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.

                It’s not the calla lilies that are in bloom again (Katharine Hepburn, “Stage Door”), but the cherry trees. Our campus has one on the finest displays in Hunan, I was told early on, and when the time came, I could expect major traffic jams on the normally wide-open streets. It would be much like hana-mi in Japan, when life takes a caesura and everyone rushes to walk among the trees, admire the ephemeral blossoms of pink and white and even green, and take pictures of every last one. This spring, there’s an added tourist attraction: me.

                “Ex-cuse me! Can I have pho-to with you?”  I’ve heard it not once but a hundred times in the last few days. The first time I was puzzled, and already feeling more than a little overwhelmed by the number of students who want to trade cellphone numbers on first meeting, visit my apartment on no notice, help me through the little difficulties of life far from home, and generally be my friend. But all became clear with the second request: “You’re my first foreigner.” Aha! They don’t know who I am, where I’m from or what on earth I’m doing in the middle of Hunan. But none of that matters to them.

                I’ve often wondered how many millions of photographs  I appear in all over the world  – “scrapbooks full of me in the background,” as Stephen Sondheim put it in “Gypsy.” If  you could multiply the number of trips I’ve taken over the years by the number of other camera-wielding travelers whose paths I’ve crossed, the figure would have to be staggering. Now I’ve moved to the foreground, smiling sometimes gamely but often from the heart, as I put my arms around total strangers and stick up two fingers in the ubiquitous V that means “happy” here.   Sometimes the strangers speak enough English to have a short conversation –“Where are you from?” “Do you speak Chinese?” “Do you like Chinese food?”– and sometimes not. Today a young man told me his grandparents live in New York. “Have you been to visit them?” I asked. “No,” he said, “it is not so easy,” meaning practically beyond his wildest dreams. When we parted, “ I said, “See you in New York someday!” and he smiled. You never know.

                When I went to Changsha, the provincial capital, over the weekend, I thought things might be different in the big city (6 million and counting), but no. In the Martyrs’ Park I was almost immediately approached by two cheerful young women who said “Hello!” and pointed to their cameras. I posed with one (we both happened to be wearing sweaters of cherry-blossom pink) and then the other before they said “Thank you!” and moved on. Next I settled on a bench to read and rest up for my time slot at the adjacent Hunan Provincial Museum. A three-generation family came next, and the matriarch – please tell me she wasn’t my age! – sat beside me and started talking. I smiled and tried to explain that I didn’t understand, but no matter: like Oma Else in Germany, she just kept talking. I went back to my reading, still smiling. A few minutes later, I felt her move closer on the bench and put her arm around me;  I looked up to find a man, presumably her husband, pointing a camera at us. “Oh, now I get it!” I thought, and smiled. Later in the museum, I noticed a girl in pink posing by a replica of a mammoth 2,000-year-old coffin – the same one who had posed with me in the park. “Hi!” we greeted each other like old friends. “Nice to see you,” I added, but I had gone beyond the limits of her English. She and her friend giggled, and we waved goodbye.

                The campus blossoms were just coming out on Friday, so I made a return trip today. (Actually two, since I went back after class for photos with my student Mimi, who wants to be my friend. She may not realize I’m just about old enough to be her grandmother, though as always I prefer to think of myself as Auntie Mame.)  A pleasant surprise was waiting at a pavilion among the trees: a group of elders who had taken up watercolors in their retirement were turning out paintings and calligraphy, which they hung on the pavilion and the cherry trees to dry. “Could I buy one?” I asked a student reporter I had previously met there. “They will give you one!” she said, and positioned me on the pavilion steps overlooking the work table. While a man painted a mischievous cat in black and white that looked suspiciously like Leksi, a woman went to work on a large vertical sheet of paper, shaping the outlines of chrysanthemums  in black, then filling them in with yellow and pink. As she worked, the reporter took me to the painters’ nearby studio. There a Miss Li, who is planning an exhibition for her 70^th birthday next year, asked me what flowers I liked so she could paint some for me. “I like the cherry blossoms, because I’m here now,” I answered, but Miss Li demurred – very hard to paint, the reporter explained. How about a lotus instead? Fine. I’m to pick it up next week. (I think Miss Li wants me to take lessons.) Back at the pavilion, I found my chrysanthemums almost complete; all the artist needed was my name, which she painted by carefully imitating the letters in a notebook.  She presented the painting to me, we posed for pictures and I went off to class, trailing the still-damp paper like a sail. It may not have been the painting I’d have chosen, but it has my name on it — in English.

