Illegal Raëlian

He came to Earth on a Tuesday. Pedro found him and brought him to class for show and tell.

I remember it was a Tuesday because Pedro only came to class on Tuesdays. He was a busy man, Pedro. Head accountant at the one and only luxury hotel in Zamora de Hidalgo, Mexico - not exactly a lightweight. He was away on business half the time, and on the verge of being fired the other half. So who could blame him if he only came to class once a week, and thirty minutes late at that? I certainly didn't.

Around 8:00 in the PM, there would come a knocking at the wood-plastic door and Pedro would peek his head in. Teacher, can I come een? No matter how late he was, Pedro always had a seat saved at the head of the table, like he'd phoned in beforehand to make a reservation. On the way to his rightful throne, he exchanged fistpounds with everyone in class. Very-very sorry, teacher. I just have the meeting with the fok-hink boss!

Pedro was in his late 40's when I taught him, and is probably in his mid 30's by now. The very portrait of youth, Pedro, but almost comically bald, with more hair to his felt-tip mustache and bushy black eyebrows than he had up top. A pair of yellowish buck teeth gave him a rodentlike but charmingly boyish appearance. He wore his pastel dress shirts unbuttoned low enough that you could infer his nipples. And nestled amongst plenty of old-growth chest hair was a solid gold crucifix. Pedro, like most Zamoranos, was a devout Catholic, though clearly not of the superstitious set. He grinned during his in-class sermons. Teacher, I just give all the thanks to my God - here, he would point and gaze up towards the yellow-stained Styrofoam ceiling tiles - for give me strength to not be fire from best fok-hink hotel in Zamora, okay? And in the next breath, he was lamenting his estranged ex-wife, who had hooked up with some pinche Sancho from Guadalajara. Then he was regaling us with tales of nudist gringo bacchanalia at Hotel Casa Velas in Puerto Vallarta. Then he was speculating on the potency of his teacher's seed, and the global distribution thereof.

"I know you have the childrens, teacher," he would say, with the same perverse grin he wore when kissing his crucifix. "All over the fok-hink world. America, Canada, een pinche China, too. Everywhere, they are callink for you. They are waitink for you, teacher! Waitink for you with open arms! Waitink - for the rest of their fok-hink life!"

Like all the other TEFL academies I've worked for, the academy in Mexico warned me about getting tight with my students. You are their teacher and not their friend - this was school policy. But I've never been very good at making the distinction between student and potential drinking buddy, and seeing how the teenagers I taught in the afternoon reviled me as their mortal enemy, I had no qualms about making friends with my adult night class. Anyway, I had no say in the matter. They befriended me first. As soon as the bell rang, Luis was nudging me and tipping back an invisible bottle of Indio, or Pedro was escorting me out to his Cadillac Escalade for an all-expense-paid tour of the little-known ritzy side of Zamora.

My adult students were well beyond their language-learning years. Poor Alejandro in the back literally could not speak a word of English, said sí for yes and a heavily accented no for no. Pedro, a Chivas fan, called soccer "football-soccer" and I corrected him every Tuesday for four months, in vain.

"Pedro, my man," I would say. "It's either football or soccer. You have to choose one. It can't be both."
"Okay, teacher. We watch the Chivas football-soccer after class, okay?"

But futile as my efforts sometimes were, my oldsters took notes, asked me good questions, even did their homework - and they learned English the way all languages should be learned: through off-color remarks about their teacher's virility. Awash in a sea of spoiled adolescents, my adult class was the lone bright spot of my teaching day. All that semester, my high school students called me a maricon behind my back and eventually to my face. They egged my house on three separate occasions, always during my afternoon siesta. But at the end of the day, when I slumped into my night class like a burlap sack full of hurt feelings, my non-traditional English learners would give me fist pounds, compliment me on my relatively youthful looks, and ask me about my girlfriends. But what cheered me up most of all were those rare Tuesdays when I found Pedro there, on time for once, seated at the head of the table, leaning over his yellow legal pad, bearing a nauseating amount of man-cleve, and as I set down my books and took my place at the whiteboard, he would say, grinning perversely, "We have been waitink for you, teacher. Waitink for you with open arms. We will wait for you for the rest of our fok-hink life."

