DIANE NOTTLE

                In the New School’s course on “Cross-Cultural Communication in English Language Teaching,” we were taught a maxim about living in a country not one’s own: “seven or eight small  hassles add up to one major hassle” in emotional impact. That’s the wall I hit yesterday.

                There’s the cold (now gone, but for how long? It’s March.) The rain (due back Saturday, but it should be warmer rain). The fact that the Chinese think it’s normal to have the windows wide open in the cold and the  rain, in a building that has no heat.  The fact that I’m not eating enough protein; the food is superb, but the meat-to-rice ratio is low and I feel it. The fact that I am a swimmer without a pool, not that even an indoor pool would be warm enough to use, since it would be in a building that had no heat. The fact that, every morning, I have to weigh the benefits of taking a shower against those of using the toilet, because it’s disgusting, not to mention  dangerous, to use it when the floor is underwater from the shower. The fact that I have to use it anyway whenever I can because the Asian (read: squat) toilets in the classroom buildings are filthy — but more on this another time. The fact that the local security bureau, where the new foreign teachers were required to register this week for residence permits, is holding on to our passports for five business days, making it inadvisable to try checking into the bargain-priced five-star hotel with pool in Changsha for a night this weekend as I had planned. The fact that I am expected to teach a language-lab class with no explanation of how the equipment works, or exactly how I’m supposed to use it to teach argument and debate.

                That’s already ten, by my count. Yesterday the big blow fell: I’ve lost my Fridays off. (Most of the foreign teachers seem to have a midweek day off; mine was Friday.) I knew I would be asked to teach a course in “Cultural Backgrounds of English-Speaking Nations,” which sounded like fun and a way to expand my repertoire, but it never occurred to me that it would be scheduled for the worst possible time slot, Friday evenings.  What that means, essentially, is that I will not be able to travel anywhere that requires more than a Saturday-night stay, unless there happens to be a holiday weekend, in which case any attraction will be jam-packed with the Chinese.

                 So there will be no trip to western Hunan to see the mountains from “Avatar” as a student recommended this week, no chance to catch up with modernized Beijing, no cruise down the Yangtze to celebrate the end of the semester.  For those of you who  say you enjoy my travel photography: what you can expect to see this trip will be the road between South Campus and North. For me, to have come so far, only to find out how little of the country I’ll be able to see, is devastating.

                On the brighter side, my first month’s pay dropped into my new Chinese bank account yesterday, right on schedule.  I will be able  to check into that five-star hotel in Changsha for a night, eventually – if I get my passport back.

                And I just found a two-inch bug crawling toward my bedroom.

                Hunan University of Science and Technology strikes me as the Penn State of Xiangtan, minus the football. The Penn, the higher-ranked and better-funded Xiangtan University (alma mater of Chairman Mao, which may explain a lot), is in another part of the city that I haven’t seen yet. It’s the story of my life: once again I’ve landed on an enormous, sprawling campus some distance from civilization with a big emphasis on technical subjects. In my “Oral English for Postgraduates” class, required for students advanced in their fields but not necessarily in English, the majors are heavy on subjects like physics, electrical engineering and – very popular – geographical information systems. There’s a big stadium on campus, and the equivalent of Rec Hall. Sadly, there is no indoor Natatorium, only an outdoor pool quite near me that I’m told will open in the summer, whenever that begins. (For the last week, temperatures have hovered not far above freezing.) Agricultural fields dot the outskirts of campus. The apartment I’ve been assigned is on the South Campus, which I’m trying not to think of as East Halls, the newer but more remote section of Penn State in my time there. North Campus is the center of activity, and students have asked me, “But why do you live on South Campus?”  Luckily, there’s an efficient shuttle bus, about 15 cents a ride, and South Campus is much closer to Restaurant Row.

                Except for the postgrads, my students are English majors, and most of them are studying to be teachers of Chinese as a second language. I have four sections of a sophomore class in “Oral English,” which means one lesson taught four times during the week, and two back-to-back sections of “Advanced Audio-Visual and Speaking,” a lab class for juniors that, its textbook indicates, is meant to focus on argument and persuasive speech. It is, by the way, the only course that has a textbook; everything in the other two is up to me. I’ve also been asked to teach “Cultural Backgrounds of English-Speaking Countries,”  timetable yet to be determined. Classes run an hour and 40 minutes: two 45-minute chunks with a 10-minute break, all signaled by bells. That makes lesson-planning fairly manageable.

