my busy day, and at the end I crashed, just like the old days on the Weekend section. On Friday, someone else cleaned my apartment while I made travel arrangements for my Labor Day holiday weekend (that’s May 1 to 3 here) in Shanghai, where I’m to morph back into a journalist for a few days and cover Expo 2010 for The National in Abu Dhabi. And then, miracle of miracles, I went swimming.

                Four of the foreign teachers who have classes in the same building on Monday mornings usually have lunch together. This week we tried a new back-street restaurant Pam had found, where you make your choices from a steam table (not a steam table as we know it; here the dishes are individual and freshly cooked, each replenished as soon as it runs out). Among them was a bright green vegetable, coarsely chopped, that called out to me. It turned out to be my beloved broccoli rabe, the first I’ve seen here — with hot red peppers, of course. Also on the table that day was Pam’s favorite, eggplant. We returned on Thursday with a graduate student who had asked us out to lunch. That day there was no  broccoli rabe in sight, at least when we arrived; I did sight some later. The man at the next table whisked the thin, crinkly tofu I’ve come to like (and that’s one phrase I never expected to be writing) right out from under me. So we settled for something resembling snap peas, deliciously crisp and peppery; lightly browned cubes of egg custard; sliced potatoes and turnips; and pork belly over (I believe) fermented long beans, just the kind of dish Chairman Mao reportedly loved.

                Tuesday was spa day, ritually followed by lunch at Pizza Hut. (I am now the proud holder of a Chinese frequent-diner card for Pizza Hut, which got us a hefty discount of about 15 percent this week. The pizza is surprisingly good – especially the one called Delicious Bacon, which means more pork belly.)  Then I went to see Tim Burton’s 3D “Alice in Wonderland” at the Rive Gauche Cinema atop the Grand Ocean mall downtown, which Pam had shown me the week before. I rode the five escalators up to the mural of the Harry Potter kids (with a very mature-looking Hermione) and, after checking that “Alice” was still playing, went to the ticket counter. Buying the ticket took about 10 minutes because the staff, looking crisply professional in their uniforms, couldn’t stop giggling. Young Chinese women cannot do anything without giggling, especially speak in class, to the extent that giggling is going to cost them points on their oral midterm grades. It’s like that line from GiIbert & Sullivan’s “Three Little Maids From School ” — “Everything is a source of fun,” which is of course followed by giggles.  These girls giggled, first, because a foreigner had walked into their theater; second, because the foreigner couldn’t speak Chinese; and third, because when one asked, ”Do you understand Chinese?” the foreigner said no and bought the ticket anyway. It actually hadn’t occurred to me that the movie might be dubbed instead of subtitled, but it’s “Alice in Wonderland” – how hard could it be? I was already late and lost another five minutes when the ticket-takers couldn’t agree which theater I was supposed to enter; the expression “a Chinese fire drill” exists for a reason. Finally I was handed my 3D glasses and found a seat – not the one I had been assigned, perhaps, but the suppertime show was empty enough that it didn’t matter. I settled back into stadium seating and marveled at how well Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter apparently speak Chinese. The 3D didn’t work as well as it did in “Avatar,” but being where I am, a movie is a movie. And it felt good to see familiar faces on the screen, among them that of the British actress Geraldine James, last sighted at the “Hamlet” table during the actors’ dinner one Wednesday at Sardi’s.

                Friday was pool day. When I arrived in Xiangtan, one person after another told me, no, there was no indoor pool in town, which is one reason I checked into the Dolton Hotel in Changsha last month (Starry, starry nights, April 9). There is an outdoor pool quite near me on campus, which opens around mid-June; at the moment it looks cold, black and greatly in need of a cleaning. But Mindia, another of the foreign teachers, had found a new pool-and-gym complex way on the other side of town – “near the steel factory,” wherever that might be – and on Friday afternoon five of us piled into one taxi for the 30-minute, $6 ride.  The taxi pulled up to a mammoth modern building where we could smell the chlorine the minute we walked in. Et voila! On the other side of the locker room, I found a sparkling 50-meter pool with a blue-tiled bottom, divided into lap lanes and not at all crowded when we arrived at opening time, 3 p.m., though it did fill up within the hour. I plunged into my customary workout – eight-tenths of a mile, which takes me 45 minutes at Riverbank State Park but nearly an hour here, where the warm water temperature slowed me down. Incense wafting in from the locker rooms made it a little hard to breathe, but who cares? Just as a movie is a movie, a pool is a pool, and this one more than met my expectations. One caveat: the Chinese swim the way they drive. Lane markers are mere suggestions, and swimmers constantly weave in and out, right, left or straight down the center line, making U-turns and stopping short at will.

