DIANE NOTTLE

Back in the dead of a New York winter, when I was obsessed with stocking my brand-new Nook  to carry me through five months with no English bookstore, I decided to take full advantage of the “thousands of free e-books” Barnes & Noble advertised. Generous going-away gift cards financed a virtual stack of new books I wanted to read, and I have to admit I’ve mostly indulged in those  — not Balzac’s “Cousin Betty” nor Scott’s “Rob Roy”; not a half-dozen Trollopes ; not the three classics that came with the Nook , “Pride and Prejudice” (hugely popular here, thanks to the Keira Knightley movie), “Dracula” and “Little Women”; and certainly not “War and Peace,” which I loaded just to be safe. Only two free e-books came up when I did a search for “Hunan” – a clue to how remote from Western consciousness this province remains — and I read both during the semester.

              They are missionary tracts, mostly chronicling the 19^th century.  “Pioneer Work in Hunan,” credited to Marshall Broomhall and dated 1906, was digitized from a copy in the University of Michigan Libraries. The other, titled simply “China,” by Robert K. Douglas, was published by the Society for  Promoting Christian Knowledge in 1887 and came from the “Harvard College Library,” as a stamp on one page says. To me, following the missionaries’ footsteps into a 21^st-century China that seems to worship glitz and neon, they indicated not how much has changed, but how much has stayed the same.

                “For years,” Broomhall writes, Hunan province “has been the closed citadel of a closed land . . . Here have centered Chinese conservatism and antipathy  to all things foreign. . . . Long after the other parts of China were thrown open to the missionary and trader, the Hunanese continued to boast that no foreigner dared attempt to enter their province.” Today’s “missionaries” are people like me, who have come to China to evangelize skills like English, or do business. (There is at least one bona fide  Christian missionary among our foreign teachers.) We do not impose ourselves on the Chinese, but  rather were recruited to come here – which may help explain why the Hunanese have stopped attacking and killing us. Broomhall records a number of such instances; in one, a missionary was about to be attacked, “had it not been for a perfect deluge of tropical rain which came on at that moment and scattered the crowd.” Yes, that’s Hunan.

                The book quotes extensively from the diaries of Adam Dorward, its missionary hero.  “Our progress in Hunan is certainly slow and at times trying to one’s patience,” Dorward wrote, “yet I hope we are making some real advance.”  He was talking promoting the Gospel, but many times this semester I have felt much the same about English. A later entry ads, “The undertaking was not to be an easy one, and as the weeks and months rolled on the strain became more and more severe.” The missionaries couldn’t even escape to, say, Wuhan on the high-speed train and check into a five-star hotel for a weekend.

                Dorward reports on a colleague’s entry into Changsha, “which city, up to that time, had not been entered by any foreigner.” He had come from “Siang-tan,” then long a morning’s boat ride away, now an hour from the bus station next to the spa. “You would indeed have been much amused if you had seen the consternation the officials were in at the thought  of a real foreigner getting inside the city. . . . They plied us with all kinds of questions as to how we came, which gate we had entered, etc., etc.” Much like the students I’ve met on the Changsha bus, who want to know everything about my experiences in China.

                Another passage records a journey to a part of Hunan where there was no inn and, indeed, no village;  a farmer agreed to put up the missionaries for the night. “As beggars must take what they can get, we had to be satisfied with some straw spread on the clay floor in place of a bed. We had no bedding with which to cover ourselves, nor had the people any to lend us, but we kept on our clothes, and a man in the house lent us his wadded gown to us as a coverlet, so that we passed the night with thankful  hearts, and rose somewhat refreshed in the morning.”  It reminded me of those cold winter nights on my hard platform bed covered with just a couple of pads, and even more of the one when I spent  on the living room floor directly in front of the heater because the bedroom was just too cold to sleep.

                Douglas’s “China” comments on the broader Chinese culture. The “wadded gown” in Broomhall’s narrative was echoed in Douglas’s description of Chinese attire, specifically in the colder months: “The main dependence of the Chinese for personal warmth is on clothes. As the winter approaches, garment is added to garment, and furs to quilted vestments, until the wearer assumes an unwieldy and exaggerated shape.” Just like my students back in cold, rainy March and April, coming from their unheated dorms to their unheated classrooms bundled in layer upon layer, and constantly advising me, “You should wear more clothes!” When spring arrived and they finally shed the layers, I was amazed at how slender and shapely nearly all of them were, even the round-faced ones.

                “Traveling in China is slow and leisurely,” Douglas writes. “Time is of little or no object to the fortunate inhabitants of that country, who are content to be carried for long distances by cart, boat, sedan-chair, or on horseback without the least troubling themselves about the pace at which they journey.” The Chinese still have a different concept of time than we do; they tend to live in the moment, as opposed to forever looking ahead. Even on the high-speed trains, they board when called and seem to ask very few questions about arrival times or punctuality. We get there when we get there.

                The exam mentality and the rote learning that drive the Chinese educational system (and sometimes drive foreign teachers to distraction) are deeply ingrained in the culture, according to Douglas. He writes of the five books of literature that, in the 19^th century, formed the basis of the system. “This course of instruction has been exactly followed in every school in the empire for many centuries, and the result is that there are annually turned out a vast number of lads all cast in the same mold, all possessed of a certain amount of ready-made knowledge, and with their memory unduly exercised at the expense of their thinking powers.” That may explain why most of my postgrads came to their oral finals armed with material prepared instead of being ready to converse, and why students so rarely offer an opinion on any subject, other than wearing more clothes.

                Later Douglas tackles the highly formatted exams themselves:  “It is by essays that the degrees are mainly determined at the competitive examinations . . .  According to the cut-and-dried model upon which every essay should be framed, the writer, after stating his theme, give a short ‘analysis’ of it, and then an ‘amplification’ in general terms. Next follow an ‘explanation’ with a postscript, the ‘first argument,’ a reassertion of the theme, the ‘second argument,’ and the ‘third argument.’ . . .The inexorable laws of essay-writing, confirmed by centuries of habit, have made their outward observances indispensible; and a competitor at an examination would as soon dream of throwing doubt on the wisdom of Confucius as of disregarding them.” So many oral presentations I heard this semester were  organized in just that way: “Firstly . . . secondly . . thirdly . . .”  (Similarly, he writes of Chinese painting: “The graceful bamboo sketches which appear to be traced with such individual freedom, the birds, the trees, the picturesque landscapes, etc., all of which seem to be the result of inspiration, are, after all, drawn according to fixed rules and after long-continued practice from authorized models.”)

                Few visitors to China can stop themselves from commenting on the food. (Red, hot chili peppers, March 6; Sichuan food: the motherlode, April 7.) It was true in Douglas’s time, and it’s true today: “To begin with, the staff of life in China is rice. It is eaten and always eaten, from north to south and from east to west . . .  the big bowl of rice forms the staple of the meals eaten by the people, and is accompanied by vegetables, fish, or meat, according to the circumstances of the household.” It’s still common to be asked after a meal, “How many bowls of rice did you eat?” Rice is assumed to be the centerpiece of any meal, whereas a bowl a day is probably enough for most Westerners. 

                “Frogs form a common dish among poor people,” Douglas continues, “and are, it is needless to say, very good eating. They are caught with a rod and a line.” It’s just a few weeks since I saw a young man at the pond with the pavilion on North Campus, where you can sit and listen to the frogs, with his lines and small nets. And once sentence took me back 25 years to the day I broke the news to my father I was going to a newly opened China. He paused to think about that, then said, “You know, they eat the goddamn rats over there.”  (Anyone who knew my father could just hear him saying that.) I answered rather stiffly that I did not intend to eat any rats, but Douglas confirms that he was right: “In Canton, for example, dried rats have a place in the poulterer’s shop, and find a ready market.” So I guess the old man was right. As I write this, I’m in Canton, now Guangzhou, but I’m not going looking.