                For my opening number, all classes focused on getting acquainted. (At some point, someone will have to explain to me how I can possibly grade 160 students whose names I cannot read on the rosters. Well, most have adopted English names, and that should help.) For the New School ESL crowd: no, we didn’t do the ball toss. In the first 45 minutes, I asked the students to introduce themselves (which takes a fair amount of time when you have as many as 32 in a class), then simulated a press conference so they could ask me questions about myself. In the second half, I broke them into groups to do Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire, which asked introspective questions about themselves, then reconvened  the class to report on their answers. (Here I managed to sneak in my first Sondheim of the semester, a snippet from “Into the Woods” that addressed one student’s idea of perfect happiness.) My third section of sophomores was so delightfully vocal that we didn’t even get as far as the Proust Questionnaire, which I promised they could do this week. They were, incidentally, enchanted by Vanity Fair’s March cover photo – a pre-Oscar shoot of nine young actresses, at least two of whom they recognized from “Twilight” – and the advertising. “Emma Watson!” one girl shrieked when she spotted Harry Potter’s Hermione in a Burberry ad.

                The students are mostly girls – boys tend to favor technical majors – and, interestingly, many have at least one sibling, which makes me wonder whatever happened to the One-Child Policy. And “girls” they are; they seem so very young that even I have a hard time thinking of them as “women,” as we undergrads insisted on being called back in the days of the 1970s feminist movement. Though I’ve seen only one taking notes, they seem thrilled to be getting an education at this university. Many appear to be middle-class, with parents who are teachers and policemen, but at least one stated flat out that hers are “peasants,” which no doubt makes her education their great hope for the future.

                Though they exclaim “It’s so cold!” they accept as normal the fact mind that neither the classrooms, off open courtyards, nor their dorms have heat. (I don’t, and rush to the shuttle as soon as classes are done for the day so I can spend the evening sitting in front of the heater. After six hours in class and a two-and-a-half-hour lunch break last Thursday with no heat, I pray for the 61 degrees forecast for this Thursday. ) Beside the lack of heat, the classrooms are entirely no-frills: they have seats, desks and blackboards, but no Internet connection except in the lab, and no means of projection or sound amplification. I miss the luxuries of Poland.

                The students are very sweet, a little intimidated by a new foreign teacher (there are just eight of us  on this campus of 35,000), yet expressing eagerness to be my friends. They wonder why I’ve come to Hunan; they want to hear about my past life in journalism and, like everyone else in the world, about New York. One has already asked my thoughts on her possible major if she does graduate work abroad. They insist on trading cellphone numbers, which I politely discourage, given my unrelenting detestation of cellphones and the more practical fact that mine doesn’t work all that well. They offer help with the little problems of life in a place where I don’t speak the language, like getting a money card for the canteen or a delivery of bottled water to my apartment. A boy is working on keeping me up to date on “Desperate Housewives” (one student thinks I sound like Bree) and “Grey’s Anatomy,” which pesky copyright laws prevent from streaming outside the United States.

                But that’s for later. Now I have to go fabricate some lesson plans. This week, I’ve announced,  we’ll focus on pronunciation. “The rain in Spain . . .”

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

                This week I had it for lunch in Xiangtan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                “A little”

                “What is this test?”

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

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

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

                “Only you,” Nahoko added.

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

                Pudong International Airport is a traveler’s dream: visually sleek, reasonably efficient, with a high-speed rail link (eight minutes to the center of Shanghai, an hour by car) and useful services including a business center, a post office, designer shopping past security (laptops out, but no demeaning checks for shoes or liquids), even sit-down restaurants near the gates. The airport at Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, serves as a reminder that you’re still in the developing world.  Debarking there is a little like arriving on St. Thomas, minus  the teal waters of the Caribbean just off the runway. There are jetways, but not for my Shanghai Airlines flight; we debark down an old-fashioned stair, like jet-setters of the 1950s and ‘60s. Baggage claim is considerably more efficient than at St. Thomas, but then, apparently a lot less luggage has been checked. My two overweight bags, Big Blue and Little Red, arrive together on conveyor belt in little more time than it takes to visit the ladies’ room.

                I’ve been told to look for my driver, here’s no one holding a sign with my name neatly printed on it, as there had been at Pudong. “Taxi? Taxi”? I hear around me. I shake my head and continue looking; my flight is an hour late, and I fear the driver may have given up. Then a wiry man holds out a piece of white paper in front of me and unfolds it; ragged printing in pencil spells out Diane. “Yes!” I say, smiling with relief. A cart materializes, and we set off to the far side of the parking lot. I settle into the back, on a Snoopy seat cover.

                My destination, Xiangtan, is only about 20 miles away, but of course I have no idea in what direction or how to get there.  We pass through the outskirts of Changsha, passing stores with names like Wal-Mart and Avon and a misspelled Michelin, and into what appears to be the city center, the driver intermittently chattering on an invisible phone. Just after one call, he pulls up at curbside and greets a chubby-cheeked boy of perhaps 8 or 9. To my surprise, the boy gets into the front seat, and then a woman I hadn’t noticed join me in the back, carrying a huge bag of oranges. We exchange ni hao’s.  “My boy,” the driver announces proudly, in English; he does not mention the woman. In my brain, Rosetta Stone Mandarin kicks in.  “Er zi. Tai tai,” I think without speaking. “Son. Wife.” 