Enter the Raëlian. It was a Tuesday, around 8 in the PM. Pedro was absent, but that was nothing out of the ordinary. Over the weekend, I had taught myself the four English past tenses, how to distinguish them, and how to teach them, so I was very excited to share this newfound knowledge with my adult class. I sketched Pedro's balding visage on the board.

"So, let's say Pedro is watching football-soccer. Suddenly, his estranged ex-wife calls from Guadalajara. This is the past continuous, followed by the simple past: Pedro was watching football-soccer when ... "

I was teaching the past continuous when the Raëlian arrived. There was a knock at the door. Pedro peeked his head in.

"Very-very sorry, teacher. Can I come een?"

But this time, Pedro was not alone. He exchanged fist-pounds with his classmates and me and assumed his usual place at the head of the table. And behind him came an emaciated man of a greenish hue who smirked at me as he passed. The stranger did not exchange fist-pounds with anyone, but kept his arms crossed over his chest and his hands tucked into his armpits. He slid a chair to the far right corner of the room and there he sat, smirking at me.

Pedro took out his legal pad, put on his bifocals, and began copying down what I had written on the board.

"What will you show us today, teacher? I mean, what will we see today?" He squinted at my Pedro cartoon. "Teacher, that ees me?"

I, meanwhile, was squinting at the stranger in my classroom. That smirk. Those eyes. His zombie complexion. If you've seen David Lynch's Lost Highway, this guy was the splitting Latino image of The Mystery Man.

"Pedro, aren't you going to introduce me to your ... friend?"
"Oh. Hmph." Pedro snorted. "He ees not from our planet, teacher. He from space."
Pedro pointed up at the ceiling tiles and resumed writing.
"From space?"
"Yes, teacher. You don't want to know thees man," he said, scribbling irritably. "Thees man have very-very strange ideas."
"Well, that's okay. I'm interested in strange ideas."
Pedro set down his pen and removed his glasses.
"Por ejemplo, teacher. You know I believe in my God, my Lord and Savior Jesucristo," he turned toward The Mystery Man, who was watching me. "Thees man believe in - he believe in other God. Cómo se dice lagarto? Yes. Yes. He believe in leezard God!"

My students had stopped taking notes and were looking back and forth between Pedro and The Mystery Man. I glanced anxiously at the whiteboard. The past continuous had become the past simple. Finished. The arrival of Pedro's lizard-worshiping friend had catapulted us into an unexpected and unpredictable future tense. But my curiosity was far too piqued. I couldn't help but ask.

"Maybe you can tell me a little bit about your lizard beliefs, Mr. - "
He got to his feet.
"Name is Jose," said the man. "I am Raëliano."

It took me a moment to translate the word, but only a moment. No shit. A real live Raëlian. In my classroom. It was as though I'd hogtied a unicorn, or boobytrapped Bigfoot. I had met Scientologists before, Hare Krishnas, even Episcopalians - but this was something new. My very first Raëlian. Mentally, I marked off another square on my Sinister Cults Bingo card.

Then, I played dumb. Because I was interested.
"Raëliano?" I asked. "What's that?"

A radioactive glow spread over the classroom as the Raëlian spoke. His English was impeccable, but stripped of all tone and color. He did not mention lizards, but he did reference UFOs, alien overlords, a French auto racing messiah, and a whole host of other divine beings that you might find in the National Enquirer Year in Review issue. Patricia was glaring at the Raëlian and praying to herself. Alejandro had no idea what was going on. Alejandro 2, a 16 year-old boy who had been placed among the adults for some reason, and who was more mature than any of them, looked positively terrified. Pedro snorted and rolled his eyes.

"Teacher, do not listen thees man. I will wait for my God with open arms and one day very-very soon he will come," said Pedro, "but thees man, he will wait for the rest of his fok-hink life and still, the leezard will not come. Okay? Time for school. What will you show us today, teacher? What will we see today?"

The Raëlian sat back down and was silent for the rest of class, but he watched me with a laserbeam intensity that gave me the shakes and rendered my own words foreign to me. I was relieved when the bell rang. Pedro and the Raëlian got up to leave. Pedro gave me a fistpound. The Raëlian just smirked. I would never learn just how they were acquainted, or why Pedro had brought him to class in the first place. And I still don't know anything about the Raëlian belief structure, whether it involves lizards or aliens or Israelites or race cars or what. I plan to remain happily ignorant in that regard. I'd rather not know. It's like looking into a vortex. You keep at it long enough and before you know it you've got spirals in your eyes.