                Douglas addresses criminal justice: for nonviolent crimes, “punishments of a comparatively light nature are inflicted, such as wearing of the wooden collar, known among Europeans as the canque, and piercing the ears with arrows, to the ends of which are attached slips of paper on which are inscribed the crime of which the culprit has been guilty. Frequently the criminals, bearing these signs of their disgrace, are paraded up and down the streets where their offenses were committed, and sometimes, in the most serious cases, they are flogged through the leading thoroughfares of the city, preceded by a herald, who announced their misdemeanours.” Which sounds a lot like scenes I’ve seen in movies of intellectuals and other alleged counterrevolutionaries being paraded in dunce caps during the Cultural Revolution.

                He also writes of the Chinese language and the challenges it presents to foreigners, specifically its four tones, “which add so greatly to the difficulty of learning to speak Chinese.” That hasn’t changed, as my Chinese teacher can verify. Conversely, I can’t help wondering if the women in a photo in the Broomhall book — “Mrs. Keller and Her Class in English” – had the same problems with the rhythms of English as my students do.  It takes a moment to pick out Mrs. Keller, dressed in a Chinese gown, from the five Chinese ladies in her class. It might take a moment, too, to pick me out of the crowd in my end-of-semester class pictures, since we’re all dressed pretty much alike – not in Chinese gowns, but in Western casual wear. In the 21^st century, consumerism seems to be the new gospel.

                Today’s exam-taking tip: ”My oral English is very poor” is the wrong thing to say on your oral English final.

                I heard that sentence about  50 times on the first day of postgrad class in March, when I asked the students to introduce themselves. And I must have heard it 20 times during their finals – which does not exactly speak well of my teaching.

                The exam seemed simple enough: a five-minute conversation with me, one-on-one, on any subject of their choice (already downgraded from a five-minute presentation to the class). But it may cost 10 people their master’s degrees, or so they said afterwards. I sincerely hope it’s doesn’t, since the course, which is required, is entirely misconceived. The postgrads  are all technical majors, not the English majors I was recruited to teach. They may well need English for professional purposes someday, but  what they need right now are foreign teachers who specialize in scientific and technical English  – not me to teach them how to buy plane tickets, order in restaurants and go shopping.  (Originally I had been told I’d be teaching some writing. “Great!” I thought. “This is a technology school. I’ll teach them to write instruction manuals we can understand.”  But I was never assigned a writing course.)

                The postgrad classes are every foreign teacher’s least favorite. They are far too large to teach speaking effectively; mine had 56 students registered. They often cut class, rarely paid attention and could be shamelessly disruptive. “The postgrads are my biggest disciplinary problem,” a colleague said early on. Only a few were the least bit interested in doing anything but passing the exam. (The entire Chinese educational system is built around examinations; more on that in a future posting.) Just past mid-semester, I announced that I would not give the final to any student I did not recognize on the day, and I never expected all 56 to show up. They did — all but one, the Reluctant Postgrad (March 24), who had not been seen in months —  and I gave them all them the exam, stretching orals to four hours before my evening class and almost another hour after.

                Since we had scheduled the final for a time outside our regular class periods, our room was already occupied, by another exam. (It’s also next door to the worst toilets on campus, and I could imagine what that would be like on this broiling-hot day. At least I’ll never have to use them again.) I had always envisioned this exam taking place outdoors anyway – a series of pleasant conversations, maybe in the pavilion in the lake, with a breeze fluttering my hair. But the students favored the grassy slope just outside the Chemistry Building, so I took my place under a tree, looking like some sort of female Buddhist sage dispensing wisdom, and commenced. Stevie Nicks, who had heroically taken his own exam in public the week before to show his classmates what to expect, was by my side to help me with the Chinese names on my rosters and run the stopwatch.

                The postgrads had been told they need come for only five minutes anytime within a three-hour period. But this was an exam, and suddenly these people who had been cutting class all semester were model students. At least two dozen arrived before the 3 p.m. start; they waited patiently until their numbers came up, and long afterward until I told them to leave, patiently if not quietly. ( “Why do Chinese students think it’s all right to talk through class?” I had asked Stevie Nicks on his final. As usual, nobody got the message.) Moreover, this group that had clung to the back of the big lecture room all semester, declining all invitations to good seats up front, now clustered around me as close as they could, in the way that makes Westerners so uncomfortable, looking over my shoulder as their classmates spoke and I recorded their grades. When, oh, when will I get over these notions about privacy?

                A few demanded to go first – “I am very busy!” — including two or three I had never seen before, who were not on any roster. “No,” they explained, “we failed last semester and want to take the exam again. The school arranged it.”

                “Then the school should have told me. I have to examine my students first.” Dismissed.

                One by one, I called them up and we began talking. Some could converse  spontaneously; most had clearly rehearsed. Many flattered me by thanking me profusely for my teaching, especially when it touched on American culture, and one for “teaching us the rules,” which was news to me. Many expressed a desire to talk about travel, which they know to be a favorite subject of mine. When I asked what they had learned in the course, or what they liked best about it, too many said, “It made me open my mouth” – a phrase Stevie Nicks had used. Too many cited the lessons on restaurants and travel, the first ones of the semester, much like certain book critics who never quote a passage beyond page 6. A few gently bullied me into role-playing dialogues we had done in class, like a shopping scene. One said he had prepared two topics; the first was, predictably, a role-play on buying his girlfriend a raincoat, which we then performed together. “What was the second?” I asked as his time was running out. “It’s about history,” he said, launching into a highly intelligent list of reasons for studying history, in words clearly not his but ambitious enough to be interesting. The very last, an open-faced physics major who rarely missed class, explained Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to me, in English that was mostly his own. He passed.

                Most of the scores barely cleared 70, the minimum passing grade; only a few topped 80. Not surprisingly, the 10 or so who failed had unfamiliar faces, but they failed on performance, not attendance or spite. I felt bad about only one, who had come to class fairly regularly and done his best. But his answers showed me that he didn’t understand the questions I was asking, and I could give him only a 65.

                At the very end, near 10 p.m., those who failed marched into my evening classroom pleading to be allowed a second chance. Some claimed they would lose their degrees; others said they had just one chance to pass, which I don’t believe, given all the stories I’ve heard about students who keep trying their luck on the exam semester after semester, with different teachers, without repeating the course. I pointed out that I didn’t remember seeing them in class very often. “We sat in the back,” they said. “We were very shy, so we didn’t talk.”

                “This was a class in oral English. I told you the first day: you have to talk.”

                “It was a mistake,” they conceded.

                “Yes, a big mistake.”

                I made a mistake of my own right then and there, suggesting that they talk to the administration, and for all I know I may be ordered to re-examine them. It wouldn’t do much good; spoken language doesn’t  improve that fast, and they would simply memorize something, like the good rote learners their educational system has programmed them to be. Instead, I should have advised them to negotiate – a skill we practiced in class – for another way to satisfy the English requirement. But afterwards, I couldn’t help wondering just what my role here was supposed to be: to give a conscientious assessment of their competence? To give them all a pass on a requirement that makes no sense to them or, after 16 weeks, to me? Or simply to teach? Maybe I could and should have taught them better, but before they could be taught, they would have had to be present, in every way.

           Update: A week later, I offered to retest any postgrads whose degrees would truly be in jeopardy if they failed; I advised the others to repeat the course. Five out of 12 showed up,  and while their performances were not stellar, they all made a passing 70. I suggested that they do what a number of unregistered students did this semester: go to a postgrad class in the fall and ask the teacher if they can sit in, explaining that “Diane said I need more practice.” They all thanked me profusely and agreed to keep studying.

                “Max knew that a bunk bed was the perfect structure to use when building an indoor fort,” began the Dave Eggers story in a year-old copy of The New Yorker, a riff on “Where the Wild Things Are.” I would have laughed out loud, but I didn’t want to wake the two Chinese men beneath me.