                When I was maybe 12 years old, on a field trip to the United Nations in New York, I was awed to find that our guide was from Japan. Too shy to ask for a photo, I deliberately brushed against her, convinced I would never again be so close to anyone so exotic. I seem to have come full circle.

               Update: It seems the calla lilies are in bloom again after all. On a weekend trip to Sichuan province, I spotted a window box filled with them on the top floor of a farmhouse as my bus whizzed past.

In my postgrad class there’s a student I’ve been worried about. I think of him as the Grown-Up – the one student, perhaps in his mid-40s, who is significantly older than the 59 or so others (who look to me very young for graduate students). He has not yet missed a class but has declined to speak a word, even on the first day when, partly to gauge where students stood on the English-speaking spectrum, I asked each one to rise and introduce himself. This man smiled but shook his head and waved his hand in front of his face. He’s done the same each time I’ve tried to engage him in the simplest conversation exercise; in fact, he’s always laughing and talking to his neighbors, and I’ve been assuming he was making fun of me. (Bear in mind that most of the techies in this class see no reason they should have to be there.) Since this is a required class in Oral English, his grade and maybe his degree depend on his being willing and able to make at least a minimal presentation by the end of the semester. This week I asked Stevie Nicks, my student assistant in the class (see A report from the barricades, March 20), to pay special attention to this man and try to draw him out, in hopes of getting him to say something. But when I went around to check his progress, he once again hid his face.

          Today, in quite a good restaurant on the fringe of South Campus, I was just finishing lunch (soup with black mushrooms, pork buried in sliced green chili peppers, sautéed greens, the ubiquitous white rice) with Erika, a graduate student in drama in a city that has no theater, when she noticed a man standing a few feet from our table. It was the Grown-Up, smiling, and I smiled and waved back. He came over, took the chair at the end of our table and began chatting with Erika. “Do you two know each other?” I asked her. “No,” she said. Apparently he wanted to talk to me and, seeing me with a Chinese, seized his chance to have an interpreter. He had gone back to school as an older student after a career as  a construction designer, he explained; in fact, he had worked on a number of important buildings in Guangzhou. Now he is studying G.I.S., or geographical information systems, a popular major in that postgrad class. He has worked abroad, in Australia and New Zealand. And, in Erika’s words, “He cannot understand anything you say.” Which accounts for his shyness in class.

              When in doubt, make small talk. “Ah, Guangzhou,” I said. “I am going to Guangzhou for the Tomb-Sweeping holiday.”

              Erika translated for me, then for him. “Maybe if you have some questions about Guangzhou, you can ask him,” she said.

              Maybe. But how? Well, there’s always Stevie Nicks. And I am supposed to be an English teacher. The Grown-Up seems like someone who would be interesting to know. His class has 14 weeks to go. How far I can break down the barriers between his language and mine in that time?

                Spa Day moved from Friday afternoons to Tuesdays when my Friday night class was added. It was a lovely way to end the week, but  after the spa I can never be sure my hair will be presentable enough to make a public appearance, which means I might have to stop at home and shower. In any case, after the postgraduate classes on Tuesday morning I deserve a reward — some serious relaxation —  and afterwards I can spend time downtown without having to rush or fight the weekend crowds.

                Pam introduced the concept when we first met over brunch at Coogan’s Irish pub/sports bar in Washington Heights. “Might there be,” I ventured, “anyplace in town to have a facial?” (A two-hour facial at the luxurious Babor salon is always a highlight of my summer in Wroclaw, which may be the facial capital of the world.) “Facial and massage, two and half hours, $12,” she replied. “My first semester, I had no classes on Tuesdays, so Tuesday was Spa Day.”

                And so it is again. The postgrad classroom is a 10-minute walk from the North Gate, a convenient meeting place and the beginning of the No. 14 bus route, which improves our chances of getting seats on the lurching ride to downtown Xiangtan. The bus lets us off right outside a modern complex of shops (including Avon and many shoes), restaurants (the one that advertises Western-style food serves a club sandwich that contains peanut butter, hard-boiled egg, cucumber slices and a unidentified pink meat) and, on the fourth floor, the Panco Salon, a heavily pink celebration of being female.