As Navidad approached, my adult students proposed an end-of-semester Secret Santa gift exchange. I set the bar at twenty pesos maximum, though I knew Pedro would hurdle it. Then, a strange thing happened. Two weeks before the gift exchange and the final exam, everyone dropped the class. Luis, Alberto, Patricia, both Alejandros and a pair of Lupitas. All gone. Everyone had vanished except me and Pedro, and Pedro only showed up on Tuesdays. The week before the final exam, just for something to do, I spent my 7:30 class tutoring a bratty little ten year-old soccer phenom who wanted to improve his grammar, but wasn't much for conversation. No sense of humor, this kid. Then, he disappeared, too. So I would walk into class, find the classroom empty, shut the door behind me and start doodling little Pedros on the whiteboard, blue Pedros, black Pedros, red ones, green ones ...

Then, the day before the final exam, the night of the gift exchange, there came a knock on the door. I erased the whiteboard as fast as I could. The door squeaked open and there was Pedro.

"Teacher, can I come een? Where ees every-bady?"

There was no one to fistpound but me. Pedro took his seat at the head of the table, unpacked his legal pad and glasses.

"What will you show us today, teacher? What are we going to see today?"
"Well, Pedro, my man. We should probably review a little bit. The final exam is tomorrow."
"Ayyy, no! Teacher, I have the meeting with the fok-hink boss in the tomorrow night! I will be late to take part een the exam!"
"How late is late?"
He glanced at his Rolex.
"The eight and thirty!"
"Well, then, Pedro," I said. "I will wait for you. Here. With open arms. For the rest of my life."
"No, teacher," corrected Pedro. "For the rest of your fok-hink life."

That night, Pedro drove me in his Escalade to a place called La Cucaracha. I had told my roommate Nicole to meet us there for the gift exchange, having already hyped up this Pedro character to lizard godly proportions. We found her sitting in the back of the bar with the rest of my adult class. There they were, waiting for me. With open arms, as it were.

I gave them all fistpounds. Then, half-irked, half-delighted, shouting over the intoxicating ruckus of jukebox banda, I asked, "Where have you all been? The final exam is tomorrow!"

"We have been waitink for you," said 16 year-old Alejandro 2, flashing a grin across the table at his bald, mustachioed mentor. "We will wait for you for the rest of our fok-hink life."

But not for the rest of the semester, apparently. The next day, Pedro was the only student to take the final exam. Everyone else failed the class. Pedro passed by a mustache whisker. But the gift exchange was a success. I gave Alejandro 2 an English dictionary, the fruitcake of ESL gifts, but he was delighted with it and wore a brace-toothed smile for the rest of the evening. And Pedro gave me a wallet. I spotted the pricetag: 200 pesos. I blushed. Later that night, I transferred everything over to Pedro's wallet - my cards, what centavos I had left, and an Emiliano Zapato trading card that Eduardo, the only teenager in Zamora who didn't hate me, had given me back in February. I slid the trading card behind the transparent flap where your driver's license is supposed to go and now, whenever I fumble around for some loose Chinese RMB, there is Emiliano Zapato peering up at me with his furious superhero eyes, wearing a sombrero so big that it doesn't even fit in the frame, a mustache like a charred Vienna sausage, a red scarf knotted around his neck, two sashes of ammunition crisscrossed over his chest, and under his portrait, the words "EL APOSTÓL DEL AGRARISMO." And then, at the very bottom of the card, the handwritten words "Thanks Kiwi. Seeya man. -Eduardo" Ah, yes. They used to call me Kiwi back then. I remember now. KIWI: EL APOSTÓL DE INGLÉS.

pimwarts5943682.doc

I have managed to keep Expatriate Act aloft for just over four years now. Free Expatriate Act beer koozies for all, etc. But if you were to start from my very first post and read all the way through to this one, you would not, for the life of you, be able to find anything in the way of a narrative. There is no overarching plot here. There are very few recurring characters and even the narrator remains a vague (but hopefully likable) vagrant fop on the horizon. There are no themes or symbols in my story, or if there are, I am unaware of them. There is, naturally, no setting to speak of. One day our protagonist is in Krakow. The next he's back in Omaha. Then he's off to South Korea all of a sudden. Thanks for letting us know, Mr. Foppish Narrator. Much later, we learn that he's in Omaha again, by way of Poland and Mexico, though in neither country did he bother to write about much of anything other than the contents of his stomach. And now he's in China, apparently for a much longer spell than is usual for him. He is writing somewhat regularly these days, though what he writes isn't much different from what he wrote while serving puberty in the American Midwest. Disillusionment, social discomfort, moral ambiguity. Is that all there is to the world? You begin to wonder whether he ever left the country in the first place, whether he might not be hiding out in his parents' basement after all, drinking Miller High Life on the sly and siphoning his ideas from 4 AM reruns of M.A.S.H.