                  When I opened the magazine, I was stretched out in an upper berth of a “soft sleeper” on the “air-conditioned fast train” from Zhangjiajie in western Hunan (the National Forest Park there is the  home of the Floating Mountains from “Avatar,” which are a sight to see) and Changsha.  The sunset landing at Lotus International Airport three days before had been breathtaking, and no doubt the sunrise takeoff that morning would have been, too, had I realized I was supposed to be on the plane. But I misread my departure time as 6:50 p.m. instead of a.m., possibly because my mind is incapable of believing that anyone would do anything at 6:50 a.m. Since there’s just one flight a day on that route and I was due at oral finals at 8 the next morning, there was only one option: take the afternoon train.

                It was my maiden voyage, solo, on Chinese rail other than the new high-speed line to Wuhan. (“Fast train” does not equal “high-speed; this ride would take just over five hours.) It was also one of the worst possible times for such an impromptu journey, the last day of the three-day Dragon Boat Festival, a major national holiday. The day before, there had been an hourlong wait for the cable cars into the mountains, and I expected much the same at the train station. But the mammoth modern structure – when the Chinese build train stations, they don’t fool around, at least on the outside – seemed surprisingly empty, and only a few people waited at each ticket window. Apparently the Chinese had, uncharacteristically, planned ahead; all the seats, hard or soft, were sold out.  “You will have to stand,” the English-speaking student enlisted to help the wai guo ren explained sympathetically. “Are there any sleepers available?” I asked. There were, I was told, but only uppers. I cheerfully handed over the extravagant sum of 156 yuan (about $22).

                In the waiting area, passengers were regimented into rows of seats by car numbers, giving way to the usual free-for-all of jockeying and pushing when the single platform gate was opened. I found my car, compartment and berth with no trouble. One of the men was already ensconced in his lower berth, the fold-down table by the window covered with a crisp white tablecloth and set for tea. He helped me lift my bag to the upper and I settled in for the ride. From my perch I surveyed my surroundings: not as good as the sleeper in Italy, better than Serbia’s, definitely better than Amtrak.   

                The padded, hence “soft,” berth was more comfortable than the bed on which I’ve been sleeping for nearly four months now. The uppers, dressed in blue dotted underskirts with pleated dust ruffles, each came furnished with a comforter and two pillows; I wished I were brave enough to liberate one of the pillowcases, with its navy-blue logo. The backs of the lowers were draped in white eyelet coverlets. Comfort aside, the sleeper was a serendipitous investment in privacy: there was no one constantly walking the aisles, no 50 or 100 cellphone conversations going on around me simultaneously, no screaming babies, no one wanting to practice their English. I could read in peace and work if I wanted to. I should have been lesson-planning, but the fact was, all I wanted to do was look out the window, even if had to crane my neck a little to see the view.

                And that view was stunning as the train crossed Hunan from west to east. The green mountains stayed with us for a good hour as the track hugged the Lishui River, much as Amtrak hugs the coast from New Haven to Providence. The train  ducked in and out of tunnels cut to speed its journey, so the view alternated between darkness and steep green slopes, as in the southern Alps. Lying back and looking down at the landscape as it unfolded like a scroll painting let me take in, and appreciate, each detail:

                The rice paddies, their borders as sinuous as dragons; seen from above, each slender stalk stood out as an individual against the brown water. The alternating fields of corn, doing very nicely for mid-June,  sometimes planted up and down hillsides. Houses perched directly above the river. Little round islands, some covered with green, some with pebbles, apparently produced by dredging. A shallow fishing boat piled with nets. The elaborate tomb built into a hillside with an entrance that could rival a movie marquee.  The bushes, rushing by too quickly to identify, studded with deep-pink flowers. Buffalo sunken in the water to stay cool, one right up to its neck, resembling a floating head. The erect green paddle-shaped leaves of lotus plants being grown commercially – well, where did I think all those crunchy lotus roots I’d been eating came from, somebody’s backyard garden? Tile-roofed farmhouses. Chickens scratching in the dirt. A single white heron or egret gracefully stretching its neck. Kites and squares of white fabric flying in the breeze, probably to act as scarecrows. Big-leafed plants yellowing at their tips — could they be tobacco? A man working a rice paddy in his straw hat, who looked as if he could have stepped out of practically any century in China’s 5,000-year history, except that the young woman next to him was wearing a T-shirt and short-shorts.  

                As the train approached Changsha, the view across the rice paddies grew somewhat more suburban: freestanding houses, the occasional new villa, one with a stunning blue-tiled gate. Sooner than I expected, the  conductor knocked on the door and announced (I presume), “Next stop, Changsha!” I put on my sandals and climbed down for the first time in five hours.  The men indicated it was way too soon, and one motioned me to take a seat on his berth. They tried to make conversation, but I shook my head. “Wo shi mei guo ren,” I explained. “Mei you . . . zhong guo” – “I don’t have Chinese.” “Wo shi  . . . yingyu . . . laoshi . . . ke da . . . Xiangtan” – “I  am an English teacher at  the big school Xiangtan,”  no preposition. It was my longest statement in Mandarin to date.

                At last the train pulled into Changsha. “Zai jian!” I said, waving. “Xie xie!”

                “Bye, bye!” they answered.

                From the platform I navigated my way out of the train station, across the street to the bus station and back to campus  as if I’d made that trip a hundred times before, instead of twice, with a great sense of accomplishment. Missing the flight that morning meant missing a boat ride on Baofeng Lake, and maybe the Huanglong Cave. But I’ve been on boat rides and seen caves before, and I wouldn’t have missed that ride through Hunan for anything.

                Pam and Arlene are known around campus for their movie nights. Just as spa day is Tuesday for Pam and me (Thursday for Arlene), Friday is their movie night, when they invite students to their apartments to watch DVDs in English. Back in New York, I thought that sounded like fun and expected to  do the same. But that was before I saw my apartment on South Campus, which is, shall we say, not equipped for entertaining, with its small square living room, complete lack of comfortable seating and TV in the bedroom. The TV has never worked after for the first time I turned it on back in February, and while I’ve been content to watch DVDs on a 17-inch laptop screen, I’m not sure the students would be.  I’ve had as many as four over at a time, but it’s tight.

                I thought I might have my movie night, of sorts, last Friday in “Cultural Backgrounds” class. It was the eve of the Dragon Boat Festival holiday, and I suspected attendance might be slim, despite two days of makeup classes scheduled over the weekend. We’re studying Australia, so the first half of  Baz Lurhman’s “Australia,” which would just fill a 90-minute class, seemed a passable audiovisual lesson.  It’s in no way a great film. My friend Beth, a Sydney native now living in Victoria, reports having tried to watch it  and bailed out after 20 minutes. The first time I saw it, in the theater upon its release, I laughed myself silly; it bore no relation to any Australian reality I had ever experienced. But I watched it again not long before coming to China, and laughed less. It gives me an Oz fix, and sometimes that’s enough. In any case, it shows a good deal landscape, as well as Hugh Jackman’s torso – I mean, his accent, which is educational  as a variation of English. And its romance/adventure plot is just about my students’ speed. So, English materials being in short supply in Xiangtan,  I borrowed Arlene’s DVD of the film. (My own is at home in New York, since I came to China having no idea I’d be asked to teach such a course.)

                So how did it go? In the words of “A Little Night Music”: I have sinned. And it was a complete failure.

                The first rule of using technology in the classroom is, make sure the technology works. Technology in the two “multimedia” classrooms I’ve been assigned here is always hit-or-miss. Both have computers, but one of them has no Internet connection, and the other has no working DVD player. (I’m told Arlene has been known to bring in the one from her apartment, but that assumes there’s a TV monitor.) I’ve been known to bring my laptop into the junior debate class and call students up front is small groups to watch a segment, then report to the class. For “Australia” I took the DVD in two weeks in advance to make sure it would play, and it did, which is the only way I would ever consider giving over a whole class to it. (Again I say: I miss the luxuries of Poland, where a support staff – something that does not exist here — makes sure there’s a techie available if a teacher wants to use even the simplest electronic device in class.)