                Several young women in pink-and-white uniforms greet us enthusiastically – Pam has been a regular for almost two years – and gesture toward a table, where they bring us pale green tea. When they’re ready for us, they gently touch our arms – who would have pegged the Chinese as touchy-feely types? —  to maneuver us toward the dimly lighted changing room, actually a circle veiled off floor to ceiling circle. We abandon our clothes for a single towel each, and then it’s into the steam room, a two-seater whose misty atmosphere encourages confidences between women who, after just a few weeks, are still relative strangers. It’s also a good place to muse on weekend explorations: should we take the new high-speed train down to Guangzhou for the coming holiday weekend (Tomb-Sweeping, which seems to be something like Memorial Day and coincides  with Easter this year), as we had discussed, or maybe in the other direction, to Wuhan, where a student has just told me the region’s best cherry blossoms should be in bloom?

                After 15 or 20 glorious minutes of steaming open our pores and sinuses, we’re shown to private showers. There we exchange our towels, now soggy, for simple under-the-arm shifts and tissue-paper panties that balloon like hotel shower caps, or would if they came in my Pennsylvania Dutch size. As we step outside in our plastic steam-and-shower slippers, an attendant exchanges them for plush ones, gently drying our feet in the process.

                From there we are led to a three-bed massage room, where we lie on our backs, swaddled to our chins as a mother might cover her baby, which is what I feel like in my soft cocoon. But not for long. Soon the coverlet comes down and the massage begins: first the scalp; then the, uh,  chest and shoulders; then, once I’ve flipped over, every inch of my back, in many different ways; then another flip for the facial massage. A gauzy veil, permeated with some cool liquid, is placed over my face, to be followed by the final mask and an arm-stretching. Throughout, the massage room is all but silent – a blessing indeed when you consider that our business in this city is talk.  All I can hear are an occasional murmur or music from outside when the door opens, and the thwacks as a nearby body (or is it mine?) takes a restorative pummeling. Being alone with my thoughts here is almost as good an isolation tank.

                When I rise from the table after nearly two hours, it’s a little hard to get my muscles back to work. I dress languidly, as if I’ve almost forgotten how to put on my clothes. Out at reception, as I sign my account over another glass of green tea and a slightly warm, slightly sweet black bean soup, I wonder how I’ll summon the energy for even a quick run through Bubugao, the shopper’s paradise downstairs,  or navigate the hustle and bustle of downtown Xiangtan. But each week, I manage.

                At the end of my first spa day, I was asked if I would like to set up an account – 15 visits for 1200 yuan (about $160), enough to see me through the semester. Oh, yes.

A literary-minded student asked me last week to write a short piece for a campus magazine, addressing a classic Chinese poem, the art of translation, and how the poem might reflect my current state of mind being so far from home — all in 350 words. Writing short has never been my strong point, but this piece did come in just over 400. Loyal readers will notice and, I hope, forgive a slightly recycled lede. 

                Maybe this is not the best moment to be listening to a song called “Give My Regards to Broadway,” which came up when I opened iTunes. I’ve been given eight different English translations of a classic poem by Li Bai. Being a journalist by training and an essayist by nature, I don’t think I have much of a feel for poetry in general, and I know very little about Chinese poetry in particular. So Andrea, my student and assigning editor, has explained that the moon is a symbol of home.

                The poet is clearly far from his home. The elements of his poem are simple: a bed, the night, the moon and its light, the frost on the ground and, most important, the homesickness they conspire to produce. Yet the emotions are deep and complex. 

                What strikes me is how well the eight versions illustrate an often-overlooked fact: that translation is an art in itself. From one set of Chinese characters and one set of images, eight different translators  have each produced a slightly different work of poetry. In part it is a matter of word choices, which English offers in abundance. (I often remind students that there are many different ways to say almost anything in English.) From the little I know, Chinese strikes me a much more visual language than English: you think in pictures, we think in words. So it is also a matter of the way the images are arranged.

                If pressed to choose one version that best reflects my own emotions as a newcomer far from home, I would probably say the seventh, “In the Quiet Night,” with its simple elegance:

                So bright a gleam on the foot of my bed

                Could there have been a frost already?

                Lifting myself to look, I found that it was moonlight

                Sinking back again, I thought suddenly of home.

                It is, I think, the word “suddenly” that seized my attention. Such feelings do come upon the traveler without warning. While they can linger, they often pass as daylight replaces them with the new experiences that drive travelers to leave home in the first place. This version captures a single moment that comes and goes as quickly as the frost.

                Each culture and, of course, each individual have their own symbols. Mine may be less elegant than Li Bai ’s poetry, but the moon shines over Broadway, too, and its music has a poetry of its own.