                Tomorrow is Saturday, and the foreign teachers are scheduled to make a shopping run to Changsha. I can already smell the cheese.

                Postscript: Back from Changsha, laden with not only four hunks of cheese but also a bag of tortilla chips and a jar of Old El Paso salsa, which served nicely as lunch. To ensure a balanced diet, I also brought back four bags of toasted, candied walnuts and a bottle of sour plum juice.

                “Oh, look! There are little things in the bathroom!”

                Pam and I had just checked into the Tibet Hotel Chengdu, a five-star hotel that advertises “a unique Tibetan lodging experience.” We had wondered if that meant something like a yurt, but it turned out to be a conventional hotel with Tibetan-inspired décor. I was unpacking in the main room, marveling at the luxury — a full-size sofa and ottoman, wood-and-upholstery headboards that reached the ceiling, needlework wall hangings, crisp white sheets that actually fit the bed — when I heard Pam’s voice. Little things? Like bugs? That didn’t seem in keeping with our surroundings. But her dreamy tone didn’t suggest bugs.  Suddenly I understood.

                Little soaps. Bottles of shampoo and bath gel. Shower caps, razors and toothbrushes,  individually wrapped. Tiny tubes of toothpaste, just enough for one or two brushings. All neatly arranged in a carved wooden box.

                Home at last.

                After nearly six weeks, I was growing accustomed to my seriously no-frills campus apartment (Ever so humble, March 3). Pam’s new place on North Campus is larger and more modern than mine but still has its challenges.  Every now and then we yearn for a reality check, a reminder, beyond Spa Day, that some parts of China are further along the development scale than others. What could be better than a weekend in a five-star hotel?

                In China, five-stars are cheap, by American standards. The one in Chengdu came with our Sichuan tour, but the week before, I had paid $73 to spend a night in the part-stately, part-glitzy Dolton Hotel  in Changsha. (Even the very comfortable Novotel in Shanghai cost me only $58 a night, pre-Expo season.) It was my maiden solo voyage outside Xiangtan. I desperately needed a brief escape, a couple of days in a city that had things I could recognize as touchstones of my life: clean sidewalks, museums, nail parlors, maybe a movie theater. Most urgently, a swimming pool.

                Changsha had the first three, and the Dolton supplied the pool. After a full month without a swim – all but unheard-of in my many years of travel – the ninth-floor pool area overlooking the city felt like heaven. In the hotel’s Chinese restaurant, I’d already had a lunch that makes Shun Lee on the Upper West Side look like chopped liver: shrimp-and-chive dumplings, heavy on the chive, in a skin so thin I could see the green inside; a beautiful dish of finely shredded beef filet with hot red peppers and an unidentified chewy vegetable that looked like crinkled yellow cellophane; chilled broccoli florets, sautéed with garlic. Then I ventured outside for a brief look around  before turning back to what I had really come for. More than 25 meters long, just warm enough to be comfortable and not soporific, and with a drop-off that gave me just the right shoulder-depth for water aerobics, the pool fully lived up  to the picture online that was my main reason for booking the Dolton. I did my hourlong aerobics routine, followed by 15 minutes stretched out on a chaise, before going upstairs to clean up in a real bathroom — one with a toilet and a sink in the same room, where I could look in a mirror while I washed my face, and a shower that drained into a bathtub. And little things that smelled very nice. The next morning, I was back in the pool for a full set of laps before checkout.

                The Tibet Hotel didn’t have a pool, but even if it had, there wouldn’t have been time to use it; our tour whisked us off almost immediately to a fine Sichuan dinner, followed by an evening of Peking Opera Lite.  Never mind. The bathroom seemed roughly the size, shape and color scheme of the ladies’ room at Zankel Hall — a long rectangle – but instead of a row of toilet stalls (ours was glassed-in) it contained a tub with separate shower. “I am going to take such a shower in the morning!” I announced to Pam at bedtime.