                But that was two weeks ago. When the time came, the DVD sort of played and sort of didn’t. It chugged along bravely, but  it was the pauses between frames, not  the Aussie accents, that made the film unintelligible.(Oh, and the out-of-date software on the antiquated computer offered no way to turn on the Chinese subtitles that had worked on my laptop earlier in the day.)  Having no backup lesson, I used the film to show stills. This is what the Outback looks like! This is what Aborigines look like! Look, there’s a kangaroo! See those camels? They’re not indigenous – oops, that’s a four-syllable word. I mean, not native to Australia.

                A better teacher would have had a backup lesson. But it’s late in the semester, we’re all getting tired, and I am especially tired of this class. The Friday Night Ingrates, as I call them in my head, are the class I was assigned at the last minute, the one that interfered with my plans to travel on weekends (see Grounded, March 11) , the one that is keeping me in China nearly a month longer than would otherwise have been necessary, and thus away from Poland this summer.   Moreover, they’re the ones with no manners at all, who talk and text throughout class, even after I fall silent, give them that universal teacher glare and announce, “Let me know when you’re ready to go on.” They come to class late, if at all, and assume they can do their exams over if they don’t like their scores. At least they do their exams, if not necessarily by deadline, but in this exam-oriented educational culture, that’s practically a given.

                A better teacher would have launched right into the lecture on Australian government and politics that was to be the next class, and is bound to drive the students to tears and texting. (I still have hopes of getting a copy of the Australian lyrics to “Jingle Bells” in time to use it as a lesson in Aussie language.) But the fact is, this teacher hadn’t done that homework yet. So she dismissed class 40 minutes early, with a recommendation that they look for it on DVD or the Internet, their preferred way of watching movies. What the heck – it was Friday night. I spent the rest of it in front  of my laptop, watching the end of the “Red Riding” trilogy, an hour ahead of schedule. My own private movie night.

                Someone in the neighborhood is learning “Auld Lang Syne.” I was on my porch reading late on a  warm afternoon this week when I heard those wistful strains that, to a Westerner, mean only one thing: New Year’s Eve. The song was being played on a stringed instrument – maybe a pipa, maybe an erhu, maybe even a violin – well but not perfectly, over and over again, for about half an hour before the musician changed his tune. Given the time of day, I suspect it was an after-school practice session, parentally enforced.

                When I first visited China 25 years ago, two women in my tour group brought along a brand-new gadget, a miniature cassette tape recorder, so they could take home not just the sights but also the sounds of a country that was, to Americans then, exotic and unknown. The rest of us kicked ourselves: why hadn’t we thought of that? Never mind that I was carrying every piece of camera equipment known to mankind, including two 35-millimeter Minolta camera bodies, one to shoot black-and-white to go with my stories for The Boston Globe, one for color slides. Those mini-cassettes are now, I believe,  as extinct as the slides, replaced by tiny digital recorders. I didn’t bring one of those on this trip, either. My laptop does have a built-in microphone; so far, though, I’ve used it only to record two Australian friends for my students, who are curious about the accent but can understand barely a word of it. The mic won’t pick up “Auld Lang Syne,” or the cuckoo clock I often hear outside my window, which happens to be a real, live cuckoo. 

                So I’ll carry home the sounds of China in my head.  They’re not all as soothing as “Auld Lang Syne” – for instance, “the Chinese salute,” which I still hear more often than I’d like, i.e., never. (See Practicalities, March 16.) Or the cries of the “little emperors” in neighboring apartments, reminding me of one reason I opted not to have any, but making me feel like part of the family. Or the little noises in my apartment: the all-night dripping in the drain of the  toilet/shower; the piercing tone of the intercom that won’t stop unless I keep the handset off the hook; the occasional eight sets of three electronic beeps each, the source and meaning of which I have yet to identify – the water heater, maybe?  Or the loudspeaker atop a pole near North Gate, which every now and then blasts about 30 seconds of music and announcements. Like the colorful billboards on the other side of the gate, they seem a throwback to the days of Mao suits and old-style Communism —  exhortations to the masses to get with the program —  but are now probably commercial advertisements. “How is that different from all the music we’re blasted with in New York these days?” Pam asks. Maybe it’s not, but back home, the music doesn’t make me jump to attention.

                There’s the cacophony of car and motorcycle horns.  It’s considered a courtesy here for drivers to honk at every motorist or pedestrian in their view, to let them know they’re coming; it’s the first thing the Chinese are taught in driver ed, says another foreign teacher who’s been here longer than I and knows about such things. Sidewalks on campus can be so congested that people tend to walk in the roadway. Some streets, like Restaurant Row and the one that connects it to North Gate, have no sidewalks as we know them and are lined to the edge with vendors’ carts. So walking on the street is a constant slalom, punctuated by jumps when you’re startled by those horns from cars and motorbikes coming up from behind a little too close and a little too fast, like Vespas sneaking up behind you on the sidewalks of Florence.

                There are softer sounds, too: the bullhorns I sometimes  hear in the distance at various times of day, a man’s voice musically chanting five syllables that I guessed might be the Muslim call to prayer but Pam thinks are a knife sharpener advertising.  The nonstop bounces from a dozen basketball courts adjacent to the garden at the Foreign Studies Building as I read at lunchtime. The frequent heavy rains on the roof over my head, a sound that has lulled me ever since I was a child sleeping under a sloping rafter, as long as I don’t have to go out. The Chinese pop songs that waft through the neighborhood all day, sometimes as early as 7:15 a.m.,  possibly from the construction site next door.

                And then there is the music of the Chinese language. It’s a different music from ours, one that sometimes assaults Western ears like 12-tone bursting into a Mahlerian world; at times, depending on the speaker’s volume and proximity (and the Chinese tend to be loud, except in class), it can sound staccato, peremptory and harsh. “English has rhythm,” I often tell my students when working on pronunciation. “Chinese has tone.” Four tones, to be exact, and which one is applied to what combination of consonants and vowels determines exactly what the word is. At this point, I’m  far from skilled at distinguishing one tone from another, and even worse at reproducing them. Yet a certain satisfaction comes from hearing a little emperor on the street cry “Ba ba!”  and understanding that he is calling for his daddy.

                Finally, and most joyfully, there is the pop-pop-pop! of fireworks, at any moment of the day or night. The Chinese invented them and still seize on any excuse to set them off: birth, death, marriage, holidays, the opening of a new business (look for the red carpet of residue out front the next day), the opening of a new semester, the close of the two-week Lunar New Year festival. Sometimes it’s just the noise of firecrackers, sometimes a full display of color in the sky, even in daylight. The pop-pop-pop! is a signal to look up and join the celebration, even if you don’t know just what it is.

                Americans love fireworks, too, but tend to save them for special occasions, like Fourth of July, and then we go all out with mammoth public spectacles. As I told my “Cultural Backgrounds” class, John Adams wrote to Abigail that fireworks were part of his vision for happy returns of Independence Day before the ink on the Declaration was even dry. This year, I’ll be spending Fourth of July in Chongqing, where I board my Yangtze cruise the next morning. The Chinese may not celebrate American  independence, though they’ve picked up Christmas and Valentine’s Day. But one thing I can be sure of: somewhere in that city of 32 million, there will be fireworks that night.

                When you walk through a storm, keep your chin up high. Don’t worry: if you’re in China, it won’t get wet. Someone will be right beside you, holding an umbrella over your head. 

                It’s next to impossible to spend time alone here, even if you have an apartment all to yourself. (Students live six to eight in a dorm room. ) This week I’ve tried time and again to go for a walk, to stretch my legs and think my own private thoughts. Each time, I’ve failed.