                Maybe this is the wrong moment to be playing “Give My Regards to Broadway,” which came up when I opened iTunes for a little musical accompaniment to a blogging  session. I’ve just finished my third week of classes here in Hunan, and the reviews are decidedly mixed, on both sides.

                Oral English for sophomores seem to be going reasonably well. I have four sections a week, 19 to 32 students each (far too many for a speaking class, in a room far too cramped and echoing), and use the same lesson plan for each. No two classes are identical, of course. The Monday morning class, the first of the week, is always a bit of an experiment, and of course students’ questions can change the course of any lesson. So the plan keeps refining itself throughout the week, and by the last session, on Thursday afternoon, I usually feel I’ve nailed it. But the Wednesday afternoon class tends to be the best of the week — perhaps because it’s my only one that day (Thursday’s is the third in a row), but more probably because it’s a class of talkers. Although it’s a big one, about 30 students, they’re the easiest to keep motivated and on track, and they  were the only ones who showed any sign that they might burst into song when I played the “Rain in Spain” scene from “My Fair Lady” on my laptop, having used it as a pronunciation exercise the week before. This class’s energy doesn’t seem to flag, and so helps me keep up my own. But by the last show on Thursday, when I’ve already done two lab classes in the morning, I find myself fatigued and slightly resentful about having to do one more show.

                My Tuesday class is something of a paradox: it’s Oral English for postgraduates, but they’re all in technical majors and thus far less fluent, or at least less willing to speak, than the undergraduate English majors. The one older student in the class is the one who refuses to speak at all (and I do hope he starts before I have to fail him). All the foreign teachers hate the postgrad classes, which tend to be very large, 60 or more students, and the biggest “discipline problem,” with a constant undercurrent of talking. So we’ve all divided our postgrads into two groups, giving them 45 minutes each instead of twice that as scheduled. For me, that translates into a shortened, simplified version of the sophomores’ lesson for the week.  A few postgrads do pay attention and seem engaged. One, who came to the first class wearing something resembling a long-out-of-fashion Mao jacket,  speaks very well and would make a fine class leader, but he has a government gig that requires him to miss some classes. Another — a willow-thin, fine-featured, extremely self-effacing physics major — has come up front at every break and after class to chat with me. His English is better than he knows, and he mainly needs more practice to build his confidence. So I’ve recruited him as my assistant for this class. His chosen English name was originally Steve, but last weekend he e-mailed me to say he now preferred Nick, so I’ve come to think of him as Stevie Nicks.  When I asked him to demonstrate a simple restaurant dialogue with me, he got that deer-in-the-headlights look on his face but managed to get through it, then pitched in to help me go around the room asking students for their orders from the menu of Amy’s Restaurant (Chinese) in Inwood. This morning I received e-mail from him proposing a way to approach this week’s assignment, on vocabulary for travel, and saying he would arrive bright and early this week to assist with both groups.

                “Cultural Backgrounds of English-Speaking Nations” — the extra course that caused me so much grief a week ago when it dashed my hopes for weekend escapes — actually seemed like fun after the first meeting. The students are not English majors but are drawn from various departments around the university, many of them business and technical. They all professed a love of English and are rumored to have paid extra to take this elective. For me, the course is a chance to stretch beyond language and into the history, politics and cultures of countries where I’ve either lived or traveled. For the second class, I prepared what I thought was a concise, focused lesson, half of it on how America’s geography has helped shape its history, and half on the waves of immigration that have given the United States its “melting pot” persona.  But when I asked for questions or suggestions at the end, the tallest, presumably coolest male in the class, with a Marine haircut and, I’d guess, a deep  interest in basketball, piped up: “Say something interesting.” Well, excuse me! The university, judging from the only direction it has given me – the textbook I was handed 48 hours before the first class meeting —  seems to want the course to at least touch on serious academic subjects; the students have yet to make it clear what they want to learn, but I suspect it’s less about history and literature and more about pop culture. (Who is Stevie Nicks, anyhow?) It’s going to be interesting to see how I balance  the two, especially given the scarcity of materials available here and the all-but-nonexistence of audio and video technology in the classroom.  (There’s a wall outlet and a television set mounted overhead. That’s all.) As a video monitor, a 17-inch laptop with no Internet connection does not go far in a classroom of 30 students.