If I am evasive, I swear it isn't deliberate. Really, I wish I could be one of those super personable bloggers who updates four times a day with pictures of himself snorkeling, pictures of himself mounting a camel, pictures of himself mounting a snorkeling camel. But I've never been one to take a whole helluva lot of pictures. I tend to rely on my brain camera. And I wish I could've weaved this blog into a cohesive whole, but it's a bit late for that now, isn't it? I would've very much liked to have explained the trajectory of my life more clearly along the way, but the problem is this: I am chronically unable to come through in the writing clutch. I am the Bill Buckner of the written blog. Let me explain.

Whenever something momentous happens to me, I seem to lose all inspiration to write about it the moment I set pen to Moleskine. I never wrote about my trip to North Korea and wrote only sparingly about my time in Mexico, perhaps the happiest six months of my life. Here in China, I waited so long to write about the Kunming Dwarf Kingdom that Matt Lauer and those muckraking Today Show hacks broke the story before I could. And I will make them pay, believe me. But for whatever reason, I just can't write when the plot is spelled out for me beforehand. It's like I'm doing algebra instead of writing. I have to sort out all these predefined narrative variables and figure them into a story, when what sticks out in my mind, the things that are really interesting to me, are mere trifles: the lispy, contemptuous way the North Korean passport officials spit out the word Yesss when I greeted them in their native tongue, the Brothers Lounge on 38th and Farnam, my long walks into the Świętokrzyskie woods with Walden as my guide, the late night burrito van on Calle Uruguay, the spectacle of piling out of a Toyotavan in downtown Kunming with three Caucasians and six midgets ... These trifles I could weave into prose poems, but the stories that go with them are beyond my ability as a writer. It's as though the moment I try to capture any experience that most people would consider significant, the story acquires a plotline that won't bend, characters that won't budge, and the whole damn thing gets as big and blocky and cold as a Frigidaire.

I don't have that problem when I write about my absurd day-to-day existence. That world is more of a connect-the-dots game for my brain. I sit down with an empty page and nothing to go on but the children peeing in the street and the old men hawking laserbeam loogeys, the ever-present threat of death by trishaw and the sauna-grey skies of Sichuan in summer. This is background radiation. These are Chinese cliches. These are things I have written about tens of hundreds of times already. But amidst that overwritten backdrop, some minor spot of bother acts as the grain of sand that gets the whole snowball rolling. Everything adds up; the semicolons align. One hour later, when the sooty ol' snowball has finally come to a rest at the bottom of the slagheap hill, I've gone places I hadn't planned to, made connections between any number of things that were unrelated in my mind until the moment I wrote about them - and yet the end result is something manageable, something I can sculpt and polish between my proofreading mittens before flinging it at the internet to watch it splatter into oblivion.

So that is one hangup of mine. Another one is this: I happen to be the worst breed of packrat, hoardicus dishevelicus, the packrat who keeps everything while simultaneously losing it all. I am both archivist and book burner. I keep everything I have ever done, but I wouldn't know where to begin finding any of it. If worse came to worst and I had to clean my apartment for some reason, before the rent-a-maid arrived, I would hire a private investigator to sift through the rubble for any writing I may have done over the past year. When I say I didn't write about North Korea or the Dwarf Kingdom, that isn't quite true. I wrote about them, and probably on several occasions, but the ideas never clicked, so I gave up and ripped the pages out of my notebook, dropped them on the floor, spilled coffee on them, ashed my cigarettes onto them, slept on them, walked over them for several months, and eventually kicked them under the bed and forgot they even existed.