                Every Tuesday, Pam and I go downtown for spa day, and every week, Kang walks me to the bus stop. A graduate computer student who has finished his coursework and is down to his dissertation, Kang has no need to attend my postgraduate class; he has already passed it. But he wants to improve his English and comes religiously, not only to the Tuesday postgrads but often to sophomore classes as well, which he likes better because the students actually make an effort. Since he, too, lives on South Campus, he likes to ride home with me on the shuttle, or walk when I do — the whole two miles, 40 minutes.

                On Tuesday morning, it began pouring rain the moment I left for class, so I had both my umbrella and my burgundy poncho with me. By the end of class the rain had slowed to a drop here and there, but I put on the poncho to avoid carrying it. Even though my bags and I were covered with waterproof plastic – if I ever move to Abu Dhabi, I can wear it as a burqa — Kang insisted on holding his umbrella over my head to entire 10-minute walk.

                Since it was humid that day, I took off the poncho when he turned off and stood under North Gate to wait for the bus. Then I heard my name. It was my student Ellen, she of the text messages (and of the 95 on her oral final the day before). “Do you have an umbrella?” she asked solicitously, proffering her pretty dotted one.

                “Yes, but I’m too lazy to hold it up.”

                She looked puzzled; women here use their umbrellas rain or shine, the latter to avoid having one ray of sunlight touch their skin, which I find a lovely golden color, the kind I’d like to have as a tan, and they are desperate to lighten. (Avon here has an entire line of skin-whitening products. I’m half-afraid to use the No. 15 sunscreen I bought, for fear it will turn my natural “deathly pallor,” as a college friend once put it, even paler.)  Mercifully, just then the bus came.

                On the ride back, Pam scanned the passengers wondered if she might get home, just this once, without having student start a conversation. She did; I didn’t. It started raining again as I left the bus, and I pulled my poncho out of my bag and put it on. As I was adjusting the hood, an umbrella appeared overhead.  It was a young woman I had never seen before, wanting to practice her English. She escorted me as far as the noodle cart, where I stopped for the next day’s brunch, holding her umbrella over me all the way.

                Think about it. The Chinese think nothing of using toilets they don’t know are filthy, and expect us to do the same. (On Monday I noticed that the sinks in the Foreign Studies Building had  been cleaned for the first time this semester, maybe longer – just the bowls, not the rims, which were still crusted brown. Well, it’s a start.) But not one drop of rainwater must be allowed to fall on me. What am I, the Wicked Witch of the West?

                By Wednesday the weather had cleared, and I decided to walk home after class.  “Ex-cuse me!” I heard when I had barely entered the garden. “Can I ask you two questions? They’re about pronunciation.” “Oh, good,” I thought, “at least this will be quick.” Wrong. The questions were, but the conversation wasn’t. Like Kang, Junior – I think I heard that right — walked me all the way to South Campus, two miles, 40 minutes. All that time, I had to keep up the conversation. “I’m sorry to take you so far out of your way,” I hinted. “Oh, no, it is my great honor!” he said. At least he was fluent; a freshman in a technical major, he will have no trouble with postgrad oral English when the time comes. He brought up Obama, and I seized the opportunity to fill him in on the Coup of 2000 and indulge in some Bush-bashing, so the time was put to good educational use. But until I managed to ditch him at the fruit stand, where I had urgent business, I thought he might follow me all the way to my door.

                On Thursday, with time to kill after a round of oral finals ended early, I headed east toward the new section of campus that I hadn’t yet explored. I was barely on the road when I ran into seven students who had just come from my class. They wanted to treat me to ice cream in their canteen, and how could I say no?  At least they asked to hear about my travels in China, especially Expo. About 10 feet on my way toward South Campus, I heard my name called behind me — Ellen again, this time on her way to the dentist. She offered to walk with me and gave me a choice of routes: the muddy unpaved shortcut through a construction zone that the students favor, or the long, roundabout paved road. In my  open sandals, I chose the latter, and we walked together far more slowly than my normal pace, as if she assumed I couldn’t keep up.  (Remember, she’s the one who said I was a little like her grandma.) I thought of asking her what time her dentist appointment was but realized that would have been a silly question. Even if she had an appointment – not likely – punctuality is meaningless here.

                At dinner that night, Pam mentioned that she had gone with a student to the back-street restaurant with the good vegetables, where you point at your choices on the steam table. “Diane isn’t with you?” she was asked.

                “You know her?”

                “Diane eats here all the time,” she was told. I was floored. I do eat there all the time, including lunch that day, but I have never had any kind of verbal exchange with any of the workers, let alone told them my name.   It reminded me of the day a few weeks ago when a total stranger told me he had heard I was “an outstanding teacher.” Being here is like living in a small town in Pennsylvania, only more so.

                The Chinese simply have no boundaries, physical or social. They don’t understand the concept, and thus can’t read even our most overt signals. Only one, my student Lily, has asked me about Westerners’ different concept of personal space and privacy, and this while sitting in my living room on an evening when she and three others had invited themselves over. It was what we in the business call ”a teachable moment,” and I explained that sometimes Westerners just need to be alone.  “On what occasion “ — and she was choosing her words very carefully – “do you wish not to be bothered?” she asked. “Thursdays!” I said, explaining that it’s a long, hard day and I really need to rest my voice at lunchtime, even if I’m in public. “But you,” I added, meaning my own students, “are always welcome.”

                 At the informal Monday lunch club of foreign teachers the other week, I mentioned how difficult I find the lack of privacy. “Well, I came here to teach the Chinese,” said one of my colleagues, a trifle smugly.  So did I, and so I do – 200 of them, the 16 hours a week that I am paid to teach them in class. But not 39,000 of them on demand, and anyway, I’m not charging them 200 yuan ($30) an hour as private students, as I hear he is.

                On Thursday night, someone did follow me home. It was after 10 p.m., and I was sitting in what passes for my pajamas these warm days, watching a DVD on my laptop. I heard a persistent banging, which could have been the decrepit metal awning over my porch threatening to tear away,  but just possibly could have been someone, perhaps the Ukrainian dance teacher downstairs, knocking at my door. To my surprise, it was a middle-aged Chinese man I had never seen before. “Uh, oh,” I thought, “my speakers are too loud.” But no.

                ”Ex-cuse me, you are foreign teacher?” 

                “Yes . . “

                “I am new teacher here. I live on first floor. I want make friend with you. But” – smiling apologetically – “it is late.”

                “Yes, it is.” I stood on the other side of the half-screened metal door in my toothpaste-splattered T-shirt, underpants, slippers and nothing else.  “Maybe this weekend?”

                “Tomorrow morning.”

                “No, tomorrow I have to  plan my class. The weekend?”

                “I have to go away. My wife and son in Changsha.”

                “So next week?”

                “Yes. Too late,” he kept repeating, but he made no move to go.

                “This is not a good time,” I said as politely as I could, several times before he got the message and wished me goodnight. I have no idea if he’ll follow through. Being an adult, he  might be someone I’d like to know, and yet, in my  head, I can already hear my end of the conversation: “What . . . do . . .  you . . . teach?” Now I’m inclined not to play music as I work, lest it be taken as an invitation.

                I can hardly wait to get back to New York, where I can read on the subway undisturbed and nobody wants to be my friend. But now, it’s almost time to walk to class.

                Update: Junior turned up at my class last night, and asked better questions than the registered  students did.

The pineapple has disappeared. I’m spending more time thinking about travel plans than class preparation. And yesterday, I ordered my breakfast bao zi in Polish.

It’s time to go home.

 “You were ready to go home after two weeks,” Pam said as I reported the bao zi incident, when I asked for dwa steamed pork buns instead of er (two). Actually, Pam, I was ready to turn around and go home the day I first dragged my luggage up the three flights of concrete stairs, which showed no sign of having been cleaned since they were built, and saw my apartment. But, like Tom Wopat’s character in the musical “A Catered Affair” – the steadfast taxi driver who never ran out on his difficult wife and family responsibilities – I stayed.