                The one classroom that does have a little technology is turning out to be my bête noire. On Thursday mornings, I’m assigned two sections of a junior class titled “Advanced Audio-Visual and Speaking,” and after three weeks, I still have next to no idea how I’m supposed to teach it. There’s no visual, only audio: language-lab consoles that play readings from the textbook, titled “Argument.” Apparently I’m supposed to be using it to teach debate and persuasive speaking, but how is still beyond me. (Once again, the university provided no training on equipment — I saw it for the first time when I arrived to teach the first class. Standard procedure seems to be to send the class monitor to pull a Chinese teacher out of class to help, which makes me look like a fool. Though the consoles run on Windows,  remember that this Windows is in Chinese.) “Do anything you want” is the other foreign teachers’ advice. The first section makes no secret of its dislike for the textbook and the audio, yet when I ask questions, they mostly stay silent (perhaps because the class starts at 8 a.m., when I don’t exactly bloom either).  The second class says it likes the book and the listening, but maybe not all of it, and again students remain shy unless called on. Each week members of both classes corral me to suggest improvements, but either I don’t understand what they want or I can’t make it work. In any case, suggestions are welcome.

                On the other hand, a number of students have come up to me and said, “I love your teaching style! It’s so different from the other teachers’ ” – which only makes me wonder what the others do and, given an inborn paranoia heightened by  20 years at The New York Times, what I’m doing wrong. And twice last week, students who are not enrolled in my classes – four freshman chemistry majors who sneaked into the postgrad class, and two engineering students with friends in one of my Oral English sections – asked if they could sit in, just for practice. It’s flattering – “You’re just perfect,” one of the chemistry girls gushed — and suggests that I may be doing something right after all, despite a strong sense that I am pulling teeth.  Curiously, they are more alert and enthusiastic than the ones actually enrolled. But maybe that should come as no surprise.

                “Oh, there are a few things I’m concerned about,” I’d say before I left home to those who marveled at my bravery in signing on for nearly five months in China. “The smoking, the spitting, the water and the toilets.”

                Twenty-five years ago, even big cities here showed few signs of modernization; Xiangtan now reminds me of Beijing and Shanghai then. The new luxury hotels where my tour group stayed — like the Great Wall (now Sheraton) in Beijing, where I phoned home from poolside – were the exceptions. China’s glories stayed with me enough to make me want to come back — to mention just one, the actual Great Wall snaking across a hilly landscape into infinity. But we found some of the  practical realities less appealing, and chief among those were the smoking, the spitting, the water and the toilets.

                So, the update from 2010.

                The smoking: In 1985, cigarette smoke was inescapable on the street, on planes,  certainly in restaurants. You might be able to avoid it in the privacy of your hotel room, but only if the window had been opened. Furthermore, the odor was vile. (All right, so every cigarette smells vile to me.) Nowadays, my internal smoke alarm – that reflex that shuts off the back of my throat whenever I detect a cigarette within a block or two — is being triggered far less often, although it did go on red alert this morning between classes in the Chemistry Building. While I do see young people smoking on campus (and it seems to be considered acceptable to smoke on the open-air campus shuttle), I see it much less, and I take that as a hopeful sign. Older people have not kicked their nicotine addiction, and if restaurants have nonsmoking sections, I have yet to find one. One chilly Sunday afternoon, I went over to Will Long for a late lunch/early dinner and took my usual seat at a small table in the downstairs dining room. By the time I had ordered, parties of middle-aged men had taken over two nearby tables, no doubt enjoying their day off with a game of cards, a lot of (loud) guy talk and nonstop cigarettes. Afterwards I went home to take a nap – only to be kept awake by the smell of smoke that, in less than an hour in the dining room, had saturated my clothes.

                The spitting: My tour group used to joke about “the Chinese salute,” that noisy gathering of phlegm at the back of the throat that inevitably ends up as a bubbly white blob on the sidewalk. It often accompanies smoking, and I find it nothing short of disgusting. (My father used to do both, which is probably why.) In 1985, it was universal among both sexes. Today, I notice it far less often, and rarely among women or young people, perhaps because reduced smoking has made it less urgent for people to get the taste out of their mouths. Nevertheless, from time to time I hear that telltale sound behind me. As ever, it makes my spine stiffen and my brain try to block out the image of the spot it will leave on the pavement. After taking heart at the noticeable absence of spitting in Shanghai – perhaps because the locals have been educated in Western sensibilities for the coming World Expo? – I was seated on the plane to Changsha in the same row as a man who used his stomach distress bag not once but again and again, on a flight of less than two hours, to clear his throat,  and each time I braced myself and tried not to visualize. I could only hope that he took the bag off the plane with him.