                In the event, she went first while I read in bed. “The water doesn’t really drain,” she reported.

                “Does it flood the rest of the floor?”

                “No. It’s fine if you don’t mind standing in water.”

                After six weeks of wading to the toilet daily, I didn’t.

                (I do have to report a disturbing trend, first noticed in European hotels last summer: those “little things,” or at least the ones that come in bottles, seem to be on their way out, replaced by larger wall-mounted squeeze bottles. Hotels wave the “green” flag, but I suspect their real motive is saving money,  since we travelers do tend to scoop up those little bottles rather shamelessly to restock our Dopp kits. A sign in the Dolton bathroom said Chinese hotels were now required by law to charge for used or missing toiletries. Well, I suppose we can always save those little bottles and refill them while in residence.)  

                The next night took us to the Hong Zhu Hotel in Ya’an. Iris, our tour director, kept warning us not to expect too much: “This is only a four-star hotel. A regional four-star. But it’s the best in the area.”

                “You haven’t seen where we live,” I said.

                It was good enough for us. It had a pool – outdoor, unheated, the water looking as black as the South Campus pool, with patches of something growing on it – but none of that mattered, since it was too cold for even me to swim, and again there was no time. No, the bathroom wasn’t as nice as the one in Chengdu, but everything we needed was in it, and worked. There was an electric kettle, though no refrigerator, and the beds were the most comfortable to date in China, with a little more padding  over the usual hard mattress, and extra comforters available. In the morning it was hard to pry myself out of it, even for pandas.

                We landed back in Changsha late Monday night, and our patient driver was waiting at the airport after a 40-minute delay. It was pouring rain when, in the dark, he inadvertently dropped me off  a couple of blocks short of my street. I ran through the rain, over the usual thin layer of mud on the sidewalk, reached my gate and climbed to the fourth floor. Inside my apartment, everything was just as I’d left it – no better, no worse. But after two nights of unaccustomed comfort, it looked a lot more manageable.

                My raincoat is missing. One kid too many wanted to be my friend.

                I was sitting in the garden outside the Foreign Studies Building late Thursday afternoon, reading — my way of recuperating from the three classes I already taught that day and resting up for my Mandarin class that night. (The Chinese take naps at lunchtime, religiously.) That garden, while lovely, is fairly open and public. I would have preferred a more secluded spot, like the benches by the lake with the pavilion in the middle, but I hadn’t eaten much for lunch and wanted to stay closer to food. So I set up camp for a couple of hours on a bench in the garden, using my rolled-up raincoat as a cushion. I was five minutes away from leaving when the girl came and sat next to me and said hello. I braced for the inevitable.

                “Ex-cuse me. Can I be your friend?”

                I’m sure she was nice enough, but the fact is, the number of students who want to be my instant friend is simply overwhelming, especially on a day that stretches from 8 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. To top it off, one of my lab students, Jane, had asked me to lunch that day – “forced reciprocation,” as my friend Leslie would say, for a 50-cent lunch I had bought her two weeks before. (In China students always expect to pay for their teachers, which simply doesn’t seem right to me. When did college students ever have any money?) She reminded me that I’d said she could treat “next time,” and apparently next time meant today. Jane is one of my best students and one I would like to get to know, but on Thursdays I really need some down time.

                The girl on the bench was not one of my students, and clearly not an English major. Almost immediately, she asked for my cellphone number, as is common  here; I gave her my e-mail address instead, which tends to cut down on the number of messages from total strangers. I stayed around for a few minutes, just long enough not to seem impolite, and told her she could come to my Friday night class if she wanted. Then I packed up my bag, said goodbye with a smile and fled for class.

                Except that I forgot one thing: my raincoat. It’s at least 10 years old, and it wasn’t necessarily going home with me anyway, since I have a new one waiting for me there. Just that day, when Jane had told me how stylish it looked and how much she liked the bronze color, I laughed and told her, “There’s nothing wrong with it, but frankly, I’m tired of it.” But I’d have liked to make that decision later. I’m going to need a raincoat for the next three months, since it rains a lot here, and I won’t necessarily be able to find one in my size.