Pam had warned me about the pineapple. Ever since I arrived in China, it’s been sold fresh on the street – a quarter-pineapple (they’re smaller here) on a stick, trimmed in that same spiral pattern I find so attractive at the Dominican carts in Hamilton Heights. All along, they’ve been a reliable, healthful and delicious snack on demand, at 15 to 30 cents each. But Pam said the season would come to an end, and last week, without warning, it did. Suddenly there is not a pineapple to be found. Instead, the same carts sell watermelon – sometimes in generous wedges, sometimes sliced in plastic cups – and hami melon on a stick; fresh lichees are piled everywhere. Yesterday, to tide me over at the spa until our ritual lunch at Pizza Hut, I opted for a skewer of half a dozen water chestnuts, which are incredibly sweet and peeled with a cleaver right in front of you. Water chestnuts here do not come out of a can. (Nor do bamboo shoots, which I’ve learned are not rectangular slices but slender yellow-white stalks that resemble asparagus.)

Six weeks before until I fly home, I’m already coasting. It’s only the 14th week of the 16-week Oral English classes, but I’ve already started final presentations. Why? Most of my classes are so big that it will take two sessions to give everyone even five minutes each. Then there’s the complication of the Dragon Boat Festival, a national holiday in the 16th week. China being China and this university being what it is, it has not yet announced which of three possible days will be the holiday. ”These things have to be approved,” the Boss patiently explains whenever we foreign teachers try to pin down a date so that we can do something frivolous, like make travel plans. I point out that these things have to be approved in America, too, but it’s done a year in advance so an academic calendar can be published. So, rather than have finals at the logical time, my sophomores are taking them a week earlier. For any classes unaffected by the Dragon Boat Festival, the last week will consist of filler, a party or possibly a self-declared holiday.

Now that oral exams are in progress, I have almost no more work to do; all I have to do is sit back, listen and grade. The juniors start their final debates tomorrow, and I’ve just fabricated my last in-class exercise for them. Once Week 16 is over and the sophomores and juniors are finished, I’ll have two weeks with just one or two classes each, between which I intend to hit the road. Plan A: a friend comes from New York comes over if a free seat opens up on a flight, and I become her tour guide. Plan B: she does not, and I go on my merry way. Luckily, this is China; there’s no need to plan much in advance. On my wish list are Beijing, a sleepover on the Great Wall, a weekend in the “Avatar” mountains of western Hunan, a return visit to Sichuan, and Guangzhou by high-speed train. The six-day Yangtze cruise back to Shanghai is already booked and non-negotiable.

As the semester winds down, life here is starting to feel dangerously close to normal. I’m now used to not be able to read signs or order from menus. I no longer see the hordes of people on the streets of downtown Xiangtan as Chinese, just people, and some of my students barely look Chinese to me anymore. I’m no longer surprised, though still a little disconcerted, when someone I would swear I’ve never seen before greets me with “Hi, Diane! How are you?” (That’s normal, too. When I came out of a shop downtown yesterday, Pam was chatting amiably with a student. Afterward she turned to me and said, teeth clenched, “I have no idea who that was.”)

The Chinese I know best, my students, still do surprise me. For all their whining and wheedling about finals – “I have to go first? But we’re very busy that week! Can’t we do it another time?” – everyone so far has come prepared, and most have improved significantly since midterms. More than once now, out of the blue, I’ve received e-mail from a student I can’t quite identify in a class that seems to hate me, thanking me for coming here to teach. The other week, I called on Mack, a tall, chubby junior who often doesn’t come to debate class and falls into the class-clown role when he does, to speak up front, and he acquitted himself better than I had any reason to expect. For finals, he has landed by default on a team of high achievers, and it will be interesting to watch. Sally, a tall, ever-smiling sophomore whose main preoccupations in life seem to be love and fashion (like so many girls here, she favors pink), was visibly shaken after scoring only 80 on her midterm, in large part because she couldn’t stop giggling. She followed me to my shuttle bus that day begging for guidance on how she could improve, which I interpreted as meaning her score, not necessarily her efforts. This week her dignified, expressive final presentation, on whether it’s right to treat pets as family members, brought her grade up to 88. But that was nothing compared to her tour de force last week, when she volunteered to open a discussion of movies, took over my podium, and proceeded to outline the tangled sexual relationships in “Vicky Christina Barcelona,” complete with blackboard chart. She’ll get a few bonus points for that.

“There are things you’ll miss,” Pam warns, knowing how challenging I’ve found this environment. “Of course,” I answer. I already know what some of them are; I will, for example, never be able to eat at Ollie’s again. And I will certainly miss my students. There are some I’d love to continue teaching, in a properly equipped setting, like my university in Poland or at Columbia. None of that stopped me, though, from going online last night to order a new phone system from Best Buy and tell The New Yorker when to resume my subscription.

Update: The Dragon Boat holiday has been approved!  Three days, Monday through Wednesday.  Now, the catch: we have to make up the Monday and Tuesday classes — Wednesday’s  will have an actual holiday — the weekend before. That means a seven-day workweek to get a three-day holiday. But who cares? I suspect no one will come to class, at least among the postgrads on Sunday, and I’ve booked three nights at the five-star White Swan in Guangzhou. Look for me poolside.

                If you have just a few hours to search for the essence of China today, you need do nothing more than Pam and I did this weekend: take a ride on the new high-speed rail network. In our case, it was the Guangzhou-Wuhan train, which whooshes along at 340-plus kilometers an hour through rural landscapes where peasants, some apparently barefoot, tend rice paddies with water buffalo in harness. That’s China 2010: one foot in the 21^st century, one some centuries back, and a little uncomfortable straddling the gap.

                “Welcome to the Harmony Train!” declared a recorded female voice, in Chinese and English, just after takeoff.  If that choice of words sounds like air travel, well, much of the journey is.

                For our maiden voyage, Pam and I chose Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, more than 300 miles away. “It will take you five hours by train,” warned Stevie Nicks, a Hubei native (“My home is very close to Wuhan — only two hours away”), not grasping that we intended to take the fast train even after I said so twice. In fact it took about 90 minutes; Guangzhou, seven hours away by regular train, is said to take two.

                Unlike the Shinkansen in Japan, China’s high-speed lines — 42 of them to be complete by 2012 —  do not pass through downtown stations where passengers can make easy connections; they run out of sleek new metal-and-glass stations on the outskirts that look and work very much like airports. Pam and I were not entirely convinced that our driver, who usually shuttles us to the Changsha airport, knew where he was going when we set off on the 45-minute ride to Zhuzhou West, but we took heart when we saw a bullet train speeding across an overpass in front of us. It looked just like the pictures on the billboards.

                You buy your ticket from a machine, or from a human being if you’re the old-fashioned type (which adds 5 yuan to the price); no timetables, route maps or brochures are offered. Then you pass through security, where everyone seems to be wanded whether you’ve set off the metal detector or not, and proceed through the vast wavy-roofed station and wait to be called to your designated gate. “Train 1051 is now available for check-in,” we heard from the balcony café at the Wuhan terminal as we wolfed down our wonton soup (which seemed a safer choice than the Mexican fast-food stand below). We weren’t sure what “check-in” involved, but I guessed this was essentially a boarding call — running our tickets through a turnstile like the one for the Airtrain at Newark airport, as we had on the journey up — and I was right. Once through the turnstiles, we descended by escalator to the platform, boarded and found our assigned seats. No announcement was made about seat belts or tray tables or full upright position; there were no safety instructions about what to do if we lost cabin pressure or the unlikely event of a water landing. But once the train left the station, we were flying.