                The water: “Can we drink the tap water?” I asked Pam, the fourth-semester veteran who is my rabbi in all things Xiangtan. “Mmmmm . . . not advisable,” she said, as indeed it was not in 1985. In three decades of serious traveling I’ve had few bad reactions to water, but enough to know I don’t want to take any chances here; a rather nasty morning on a sailboat in the Galapagos comes to mind. Luckily, the water problem is easily solved: we simply have giant bottles of  water delivered as needed, on account. A 48-bottle subscription goes for about $45, and that’s enough for two of us to split for the semester. You simply call the water man – or, rather, have a Chinese-speaking student call – and two big bottles, each a week’s supply for me, arrive shortly. The base can heat the water to tea-brewing temperature, which means I don’t have to use the picturesque old kettle, composition as yet undetermined, whose metal lining flaked off into the first batch I made. (“Gee, those are funny-looking tea leaves . . .”) Although I have a  working freezer, I haven’t tried making ice cubes; in fact, I haven’t even seen an ice tray here. I did get to the bottom of my McDonald’s Coke before I realized it contained ice (and probably local water), which gave me a moment’s pause. But that  was three days ago, and so far, so good.

                And finally,

                The toilets: “Asian or Western?” the women of my tour group would ask whenever we visited a new restaurant or tourist attraction, and if the answer was “Asian,” we asked ourselves if we really needed to use it. An Asian toilet, for those of you who’ve led sheltered lives, is a squat toilet set into the floor. All I’ve seen so far on this trip have had porcelain bowls and flush, but in the old days neither was a given. My apartment has a Western toilet, which is one reason I’m living on South Campus instead of North: the only available apartment there had an Asian toilet, and so it went to a male British teacher, forced out of my building by bedbugs. I’ve already documented my struggles with the shower in the toilet room. (See “Ever so humble,” March 3.) I try to use it every morning just before leaving, whether or not the floor is dry, to minimize my visits to the restrooms on campus, where there is not a Western to be found. “Well, they’re all Asians,” Pam rationalized. Even so, I have no choice but to use them from time to time, and it’s a balancing act to hold your clothes well out of the way, do what needs to be done and clean up with bring-your-own tissue. (It’s easier on our weekly visits to the spa, where  we’re bottomless anyway.) As for cleanliness – well, let’s just say that Chinese standards are different from ours. At the cold-water sinks, there is one communal rag for drying  hands; I have bought a pretty hand towel with a calligraphy design to carry in my school bag. Last week the women’s room in the Chemistry Building  was nothing short of a garbage dump, the garbage having been tossed directly into each porcelain bowl, and not flushed. I fled to another classroom building a 10-minute walk away, where the restroom that seemed filthy a week before now looked immaculate in comparison.

                And when I’m carrying a purse or wearing a coat, I need to put it down somewhere, since the doors have no hooks. A year or so ago, my friend Maureen – a registered nurse and hospital case manager, which suggests some consciousness of hygiene – circulated an e-mail warning that women who set their purses on restroom floors can expect to take germs home with them. In the future, if Maureen sees me arrive for a visit with my red vintage Coach bag, she’ll never  let me in the house.

                The lady at the fruit stand knows me.

                I mean the fruit stand closest to my apartment, the one on the left — one of two apparent competitors side by side on the block of shops that leads to Restaurant Row. My first week on campus, she had some firm, unbruised bananas with green at the tips, which meant they would last a while. The pink-cheeked woman, perhaps in her early 30s, smiled at me, weighed the bunch I had selected, bagged it and held up her fingers to tell me the price. She seemed pleased when I handed her the correct amount, and we exchanged xie xie’s. A few days later, I stopped for oranges; this time I didn’t understand the price – it was 12.5 yuan, and the five fingers she held up for .5 threw me — so she wrote it down. By the end of the week, she would smile and nod when I passed, even if I wasn’t shopping that day. When I bought a whole pineapple, she gestured to ask if I wanted it trimmed and spent a good 10 minutes scraping off the rough brown exterior, then removing the eyes in that same spiral pattern I find so pretty at the Dominican fruit stands in Hamilton Heights. As I waited, I held my wallet under my arm; a zipper pull snagged my Icelandic wool jacket, and I could neither free it nor open the wallet to pay her. Never mind: she rushed to the rescue, and we both laughed. Now when I pass,  I say “Hi!” if I forget I’m in China and should be saying “Ni hao,” and she says “Hi!” right back. Clearly I will never be able to shop next door.

