Ellen was helping me send a text message on my despised cellphone. “You’re a little like my grandma,” she said.

                Watch it, kid.

                “She doesn’t want to learn how to do it,” Ellen continued. “She wants someone to do it for her.”

                I didn’t ask how old her grandma might be, but I suspected she might be uncomfortably close to my age. And yes, I would have been just as happy if Ellen had just tapped out the message for me on those tiny keys. But Ellen is something of a rarity in my four sections of Oral English for majors in TCTF – Teaching Chinese to Foreigners. Unlike classmates who ended up in that major because they didn’t test well or didn’t know what they want to be when they grow up, Ellen explained to me that she truly loves the Chinese language and culture and wants to teach them (as she demonstrated when she chose a grammar point as the topic for her midterm). So she was determined that I would learn how to text.

                And what could be more appropriate, given the central role of cellphones and texting in contemporary Chinese culture? Like many other developing countries – and Hunan province is still very much a work in progress  – China has jumped from practically no phones just a few years ago to a cellphone in every hand today, without ever passing through the land line phase. Last month The New York Times reported that countries “from Kenya to Colombia to South Africa . . . have built cellphone towers precisely to leapfrog past the expense of building wired networks, which have linked Americans for a century. . . . The number of mobile subscriptions in the world is expected to pass five billion this year, according to the International Telecommunication Union, an intergovernmental organization. That would mean more human beings today have access to a cellphone than the United Nations says have access to a clean toilet.” I can attest to that.

                So I can understand how important cellphones are to the Chinese. They let Ellen keep in touch with her grandma, who can use them to pay bills directly from her bank account and maybe send Ellen a few yuan now and then. What I cannot understand, just as I cannot in America, is why people have become such willing slaves  – or, in my case, an unwilling slave. I reserve the right to limit myself to the technologies I find useful. I love my multitasking laptop; I love e-mail; I love my DVR. What I do not love are the dozens of unnecessary, mindless conversations screamed into my ear daily by people who have no idea they are in public; the ringtones heard in concert halls that are not part of the program; the constant undercurrent in theaters and classrooms.  So I have opted out of cellphone culture whenever possible, just as I have opted out of the credit economy that has shamelessly ripped off millions of consumer, including me.

                 “I do have a cellphone,” I answer haughtily when someone suggests that I really ought to get one. “It just doesn’t work in the United States.” I broke down and bought it two years ago when I was setting off for three months in Eastern Europe with no fixed address or advance itinerary, as a tool for  making calls or being reached in an emergency. The British SIM card that came with it automatically screened my calls, sending them directly to voicemail unless the caller had a PIN code that I didn’t even know. I used the phone once or twice on that trip – for example, to call my friend Dmitri from the Budapest train to let him know I would be back in Vienna in time for lunch with his family. The following spring I used it to make an emergency call in Venice when a tour guide didn’t show up at the meeting place, and was shocked when it actually rang back with instructions on how to proceed. My ringtone, incidentally, is “Greensleeves’ — the most anachronistic of the selections that came free with the phone.

                Here the foreign teachers are required to have cellphones, at their own expense, as well as pay for the apartment land lines that only The Boss ever uses. One of our first orders of business in arrival was to spend most of a day having ID photos taken, setting up bank accounts and setting up cellphone accounts – each of which takes much longer here than it would be in America. At China Mobile it involved filling out paperwork, choosing an 11-digit number from a long list (I asked for one starting with 158, my street in Manhattan, as a mnemonic device but somehow got 151 instead), and putting down a deposit of 100 yuan (about $14) that is supposed to carry me through five months of service. I was also asked to register for a raffle, and while I didn’t get the grand prize at the end of the month, I did walk out the instant winner of a big bag of laundry detergent.

                The Chinese SIM card works better than the British one. It doesn’t make me sign in with a  PIN, but it does ask me to “Please confirm switch on”  and warns, “Max. volume! Keep off ear while ringing.” It’s quite efficient in sending and delivering text messages, which are crucial, since there  is no voicemail here. If I miss a voice call, the phone records the number, but unless I recognize it or have the caller in my phone book, I have no idea who it was.