                A colleague had told us that the high-speed trains were great in part because “we’re the only ones on them” – meaning foreigners – but both our trains looked nearly filled by Chinese, if affluent-looking ones. Many Chinese, especially students like Stevie Nicks or Mimi, who takes the seven-hour train home to Guangdong province, find the new trains too expensive: about $60 round trip to Wuhan, “economical class.” Business class was “sold out,” the ticket machine stated, but I suspect it doesn’t exist, or at least not yet, since I saw no such car or section on the train. We noticed that our 3:30 return train left the station at 3:29, which means that either its official clock was running slow or that the turnstile check-in informed the crew that all ticketed passengers were aboard. 

                “Economical class” meant seats a little tight for Western bodies, but it also meant crisply uniformed attendants, a snack cart as well as a dining car, and cleaners sweeping the aisles. “Why can’t we have this?” Pam and I asked each other more than once during our round trip through an incredibly green late-spring countryside, dotted with ancestral tombs built into the hillsides, with the mountains of northern Hunan as a backdrop. The squalor and inefficiency of New York’s Penn Station were frequently invoked. “Penn Station has computers, right?” Pam asked rhetorically. “So why can’t they reserve seats? Why can’t they read tickets?” The larger question, though, was: what would it take for America to have trains this good?

                For starters, it would take a lot of money; the Guangzhou-Wuhan line alone cost $17 billion, according to The New York Times. It would also take genuine high-speed track so the trains could actually run at high speeds. Amtrak’s much-touted, premium-priced Acela is the closest thing we have, but any comparison is laughable: it makes the 250-mile trip between New York and Boston in just over three hours on a good day, when, say, it doesn’t spend two hours stuck on the track behind a disabled local train.

                Most of all, it would take the will to move forward and rebuild a nationwide rail system, 2.0 — a update of the one  America had in the glory days of rail travel, now almost a century ago. Opponents paint government rail spending as subsidies to a losing proposition, rather than investment in a vital service the country needs; they argue that travelers prefer to drive or fly. But those passengers might change their minds if their choices included high-speed lines like China’s, or Europe’s, instead of Amtrak. 

                 Sadly, the United States no longer seems to have that force of will. (Consider how close an obstructionist Congress came to defeating the desperately needed health-care reform bill.) China does.  Think about that when you look down the track.

      If you’re not part of the Sondheim crowd, you may want to skip this one.

      Those who’ve known me any length of time have probably noticed three things: that I think life would be much more fun if people burst into song now and then, the way they do in Broadway musicals; that my all-time favorite musical is Stephen Sondheim and  Hugh Wheeler’s “A Little Night Music”; and that I’ve often said, “I don’t want to play Desiree; I want to be Desiree.” For normal people who’ve made it this far, Desiree is the show’s leading lady, a turn-of-the-last-century Swedish actress who, in middle age, rekindles a romance with an old flame who is now encumbered with a young wife. (“I suppose that could be considered a snag.”) As created by the Tony Award-winning Glynis Johns in 1973, “the one and only Desiree Armfeldt” was the epitome of elegance and grace; she wafted across the stage in “the most glamorous costumes,” as the young wife says, and eventually got her man in a happy ending for all concerned. In a recent issue of The Sondheim Review, Angela Lansbury, who plays Desiree’s mother in the current Broadway revival starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, is quoted as saying: “Desiree isn’t a very good actress, obviously, because she’s always touring . . . any actor who has to be on the road constantly is not going to be considered among the best.” Both Rick Pender, managing editor of the Review, and I would beg to differ, Rick because “The fact that Desiree is recognized in each village and town where she tours suggests that she’s an actress of some repute,” and I because, well, that’s what I need to believe. (Though the abysmal movie starring Elizabeth Taylor would tend to make one see Lansbury’s point.)

    Here in China, it’s occurred to me that I’ve finally turned into  Desiree, or at least her entrance number, “The Glamorous Life.” With her daughter, her mother and the Quintet of singers who provide running commentary throughout the show, Desiree sings (and depending on the actress playing her, I use that term loosely) of the reality of her life on the road.

Unpack the luggage, la la la, 
Pack up the luggage, la la la, 
Unpack the luggage, la la la, 
Hi-ho, the glamorous life!

      Given the amount of traveling I’ve done these last two years, the lyrics have started to sound eerily accurate. Last summer, as I prepared to leave the Baltic beach resort of Heringsdorf, Germany, for my annual teaching gig in southwest Poland, I found myself singing the song – but the words coming out of my mouth were “Pack up the laptop, la la, la.” That chorus has been reprised in from Shanghai to Xiangtan and back, and, I hope, will be again and again as I finish my time here with two or three weeks of travel. 

      Like Desiree, I’m doing eight performances a week – not Hedda in Helsingbord, but four classes of sophomores, two of juniors, one of postgraduates and one mixed audience. In both our cases, the most important thing is that “mother’s surviving . . . leading the glamorous life.” And really, how different from Rottvik can Xiangtan be?  

     Ice in the basin, la la la brings back those March mornings when, instead washing my face in freezing-cold water at the open-air kitchen sink (since there’s none in the “bathroom”), I settled for moisturizing  towelettes.  
 
     Cracks in the plaster, la la la. You should see the spot just over my left shoulder on the living room ceiling. And the mustard-yellow paint keeps peeling off the toilet/shower door.

     Run for the carriage, la la la. That would be the campus shuttle on Thursday mornings at 7:30  – not my best time of day, and probably not Desiree’s. During the ride I usually wolf down not a sandwich, but a bao zi, one of those soft steamed buns filled with anything from savory minced pork to red bean paste to sugar and sesame seeds.

     Half-empty houses, la la la. My Tuesday postgrad class, where 56 people are registered and this week only 9 appeared, and they all expect to pass the final exam.

     Cultural lunches, la la la? The Monday gathering of four foreign teachers who have classes in the same building that morning, when we compare notes and whine and laugh about what we see as the utter chaos in our working environment, which the Chinese consider perfectly normal.

     Youngish admirers, la la la! I have to admit that I’m attracting my share, but “youngish” is an understatement: they’re in their early 20s. Which one is that one, la la la? Well, there’s Stephen, my  Friday night garden date, who seems to have a crush on me. Stevie Nicks writes me introspective e-mail during the week between our classes. Kang, a postgrad computer major who is not enrolled in any of my classes, sometimes attends two a week, walks me to the North Gate or rides the shuttle with me afterwards, and insists on holding his umbrella over my head if a single drop of rain falls, even if I’m covered with my waterproof poncho. Pam says that they have no way of knowing how old we are and that we should enjoy it, because we’re not likely to get that kind of attention again.

       There’s another version of “The Glamorous Life,” written for the film, that that lay dormant until it emerged on the concert circuit a few years ago. In this version, Desiree’s young daughter sings in greater depth about what she imagines her mother’s life on the road to be.  “Sandwiches only, but she eats what she wants when she wants”? Here I do eat what I want — mostly peerless fried rice, fiery-hot vegetable plates, noodles stir-fried with chicken and cabbage, fresh fruit several times a day – and when I want, despite the Chinese conviction that it’s vital to eat at regular mealtimes. Still, there are days when I’d kill for a sandwich. (In an emergency, I can always go Changsha and eat at Subway, where I had something approximating a cheesesteak last weekend.)

      And “What if her what if her coach is/Second-class, she at least gets to travel”? This weekend I expect to make my maiden voyage on the Chinese railroads. If all goes to according to plan, it won’t be second class: Pam and I are taking the sleek new high-speed line to Wuhan, five hours away by regular train, reduced to one. So in the end, who cares about the plaster, the basin, the half-empty houses? She at least gets to travel. 

     Update:  I just saw the first, and I hope last, of the mice in the hallway, or rather, on the staircase landing outside my door. La . . . la . . . la. 

     Sammy is teaching me Mandarin. I am teaching English to everybody in sight. And now Mimi has asked me to teach her French.
 