Even with the aid of technology, I am no less a packrat, and no less a slob. I save all of my incomplete writing - even the stuff I am proud of - under titles like skoobfob.doc and gompbar.doc and pimwarts5943682.doc. Months later, when I go looking for those writings, I am shocked and outraged that I cannot find them. And yet I continue saving them with Seussian titles. And I write a lot. For several years, my harddrive was little more than a vault of stories I'd meant to write but didn't, blog posts that weren't, the aborted fetuses of novels, snippets of dialogue, quotes from Hemingway and Borges and Dostoevsky, all of them saved as jabberwocky.doc. Then, sometime last winter, my computer suffered a major stroke. What happened was this: Windows shut down, as it often does, but when it came back up, my computer was a blank slate. Generic pastoral background, no non-Windows programs, no non-Windows files, no non-Windows nothing. Just me and Bill Gates. I didn't believe it at first, but when I searched the harddrive for "Radiohead" and turned up nothing, I knew something was amiss.

After that, my computer started to run much faster. But I had lost everything I had ever written. Good, I told myself, perhaps you will start to run faster, too! Ha ha ha. But really, I was devastated. I had always meant to make something out of all those Keith Petit b-sides, elusive and incorrigible as they were, just as I had always meant to make something out of all the crumpled, coffee-stained, cigarette-burned Moleskine pages under my bed. I wanted people, eventually, to read those stories. Those trifles. The Hermit Kingdom and the Midget Kingdom. Burritos and The Brothers Lounge. But lo, the rent-a-maid had come before the private investigator and now, all was lost. Clean, but lost.

Then, this past Sunday, when my internet started running so slowly that it took me a full two hours to download a Ramones album, I finally decided once and for all to purge the harddrive of spyware - a heaping Chinese tumor that, apparently, did not reside in the non-Windows hemisphere of my computer's brain that had been wiped clean in the great stroke of '09. I fired up some virus-infected antivirus software and as I watched my doddering machine psychoanalyze itself, I began to notice an unusual number of blorgdash.docs and sloopbunk.docs. I did some half-ass hackery and discovered that all of my writing, all of my b-sides, had been neatly saved away in a gibberish directory that my computer, perhaps mimicking his master, had cooked up in his last fading seconds of continence: /ZSKGZ7MVCBKET/

Stifling a dry heave, I delved into my writing of yesteryear. Some of it wasn't half bad. Most of it wasn't half good, either. But much of it was worth rewriting, if I can wrap my head around the task. So I think I'll do that. I'm on vacation for the next week. Seven days of voluntary volunteer leave. Then I go to Beijing. Then to Dazhou, wherever that is. I hope that I will be able to write about those places before I crumple up the memories and kick them under the bed. But for these next seven days, I'd like to delve into the nostalgic hemisphere of my brain that hasn't been wiped clean by the asbestos in my room, the lead in my tapwater, or the formaldehyde in my nightcaps. I'd like to revive a few of these amputated tales and chopped-up yarns. They are old stories, broken ones. But we can rebuild them. We have the technology. So, tomorrow, I shall begin with a story I call The Illegal Raëlian.

Welcome Week

[A bearded figure in a corduroy suitcoat assumes the podium. He fiddles with the microphone for an inordinately long amount of time, then turns the thing over in his hands and contemplates it with much wonder, as though he is a time traveler from the 19th Century. You figure this foppish boob is some sort of invalid handyman, an acid casualty turned Peace Corps janitor. You wait for him to get off the stage. Then he produces a crumpled wad of receipts from his pocket, flattens them out upon the podium and violently clears his throat. He begins to speak. Horrified, you realize that this is a second-year volunteer, and that he is speaking to you.]

Welcome, Peace Corps Freshmen. It is June the 20th. One week to go. By now, your mom has finished packing your underwear. You have quit your temp job, broken off your most recent long-term romantic relationship, and have finally abandoned all hope for your last-ditch grad school application to Vanderbilt. [Here, the speaker chuckles to himself but receives no laughter in return. He takes a long swig from a Nalgene bottle containing a murky brown fluid and coughs.]

Yes, these are anxious times. I remember them well. The Peace Corps seemed like a grand idea about a year ago, when you were unemployed and sleeping well into the afternoon upon an inflatable mattress in the utility room of your ex-girlfriend's studio apartment. And it remained a grand idea up until two months ago, when your selfless dedication to service made you an instant celebrity at the local watering hole, where old timers would slap you across the back and say, wistfully, drunkenly, Y'know, I wish I had ... y'know ... when I was your age ...