                Of course, the lady at the fruit stand has no trouble picking me out in the passing crowd. As one of exactly nine foreign teachers (five Americans, one Brit, one Ukrainian, one former-Soviet-Republic-of-Georgian and one Japanese) on a campus of 35,000, I stand out. On the first day of school, I was way too conscientious and arrived at the Foreign Studies Building absurdly early for class, so I decided to kill time by walking around outside. Within minutes, two girls had come up to me, arm in arm, as close friends travel here. “Hello!” they said. “Are you the new foreign teacher?” Everyone had heard that there were a few new ones this semester, and it stood to reason that any strange Westerner must be one of them. They wanted to know everything about me — my name, where I was from, where I was living, what I was teaching, which of their teachers I knew – and soon three more girls joined them. In the first class, I had all the students introduce themselves, then simulated a press conference so they could question me. By the afternoon class, word had gotten around: “You were a journalist?”

                Last Friday, I was on my way to lunch at another teacher’s apartment. “Diane!” I heard behind me. I turned to see a young Chinese woman whose face I didn’t recall from class – but then, I had 160 students at that point (I’m now up to 180-plus), so I couldn’t be sure. “I am Portia,” she said, and I realized she was the protegee of the teacher who was serving lunch. “How did you know it was me?” I asked rhetorically.  I was a foreigner she hadn’t met; I was walking in the direction of her teacher’s apartment. Who else could I be?

                In the dining room at Will Long Cake on Restaurant Row (I’ve since found two Will Longs in downtown Xiangtan), I’m automatically brought the English menu – the single English menu on the premises, apparently. But is that because the waitresses recognize me after several meals there, or because it’s obvious I’ll need one? And why do they  bring me only a soup spoon, never chopsticks, when I order a rice bowl, an all-in-one casserole dish topped with meat, stir-fried cabbage and a fried egg? At first I suspected they assumed I couldn’t handle chopsticks, but then, at lunch with the other American teachers in a campus canteen, I noticed that the rice bowl arrived with only a soupspoon. And on my next trip to Will Long, I saw that a Chinese man was using a soupspoon on his rice bowl, too.

                At my apartment building, an elderly woman dressed in navy blue (so far), who is rumored to be the great-aunt of my boss, seems to be the de facto concierge. On our first meeting, as I fumbled for my keys with my arms full from shopping, I was startled to see her face emerge from the shadows just inside the gate, where she was sitting. She could have opened the gate for me but instead pointed to the smallest key on my ring and indicated I should use it – which, still fumbling, I did.  Not the friendliest welcome, I thought, but in the next few days, whenever we crossed paths, I was sure to greet her with an enthusiastic “Ni hao!”  even though I was pretty sure what she was saying back meant “Crazy foreigner, thinks she speaks Chinese.” One rainy morning, I came down the stairs just as she was coming in and folding a small umbrella. She looked at me and pointed outside, as if to say, “It’s raining.” “Dui,” I responded – yes – and pulled the billowy hood of my raincoat, which I prefer to an umbrella, over my head. She gestured again, and again I motioned to  my hood. This time she held out her umbrella and seemed to be insisting that I take it. I shook my head, gave the hood one last pull, said “Xie xie! Zai jian!” and left, this time with a smile, but once again convinced she was thinking, “Crazy foreigner!”

                Being so visible, I need to be on good behavior at all times. This is not New York, where a screaming fit on any subway train or street corner will scarcely be noticed, since almost everyone is acting out most of the time.  Here even the slightest eccentricity will color perceptions of foreigners in general, Americans in particular, and me most of all. In the words of some of my neighbors back home, I’m representing. So there will be no public meltdowns here. If students I don’t even know want to chat for an hour at lunchtime when I’d rather read The New Yorker and decompress, then a chat there will be. Either way, word will get around.

                On Saturday, I made my first solo voyage into downtown Xiangtan on the No. 14 bus, and I just couldn’t help myself: I had to go to McDonald’s for my first Western food of any kind in three weeks. From the all-Chinese signs above the counter, I made my choice: the No. 2 meal, double cheeseburger with fries and Coke. When my turn came, a slight young man in a striped shirt and glasses asked for my order, in English, and rang up my purchase, 20 yuan. (For two more, about 15 cents, I could have supersized it, though he did not use the word “supersize.”)  Then he asked me, in extra-careful English: “Ex-cuse me, are you a teach-er at Hunan Uni-ver-sity of Science and Tech-nol-ogy?”