                Since Big Blue and Little Red fill the trunk of the car, the woman and I sit through a traffic bottleneck jammed into the car, she with her shopping, I with handbag on my lap and laptop case at my feet. When we finally reach the highway, the woman pulls an orange and hands it to me. “Xie xie!” I respond politely, but I am unsure if it’s meant for now or later. I hold it in my hands for a while, then slip it into my laptop bag. When the woman pulls out another orange and begins to peel it, I decide, “Oh, why not?” and follow suit. The rind is thicker than those on the easy-peel clementines I enjoyed at home all winter, and my thumbnail makes slow progress. The woman smiles, hands me her neatly peeled orange, and takes back mine. “Xie xie!” I can’t section it neatly without spurting juice all over the car, so I bite into it like an apple. My fingers are sticky with juice, and I lick them clean.

                As we arrive at my destination, the enormous campus of Hunan University of Science and Technology, she reaches into her bag once more and hands me another orange – a parting gift, and a start toward the next day’s breakfast. Welcome to Hunan.

                I never really mastered reading kanji – the ideographic characters borrowed from Chinese –  when I was studying Japanese a dozen years ago, but one character I do remember is dai, or big.  It consists of two vertical strokes, joined at the top and curving out to the sides at the bottom, with a single horizontal stroke crossing in the middle. It is meant, I believe, to look like a person with arms stretched out; think of a fisherman measuring the one that got away. That character – in Mandarin, da – is the one I’ve noticed the most this last week, all over Shanghai and now in Hunan province.

                In Shanghai today, everything is big – but specifically, the Pudong section of the east bank of the Huangpu River. When I last walked along the Bund 25 years ago, none of Pudong existed. It was an area of farmland glimpsed across the river through the haze, with perhaps just a few signs of the  construction boom to come. Today it is dominated by a cluster of futuristic skyscrapers, most noticeably the 100-story Shanghai World Financial Center, a shapely glass monolith with a large square hole at the top, and the Oriental Pearl TV Tower — shades of Berlin Alexanderplatz, but with two “pearls” on its slender tower, to Berlin’s one. Street-level Pudong also feels a bit like Berlin, specifically, Potsdamerplatz, with its wide streets, open plazas and chunky post-Wall buildings, but a good deal more deserted. This may not yet be a section of town where people actually live their lives, as opposed to conducting business, despite the high-end, high-rise apartment buildings already standing and seemingly increasing by the day.

                On the other hand, the relative remoteness served me well in my choice of hotel, the Novotel Atlantis Pudong. Its location, well beyond the existing business center, made my spacious 35^th-floor corner room a great bargain at $58 a night, compared to the luxury hotels across the river. Yes, they’re within walking distance of all the major attractions, which would have been nice. But a taxi ride from the Bund to the Novotel cost just over $3 U.S., no tipping expected, to cover what surely must have been the distance from Times Square to my apartment on 158^th Street ($25 the last time I looked). And there I had, almost to myself, a 50-foot semicircular pool overlooking the new Pudong – when I could see it, through the yellowish gauze of pollution that permeates the city even on a good day. The first morning, I awoke to find my 35^th-floor room completely fogged in, not unlike my brain after a 15-hour flight and a 12-hour sleep. (Both burned off around noon.)

                Shanghai is gearing up for its 2010 World Expo, opening in May. The fair’s mascot, Seaboy, could be Gumby’s little blue brother, and his walking stance and outstretched arms in many of the posters and sculptures ubiquitous around town give him, too, the form of the da character.  In this city, everything is going big. Even the approach to the serene 400-year-old Yuyuan Garden, a deliberately preserved warren of traditional shops and eateries that was packed with Chinese tourists just after Lantern Festival weekend, is about to go big when the glassy five-story Yu Fashion Garden opens this spring. And in the former French Concession, that dignified 19^th-century enclave morphed into an ever-so-trendy center for shopping (Shanghai Tang!) and nightlife, giant billboards proclaim some of the names likely to loom large in the city’s future: Cartier, Godiva and Coach.

For those of you who’ve been wondering, “Is she ever going to get a job again?”:

Ni hao!

On March 1, I am scheduled to begin teaching Oral English for the spring semester at Hunan University of Science and Technology in Xiangtan, China. That’s about an hour from Changsha,  the  capital of Hunan province, and a 90-minute-or-so flight from Shanghai.  

I leave on Feb. 21 and return July 12. Watch this space for updates and blogging once I’ve arrived.

Be seeing you!