                Even so, this question of instant intimacy is more disconcerting. I am not a terribly social person, or, to put it more bluntly, I do not make friends easily. Despite having three brothers (who were old enough to be my uncles), I grew up essentially as an only child, and so am comfortable in my own company. It’s still hard for me to open up to people on less than, say, 10 years’ acquaintance, and preferably after we’ve been properly introduced. I have enough friends at home, and thanks to the wonders of e-mail, I’m kept up to date on every detail of their lives even when I’m 8,000 miles away.   

                Now envision this solitary child plopped down in the middle of China, where the communal is the norm. My students travel in packs. Each class is a real class, taking all its courses together and in fact living together in the same dorm. Personal body space is different;  the Chinese stand and walk much closer together than Westerners do comfortably, and female friends will walk together holding hands or linking arms. China is such a closely packed country that the concept of privacy is all but non-existent. (One public toilet I looked into had no stalls. I went elsewhere.) I’ve been asked more than once why I’m not married, which is not something I want to get into with a Chinese teenager I’ve just met, even if I have written about it in the New York Times.  The Chinese think it odd that the foreign teachers don’t spend their free time together, and they surely thought it very odd that I went off for weekend in Changsha, an hour away, and spent money to stay in a hotel, all alone.

                Whenever my own students see me in the garden, they come over to say hello at the very least (as two had done that afternoon on their way downtown to go shopping) and sometimes stay to talk, and talk. It’s not always that they want a free English lesson, as I often grumble, but that they’re genuinely concerned I might be lonely, when all I really want is a little time alone. So the girl on the bench had no idea she might be intruding on my private time.   

                I was already back in my apartment when I realized I had left my raincoat behind. Mandarin class had been canceled – the first text message I’ve received that wasn’t from a student asking to be my friend! – and I was too tired even to take the shuttle back to North Campus to look for it. Well, I’m back in the Foreign Studies Building for class tonight. Maybe the girl will come to class and bring it.  Or maybe someone has turned it at the reception desk. Maybe Stephen can help me ask. Stephen is a very sweet freshman, a computer major who usually meets me in the garden around 6 on Fridays for a little conversation. We met a few weeks ago when I was sitting on a bench in the garden, looking through the pictures I had taken that afternoon. He was the second Stephen I had met that night, and he sat down beside me, a little too close, to look at the camera screen with me. He asked if he could be my friend. Now, every Friday night, he is.

      A panda was holding my hand.

      We were palm to palm. It was not quite the “holy palmer’s kiss” that Romeo invokes on his first meeting with Juliet, but the panda’s right paw, wide and flat, was definitely grasping mine. His four middle fingers, or maybe hers, were folded over mine while his “sixth finger” – an extension of the wrist bone that works as an opposable thumb, according to a sign at the Ya’an Reserve in the mountains of Sichuan Province — was holding tight to the base of my thumb. And then he started pulling my arm toward his mouth.

      Not to worry: an attendant hovering on his left distracted him with a carrot, and he let my hand go to concentrate on chomping it. A minute later, though, his right hand reached out to make a grab for my ankle. The attendant came through again, this time with a short stalk of bamboo. Now both paws were safely occupied.

      A five-minute opportunity to play with a two-year-old panda was the centerpiece of a weekend trip to Sichuan province, Hunan’s neighbor to the west, run by the China Culture Center, a Beijing-based organization that caters to the English-speaking expatriate crowd. I’ve experienced such moments of closeness with large, more-or-less wild animals once or twice before, most notably on a game reserve in New South Wales, Australia. A very tame kangaroo saw that I was carrying a bag of feed pellets, hopped up to me, then delicately curled his front claws around my index finger, and for a moment, we moved in tandem as if dancing.  It’s a magical feeling, this sense of communing with another species, and you can’t get it at Disney.

      A dolphin encountered during a supervised swim in Bermuda surprised me with the texture of its skin: it felt like hard plastic rather that the pliable softness I had expected. And so it was with the panda.  His fur was not soft and plushy like my childhood teddy bear, which happened to be a panda, but stiff and coarse like the bristles of a brush.  And in real life pandas are not exactly black and white, but black and yellowish – perhaps their natural coloring, or perhaps a result of living outdoors in constant contact China’s red-clay soil, whose dust in the wind often turns the white underside of my fingernails a similar shade.