                 “Why, yes!”

                 “I am a student there — engineering,” he explained. “I’ve seen you around.”

                The Xiangtan McDonald’s may never know me as well as the old Broadway Diner at Broadway and 55^th, where the waitresses would bring me iced tea, extra ice and lemon, as soon as I sat down. But in a city of a million on the other side of the world, it’s a start.

               Postscript:  This morning as I was waiting for the shuttle bus, I smiled at a Little Emperor being wheeled by his grandmother in a rather elaborate car-shaped stroller. “Ni hao!” I said to the baby.  Grandma started talking to me — in Chinese, of course — and pointing toward the main library, as if she thought I should be going there . Rosetta Stone does not teach the phrase for “I don’t speak Chinese,” so I just kept smiling and shaking my head, and soon they went on their way. Later the bus passed them, and as I looked out the open back, Grandma noticed me, smiled broadly  and waved. I waved back. I think I may be seeing them again.

                As it turns out, Henry Higgins was onto something. “The Rain in Spain” makes quite a creditable lesson in pronunciation. 

                This week I did five shows – essentially the same set of pronunciation exercises with different classes — and by the end, I felt as if I had done five complete performances of “My Fair Lady.” No, I didn’t sing or dance a tango, nor did I tell the students their lesson was really a song from a Broadway show (a concept they have yet to grasp). I would have, if I’d loaded it on my iTunes before I left home or been able to play the number on YouTube, which is technically banned in China.  Thanks to a borrowed mobile wireless card with a British connection, I can actually get to YouTube, but for a video the connection is excruciatingly slow, so I didn’t bother carrying my laptop to class. Anyway, why not let the kids think I’m a serious teacher?

                “The Rain in Spain” consists of two sentences, both of which contain legitimate pronunciation points. In the first – The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain – the sound in question is obviously the long-A sound. The students had no trouble pronouncing “rain” perfectly, but after that, something happened, possibly fatigue setting in; it came out sounding more like The rain in Spen stehs menly in the plen. I had them practice exaggerating the wide-open-side-to-side lip movement, and while they were never perfect all the way through, they did improve.

                The second sentence – In Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly (in the original Shaw, ever) happen – was devised, of course, to help Eliza Doolittle overcome her Cockney tendency to drop her H’s. The Chinese seem to have no problem with the H sound; it exists in their language. (Ni hao ma? Wo hen hao.) But the sentence offered several examples of the weak-vowel sound on unaccented syllables. The students overpronounced Hart-ford and Here-ford instead of saying them the way English-speakers would – Hartferd and Hereferd. It also served up an instance of differences between American and British pronunciations, a subject on which the students are very curious. So I could invoke the rain-Spain-plain sound of the American version and then counter it with the more British hurrikuns.

                These lines are also good for practicing word linkage (rain in pronounced like raining, not rain/in; hardly ever more like hardliever) and the short-I sound of in and if, which, here as in Europe, tends to come out as een and eef. After several rounds of drilling, I almost sounded a little too much like Henry Higgins – “a-GAIN” – and didn’t want to have to explain that I was dangerously close to breaking into song.

                But in at least one class, I did get a round of applause.  After a series of minimal-pairs exercises addressing sounds with which the Chinese often have trouble – for example, river versus liver  — I gave them four tongue-twisters: “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers” (good for P sounds and short I); “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” (wood and would, not wooed); “She sells seashells by the seashore” (three difference S sounds); and my personal nemesis, “rubber baby buggy bumpers.”  I demonstrated by saying the complete “Peter Piper” as fast as I could without tripping over it and, in the week’s final performance, got a round of spontaneous applause. I took a bow.

                Postscript: In the course of using Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire to prompt discussion, I posed one of its more intriguing  questions —  “On what occasion do you lie?” – and encouraged  students to tell me the truth. They admitted lying to their parents, occasionally, when they had done something bad or didn’t want them to worry. I took it one step further: “Do you ever lie to your teachers?” When they admitted yes, they do, from time to time, I seized the opportunity and introduced them to that perennial American excuse for late homework, “The dog ate it,” which produced peals of laughter. And then I told them every New Yorker’s excuse, which is never questioned, for lateness or a no-show: “Stuck on the subway.” (I used it myself on my last day at The Times to skip the hated 10 o’clock meeting.) I hear that nearby Changsha, the provincial capital, is building a subway, so who knows? It may come in handy someday.