                This was a particular problem in the early weeks, since the Chinese routinely demand your phone number almost as soon as they learn your name. (It took me weeks to learn my cell number, by the way, and I’ve never bothered to learn the land line’s.) Other teachers gave out my number to students I had never met, to the extent that people would call wanting to come over to my apartment right now, and I had no idea who they were.  I discouraged that by saying how bad I was with the phone and texting, and that I couldn’t guarantee I’d get a message or respond. Instead I’d give them my e-mail address, which requires follow-through – not the strong point of this live-in-the-moment culture – and thus tends to cut down on the number of messages.

                People who make it into my phonebook are either there by necessity or bona fide friends. Some foreign teachers have made it; some have not. My cleaner, Christy, has made it; so has Emma, the student who volunteered to help me buy Expo tickets. Erika, who is doing her dissertation on the American playwright Adrienne Kennedy despite never having seen or heard her work performed, is on the list. So are Mimi, who helps me order water and drivers, and Kenny, who took us new teachers around to China Mobile and the bank that first day and turns out to be in my junior lab class. On the other hand, some important people have never even asked for my number – chief among them Stevie Nicks, my volunteer assistant in the postgrad class. We e-mail about once a week and see each other in class, and we communicate just fine.

                More than once I’ve told students in class to put away their toys – yes, in those words — and pay attention. They look shocked, puzzled – “What is she talking about?” – or just plain amused. During an oral midterm, I had to warn several times that I would deduct 10 points from everyone’s grade if those who had finished did not put away their phones and show their classmates some courtesy. Then again, the phones can also get my message across. A couple of weeks ago, I announced to the sparsely populated postgrad classroom that students who did not attend regularly would not be welcome at the final exam, and that those present should tell their friends. Within five minutes, rarely seen faces came streaming in. I meant before the next class, but the students apparently texted their friends to come right now.

                Ellen’s jaw literally dropped when I explained that I don’t carry a cellphone in New York. Nevertheless, she persisted in her mission,  and eventually she came to the missing piece of information, the one no one else had mentioned because they couldn’t conceive of my not knowing it, the one that made everything else make sense: that the phone contained a dictionary and could figure out, from the sequence of keys I pressed, what word I was trying to spell. It might not be evident to me from the line of gibberish on my screen, but sooner or later the magic word would appear.

                Ellen was, unconsciously, right about one thing: technology is generational. I thought back to a visit from my friend Alice, then in her 80s, when I had just bought a new desktop computer almost 20 years ago. I saw her down next to me and proceeded to demonstrate something called the World Wide Web. “I could never learn to do that!” said Alice, a pioneer career woman who had worked her way up from the steno pool to programming director of WPIX, Channel 11, and could juggle a full day’s schedules in her head.  I told Ellen that, 20 years from now, she’ll probably feel the same way about some newfangled gadget her kids are addicted to.

                Personally, I’m waiting for the chips to be implanted directly in our brains. Ellen’s grandma and I might have a lot to talk about, if we spoke the same language. But I suspect it wouldn’t be by cellphone. Maybe the implants will help.

                But before spring break, there were midterms.

                Since I’m teaching primarily oral English, the midterms, too, were oral in six of my eight classes. (Nice work for the teacher! No papers to read, instant grading and fewer lessons to plan.) With class time running 90 minutes and sizes ranging from 19 to 41 students, oral midterms felt a little like speed dating. The sophomores were assigned individual talks to the class, on any subject of their choice, for 2.5 to 4 minutes, depending on how many had to be squeezed in. The juniors in “Advanced Audiovisual and Oral” were assigned one-on-one debates. Many students ran short; instead of speaking spontaneously, most had memorized their presentations and nervously raced through as fast as they could before they forgot a single syllable. (The sophomores didn’t tell until me afterwards that they’d never had midterms before.) The few who did run over, as measured by the stopwatch function on my iPod, were cut off with a “Thank you!” as if I were running an audition.

                Overall, grades were better than expected. There were the predictable stars: the prize-winning Juliet, a professor’s daughter with near-perfect pronunciation and exquisite poise in front of an audience, scored a 97. Others who never talk in class if they can help it did very well, showing they really can speak English. Subjects ranged from Manchester United (from a boy devoted to the team who, I suspect, had not done much in the way of preparation) to traditional Chinese painting to vocabulary related to the word rain – very useful in Xiangtan. A number of girls told how wonderful their fathers were; a few, also apparently unprepared, led with “I want to tell you a little something about my life.”  One spoke with great conviction about how important it was for her to find a good husband, and defined that husband as someone who would make a lot of money to support her. Excuse me, but could  someone please direct me to 2010?