      Until last weekend, I hadn’t seen much of the Chinese landscape beyond the road to Changsha,  Hunan’s provincial capital an hour’s drive from Xiangtan. But even that stretch, which is rapidly sprouting high-rise apartment and commercial buildings, offers glimpses of a still largely agricultural region: small farms with flooded rice fields; the occasional water buffalo moving languidly among them; most spectacularly, the west side of the Xiangjiang River, where the bright-yellow flowers of the rape plant cover a wide stretch of riverbank this time of year.

      Like Hunan, Sichuan is very green this spring, as seen from a bus on a triangular bus route that first took me south from its capital, Chengdu, to Leshan (home of the world’s largest Buddha, carved from the native rock and suitable for climbing), then northwest to Ya’an before turning back to Chengdu. Every available square meter of land seems to be under cultivation, with rice paddies, rape fields and the occasional vineyard nudging right up to the roadside, where a curvy-horned ox may be caught napping, undisturbed by passing traffic. Even the flat roadbed of an old bridge not far from Ya’an has been converted to a sort of agricultural High Line and was displaying heads of cabbage and other leafy greens just about ready for the wok. As the altitude began climbing toward the mountains, a new crop begins to dominate: low, rounded hedges of tea, their tiny leaves ranging from bright green to reddish-brown. Row after row, they draw lines in the landscape like the vineyards of Europe, some straight, some curved, some flat, some climbing hills, some forming borders, and all serving as a reminder how central they are to the life of this country, and to mine.

      But bamboo dominates the mountain vegetation, and a good thing, too. These highlands are the natural habitat of the giant panda, which eats its weight in bamboo – and adults weigh somewhere around 200 pounds — every day. Since few survive in the wild and reproduction is not the panda’s greatest talent, reserves like this one may be their best chance of avoiding extinction. And so the donation required for admission to the panda playpen seemed a small price to pay.

      Perhaps a dozen from my tour group suited up in blue plastic hospital gowns and shoe coverings and clear plastic gloves, all required to protect the pandas from any risk of infection. (Surgical masks had been rumored but never appeared.) Inside the gate, we could meet the pandas, tickle their bellies and, in my case at least, shake their hands, all to the snapping of camera shutters. Afterwards, we couldn’t help browsing the all-black-and-white gift shops and leaving a few more yuan behind.  Yes, there’s kitsch tucked in among the nature; the wide array of panda toys and gifts is unavoidable, both outside the reserve and – last chance! — at the Chengdu airport. (Outside the airport, revolving atop a tall red column, a cartoonish panda figure greets travelers coming and going.) But even on the last day of a holiday weekend, attandance at the reserve was so comfortably light that we could stroll the wide paths through the forest, watching the pandas climb trees and snack on bamboo sticks and take mid-morning naps, all the while breathing the freshest, cleanest air I am ever likely to find in China. Civilization, such as it is, seemed very far away.

      Oliver, our Chengdu-based guide, explained before the first meal that Sichuan cooking was based on two kinds of seasoning: the spicy-hot of the red peppers (though nothing I ate in Sichuan was as outrageously spicy as some dishes I’ve had in Hunan) and “the numbing seed.” I had already been wondering about the seasoning in my new favorite fast food, what I call the “Chinese burritos” from a stand around the corner from my apartment in Xiangtan. They consist of thin slices of beef (pork and egg also available) rolled with spears of cucumber and scallion in a white pancake, thinly spread with a sauce that doesn’t so much numb my tongue as make it tingle all over, as if the tongue itself is effervescing. “What is the numbing seed?” I asked Oliver. “I don’t know how you call it in English,” he answered sheepishly. I pressed him: “Is it small and round, and maybe pinkish-brown?” “It grows on a tree,” he countered, not quite answering the question I had asked. But by now I was pretty sure of my suspicions. When a small brown sphere dropped onto my plate from a piece of meat or vegetable, I bit, and there it was, that distinctive  tingling/numbing sensation. Unless I’m very much mistaken, the “numbing seed” is what we call in English – what else? – the Sichuan peppercorn. Used rarely in Western cooking and sparingly in Chinese food in America, it is often said to produce a sensation rather than a flavor.   

        The sad thing about being in China here is that I can’t call out for Chinese food on demand, practically a constitutional right in New York. Even if restaurants here delivered, how on earth would I call in the order? You can’t point over the phone.