    Along with “Do you like Chinese food?” one of the questions that invariably follow “Ex-cuse me! Can I prac-tice English with you?” is “Do you speak Chinese?” “Just a little,” I answer, making that pinch-of-salt gesture with my thumb and forefinger. “I can say ni hao and wo hen hao and xie xie and a few other phrases. I’m pretty good with my numbers. But I don’t really speak Chinese.” I can read a few characters thanks to the three years I studied Japanese, which borrowed the ideographic system of writing. I know my numbers because I bought Rosetta Stone’s Mandarin software and finished 11 of the 16 lessons on Level 1 before coming to China. (My first night on campus, when I stopped at the corner store for water and toilet paper, I thought I heard Ashi-san at the checkout counter and thought, “Who’s Ashi? I Am I back in Japan?” Then I looked at the register and realized it was the price — er shi san, or 23 yuan.)

     Though every day here is total immersion, it’s possible to survive quite comfortably without knowing the language, in large part because no one here expects a foreigner to speak any Chinese at all. But there are things you can’t do easily, like eat in a sit-down restaurant without an English menu, or a cheat sheet like the one in my notebook, or a student or another foreign teacher of longer standing to order. Or go to a movie and understand anything that depends on words. (I did fine with Tim Burton’s dubbed “Alice in Wonderland,” but “East Wind, Rain,” a visually sumptuous new Chinese film about spies in Shanghai in 1941, was another story.)

     So the foreign teachers asked The Boss to arrange a teacher for us, at our expense, and now Sammy Lee comes to Pam’s apartment twice a week to listen to us mangle her language. At this point I am not so much learning Mandarin as learning about Mandarin – how the language works, which to me is at least as rewarding. I may not be able to put together much more than a simple sentence by the time I leave China, only seven weeks away. But now I understand about tones, and a little bit about grammar. (I have an idea how pidgin developed; it sounds to me like a result of direct translation of the rather abrupt Chinese. For example, the greeting ni hao literally means “You good?” ) And I’ve picked up some vocabulary.

     Sammy works mainly from vocabulary sheets she has written for us. The first few weeks focused on pronunciation and those four all-important tones. (The same Pinyin spelling can have four entirely different meanings, depending on the tone of the vowel – the quality that gives Chinese its singsong sound.) They have become more complicated with time. Single words led to simple sentences, then to themed lessons – for example, going to the fruit market or, most recently, asking directions.

     As we sit with her, repeating the words and making notes as she defines them, it occurs to me that Sammy is doing the same with us as we do with our students. The difference is, we’re true beginners and they’re far more advanced in English. It also occurs to me how much like our students we behave, or rather don’t. We don’t make the time to study and practice between class, as Sammy keeps urging us to do, and then we hang our heads in embarrassment when we’re caught unprepared in class. Our pronunciation is far from perfect; the tones are as hard for us as, say, the short I sound is for the Chinese . It helps keep us humble, and in touch with what our students must be feeling every day.

     Still, we study in our own way. One spa day, Pam and I took our fruit lesson to Bubugao, the supermarket downstairs. I had already mastered lemon – ning meng – because a student had introduced me to the refreshing ning meng shui, or lemon water, from a drinks stall near my apartment. At Bubugao, we used our sheets to look for unfamiliar fruits and matching the characters to the ones on signs above the counters. “Is that durian?” “What’s a jackfruit?” “There’s mangosteen.” “Is that li zi or li zhi?” There were several kinds of melon on our list, all distinguished by the same character for melon at the end of their names; the trick was figuring out which was which. I already knew hami melon, the large, elongated yellow melon that looks like cantaloupe inside but tastes much sweeter. When we were satisfied that we had done our homework, we proceeded to Pizza Hut.

     There are small moments of great triumph, like the first time I heard — actually heard the word rather than abstract sounds — “Laoban! Laoban!” (“boss,” meaning proprietor) at the salad bar down the street. For breakfast on early mornings, I can order qing wen, er bao zi – two pork buns, please – instead of pointing at the steam tray. At the fruit stand, where the lady’s husband now also knows me and they seem to have adopted me as their pet foreigner for the semester, I can ask for ping guo (apples), though the word and counter for banana still eludes me. One day I found I could not only do the hand signal for six, which also happens to be the Hawaiian signal for “hang loose,” but could also read their hand signal for the price, 22 yuan. “Er shi er?” I asked, winning big smiles and the Chinese equivalent of “Brava!” from both laobans. I repeated the feat on my next visit, and I know they are proud of me.

     One Friday night, near my stop on the campus shuttle, the driver turned to me and asked a question I didn’t understand. “He wants to know where you’re from,” piped up a small female voice behind me, then, in explanation, “I’m an English major.” “New York!” I said.   She translated; “Niuyue!” he repeated, adding, “U.S.A.” One of them said, “Mei guo,” and I sprang into action: “Wo shi mei guo ren,” I said slowly – my first spontaneous sentence. I push myself one step further: “Wo shi yingyu laoshi.” Of course, I mispronounced ying – I tend to say the Y sound, which is silent — and the student corrected. me. The driver had one final question as the shuttle stopped. ”He asks about pay.” It took two or three tries to understand the question: Do I get paid to teach here? No, it seemed he wanted to know how much. “I don’t know if it’s rude to ask,” the student apologized. I took the out: “Americans don’t like to talk about that. Good night!” If I had told them my monthly salary here, they’d have been horrified, just as horrified as my friends back in New York would be, but for opposite reasons: they because it’s so high by local standards, twice what a Chinese professor makes; New Yorkers because it’s so low, not even enough to pay for a weekend with the pandas in Sichuan, let alone the Yangtze cruise back to Shanghai that I’ve booked for the end of my time here.
 

     It was around that time that Mimi asked if I had been to Paris, if I spoke French and if I could teach her. (She has a friend in Paris and dreams of visiting someday.) At first I was taken aback, but on reflection, I saw no reason I couldn’t teach her French. It is, after all, my second modern language. Though somewhat rusty, I speak and read it with reasonable fluency, and was complimented on my accent as recently as two weeks ago in Shanghai. I have experience teaching true beginners in English – an intense summer in Poland – so why not a true beginner in French?

    
     Mimi comes to my apartment Wednesday mornings to sit on my terrace for an hour or so – any more would fry both our brains – to learn the basics of French. She has borrowed some introductory textbooks, in Chinese, from the university library, and we use them in much the same way Sammy uses her sheets. We started off with the French alphabet as a door into pronunciation. Mimi has little trouble with all but a few sounds: G and J and, like almost every beginner, the French R. She has no trouble at all with the French U, since the same sound exists in Chinese – for example, in the word for woman, nu ren. We moved on to simple exchanges like “Bonjour, Mimi, ca va?” “Oui, ca va. Et vous?” and then to some of the phrases in the book; like Sammy, I read them to her for the sound and then translate for vocabulary and grammar. It’s a little more complicated, since Sammy has only two languages to deal with while Mimi and I have three: the Chinese in her brain, the French she is trying to learn and the English that is our only common language, the medium of instruction. And then, a few hours later, I revert to my normal role as her English teacher in a class where she is one of 32.

    
     It’s not the only French I’ve encountered on this campus. One day I entered my classroom to find Juliet and some of her classmates there early, singing “Frère Jacques” in Chinese. (Similarly, one morning on the shuttle, a grandma behind me was singing “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” to her little emperor, also in Chinese. Some things are universal.) “You have to write out the words for me before I leave!” I told them. “I can already sing it in two languages,” and proceeded to demonstrate.

     They never did, but the subject came up again when Mimi found the words in her French book. I translated and sang them, first in French, then in English. She sang the Chinese for me and wrote the lyrics for me, in both Han and Pinyin, which follows, minus the tone markings:

     Liang zhi lao hu, liang zhi lao hu,
     Pao de kaui, pao de kuai,
     Yi zhi mei you erduo, yi zhi mei you erduo,
     Zhen qi guai, zhen qi guai.

 
     Here the song is about two tigers, running fast. One has no ears, one has no tail — very strange, very strange. I told Mimi that if she did well in French, I would sing the Chinese on the last day of classes, after final exams. We both have work to do.