                I am giving written exams, three take-homes, in my Friday night  “Cultural Backgrounds” course.  Although this is a good idea for a course (which I’m already marketing to Poland), it’s a tough crowd: the students have paid extra to take the elective but show little interest in doing any actual work. Overnight the term “cake course” surfaced in my head; although I’m sure they’ve never heard it, it’s probably what they were expecting. They are not English majors, and five minutes is about the outer limit of their attention span, even for a DVD.

                The first exam, the finale to six weeks on the United States, consisted of ten true/false questions, five fill-in-the-blanks, four short answers, two essay questions and one optional five-point bonus question (“What is your favorite American movie, and why?”). I came to class the night the exams were due expecting to hear all kinds of excuses for lateness and complaints that it was too hard, even though there was nothing on it that I had not covered in class, if they were paying attention and not texting on their cellphones. Earlier in the day, a sophomore had advised me to play more games  in class, like the other foreign teachers, to keep students interested. I thought about that a moment, then replied: “I came here to teach at the university level, not run a kindergarten.”

                The next morning, a cool, rainy Saturday, I took to my bed to grade the exams while listening to opera on my iTunes. Once again, I was pleasantly surprised. There was some obvious copying; to the fill-in question “The six most northeastern states are known collectively as ___________,” too many students answered “the northeast industrial park” —  a phrase I had never uttered – instead of New England, which was clearly marked on their maps. One seemed possessed by revolutionary fervor, writing on the first essay that immigrants mainly “mobilize public opinion for revolution” and “offers combat troops for revolution.” More troubling were several instances of obvious cut-and-paste from the Internet. Two were exceptionally clumsy: one drifted off, in the middle of detailed immigration statistics, to the Amazon rainforest and Gondwanaland, and another consisted of seriously out-of-date information on the health care vote, presented in classic American newswriting style. Did she ever pick the wrong person to con! I was infuriated, and wrote notes threatening  to fail the perps, until it hit me that in this culture they may have no idea what plagiarism is, or how it differs from research, and why it’s considered a seriously dishonorable form of cheating. Add that to this week’s lesson plan.

                The answers to the second essay question — “Discuss, in your own words, at least three characteristics of Americans that Chinese may find strange, and why” – made me laugh out loud, over and over again. Early in the course, I had given out a reading about cultural traits of Americans, among them independence, individualism, the need for solitude and privacy, and the importance of time and schedules, and I expected to find it heavily cribbed. Instead, the answers were delightfully original. 

                “I don’t know why the Americans hair are not blak,” one wrote. Another was puzzled that we seem to eat only white chicken meat, while the Chinese eat both dark and light. (Guilty as charged, but I explained that some Americans do prefer dark meat.) At least one wondered why Americans are annoyed by “helpful and useful” advice like “you should wear warmer clothes,” which is constant here. (Guilty again, as I once told the class.) Many cited our tendency to move often, others the separate lives led by parents and children; the students are shocked that Americans expect their teenagers to earn their spending money, and grown offspring to pay back loans. Some mentioned a love of keeping “secrets” about things like their ages and how much money they make, which I explained as “privacy.” A number were uncomfortable with our competitiveness and directness, whereas the Chinese strive for group harmony. “Americans usually point out your mistakes wherever you are while our Chinese thought that is not very well. Because Chinese thought to tell your mistakes is not respectful.” (This came in the day after I screamed at The Boss after being told there was nothing wrong with my refrigerator, which hadn’t worked in two weeks, and may help explain why we find this country so organizationally challenged.) One did cite our obsession with time: “Their lives seem controlled by the little machines they wear on their wrists, they never stop their steps . . . I can’t imagining how tired they are in the daily life. They must be under pressure everyday.” Some said Americans are much more friendly to strangers than the Chinese – which left me totally flummoxed, considering my well-documented problems sneaking in a little privacy amid all my self-declared new Chinese friends.

                 At lunchtime, to celebrate the completion of grading, I crawled out of bed and treated myself to the ultimate sliced Hunan beef with lemongrass at a restaurant near the North Gate. As I was finishing, a “Cultural Backgrounds” student emerged from the back dining room with some friends. She sat down next to me and apologized for not having made it to class the night before. Then she confided, very quietly: “You know, Diane, your homework was very difficult.” I smiled sweetly. “That’s all right,” I said,  assuring her that most people had done well. “This is a university. It’s supposed to be difficult.”

                I had already started writing the next exam, on Britain. This time the bonus question is “Who is David Beckham, and why should I care?” I can’t wait to see the answers.

                Sometimes in China, I can sympathize with that apocryphal quote from Dan Quayle about wishing he had paid more attention in Latin class so that, traveling as vice president, he could converse  with the Latin Americans.  Specifically, I now wish I’d paid more attention to Walton J. Lord.

                Lord was the absolute crazy man who taught Art History 310, “Chinese Art,” at Penn State. His wild hair stuck straight out at the sides like Larry’s in “The Three Stooges.” On weekends he was known to ride his motorcycle to New York, five hours each way, to appear as a supernumerary on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. (Nowadays this seems less crazy to me, except for the motorcycle part.) His lectures, and exams, were torturous marathon sessions, minutely detailed, ranging through seemingly hundreds of ancient three-legged bronze pots, scrolled paintings and other art forms, each to be memorized. To undergraduates who had barely been out of Pennsylvania, they seemed utterly irrelevant. I’m not sure why I signed up for the course in the first place; maybe I thought Chinese art was something I should know a little bit about.

                Fast-forward 35 years or so, and here I am, spending the Labor Day holiday weekend (May 1 to 3) in Shanghai. First stop, on my free day before the opening of Expo 2010, was the Shanghai Museum, repository of relics spanning China’s 5,000-year history: bronzes, ceramics, calligraphy, paintings, jades, textiles, even masks. Its collections are truly stunning. The museum building itself is modeled on one of those bronze pots: circular, without the three legs but with curved “handles” decorating the roofline. The first-floor  galleries house the bronzes, and there they are, those pots – fewer than Lord would have raced through in a single class period,  but fine examples nevertheless. I was rescued from my ignorance by the fact the much of the gallery was closed off for a V.I.P. delegation; I fled upstairs to the ceramics gallery, where my longtime addiction stood me in good stead. (Invitation to view photos available upon request.)

                Lord had, incidentally, made one previous appearance in my consciousness, during the April holiday weekend: Tomb Sweeping, which coincided with Easter this year. The Chinese name is Qing Ming. Ah! “The Qing Ming Spring Festival on the River”! (A 100-meter enlargement is on display in China’s pavilion at Expo, but who can get in?) Lord had  given a detailed lecture on a horizontal scroll painting of the festival, dating from I don’t know what century. Slide after slide showed the progress of the narrative as the scroll unfurled and the viewer read the painting like a book. “Why didn’t they just make a painting they could frame and hang on the wall?” I grumbled. That’s the kind of thing you don’t understand when you have no experience of life outside Pennsylvania.

                I’ve often said that the two best days of my childhood were spent in Flushing Meadow, Queens – namely, at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, one day each year. As it was for so many Americans, it was my first glimpse of the outside world, and it opened my eyes in ways I would understand only decades later. There I tasted my first Belgian waffle (who knew you could have strawberries and whipped cream on a waffle?), rode robotically steered cars through futuristic cityscapes and sang along with “It’s a Small World, After All.” I spent the year between our first visit and the second studying the guidebook my Aunt Lillie had bought, plotting the course of our second visit. I’ve been attracted to world’s fair lore and relics ever since, even the legendary 1939-40 New York fair that took place before I was born.  No fair since has been as good as the first; I remember being mildly disappointed by Expo 67 in Montreal, when the critical sense of my much more sophisticated 12-year-old self was beginning to kick in, and the 1984 New Orleans fair was an absolutely disaster.

                So it should come as no surprise that here I am, in Shanghai for the opening weekend of Expo 2010, which I’m writing about for The National in Abu Dhabi. Does this Expo live up to memory? Of course not. The site is huge and spread out, with ground transportation not very clear; the lines to enter pavilions, almost any pavilion I might actually want to see, stretch beyond my patience; the food is fast, if you don’t count the time spent waiting in line. (American cuisine is represented by Burger King, KFC, Pizza Hut and Papa John’s, with large bottles of Coca-Cola  and its offshoots the beverages of choice. I favor its label of ning meng shui, or lemon water.) But all over the grounds, between stops to plot my next move on the official map, I see Chinese families with grandmothers not unlike my own mother (could she really have been only 47?), who took her turn pushing my nieces in their stroller and carried  a plastic bag with a wet washcloth in her purse, just in case. Now it’s their turn to get a glimpse of that tantalizing outside world.

                My full report is now online at http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100510/ART/705099971/1223#.

         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.