But now that the idea is inching ever closer to becoming reality, it is starting to feel like a terrible mistake. What if Vanderbilt has a sudden change of heart? What if Shirley Hawksby is the love of your life and you just don't know it yet? And then, more existentially: why, of all places, China? Of all the things I could be doing with the next two years of my ever-vanishing youth, why should I spend them teaching college English in Sichuan Province? Two years is a long time, you figure, and couldn't I just stay home and make a difference here in Sandpoint, Idaho? And meanwhile, there's Shirley Hawksby to consider. And her double-D gazongas to consider ... Maybe you should call the Peace Corps and tender your resignation. But no: this is the US Government you're dealing with, here. So you contemplate faking your own death, and you wonder whether Shirley Hawksby would run away with you if you both agreed to adopt suitably sexy-sounding aliases.

In all likelihood, Shirley Hawksby and these last-minute anxieties of yours will wind up losing out to your sense of adventure. One way or another, you will board that flight to San Francisco, and in a hungover daze, you will sit through a litany of getting-to-know-you icebreaker sessions. Then, along with however many of you there are, you will make the great leap across the Pacific to the People's Republic of China. I could, of course, tell you what is likely to happen after that, but I wouldn't want to ruin the surprise.

The question that brought you this far is the same question that plagues all Peace Corps volunteers: is what I am doing right now worthwhile? There is no easy answer to that question. It is a hypothetical question in a way, because it implies that you could be elsewhere doing elsewise. The question opens up an abyss of where-should-I-be's? and where-might-I-be's? The ability to ask hypothetical questions is the greatest curse humanity has ever been blessed with. We have the capacity to dream up an infinity of universes, reasonable universes and totally fantastical ones - universes in which we fake our own death and run off with Shirley Hawksby, universes in which we bring the literary world to its literary knees, universes in which we remain in Sandpoint, Idaho for the rest of our lives doing god-knows-what - and out of those millions of universes, we must in the end choose only one. Almost one year ago to the day, I chose the universe in which I would spend two years teaching college English in China. So the question I suppose you might have for me is this: do you feel like what you are doing right now is worthwhile?

Here, I could let my eyes glaze over. I could run off at the mouth about all the wonderful things the Peace Corps is doing in China. But that would be disingenuous of me. Of course, the Peace Corps is doing wonderful things in China and all over the world. I no longer question their motives. But I do question my own motives. Is what I am doing right now worthwhile? The question is there waiting for me in my morning Nalgene bottle of Nescafe, and haunts me even after who knows how many nightcaps.

Peace Corps China is different from most other Peace Corps programs. You will be fairly comfortable in China. No huts. No hovels. You will have an apartment. You will probably have a DVD player in your living room, if not a computer. At first, you might be disappointed that you're not roughing it like Peace Corps Uganda, but before long, you will find yourself griping about how glitchy the DVD player is, or how slow the internet is, and so on.

You will not be dropped via helicopter into The Shit. Nor will you find yourself in an idyllic Chinese village. The Shit, as far as Peace Corps China goes, is a relatively poor metropolis. In all likelihood, you will be placed in a very large city where your only regular contacts are shish-kebab vendors and taxi drivers. It is unlikely that you will save any lives during your two years of service. You won't be digging irrigation ditches or treating AIDS patients. You will work a regular old J-O-B during the afternoon, and when the working day is done, during that time of day in which girls merely want to have fun, you will be left to your own devices. So you will attempt to bond with China during that time. But try as you might, you will find it immensely difficult to make a single Chinese friend among any of the 1.3 billion people that surround you. Alas, despite your best efforts, you will remain a foreigner in this country, and for that reason, you will be both embraced by the locals and kept at arm's length from them.

It will be hard for you to see how much of a difference you are making. A full calendar year has passed, and I have absolutely no idea as to what kind of impact my existence is having on Nanchong or its millions of inhabitants. At least in a Ugandan village, you might be able to cite specific instances of having helped so-and-so, or of having done such-and-such. Here, the fruits of your good deeds are not so evident. After one year in China, the people in your neighborhood will continue to heckle and taunt you as though you're fresh off the boat. You will go entire semesters wondering whether you have taught anyone a single damned thing. You will bust your ass for four months trying to teach your students that America is a diverse place, with black people, white people, Latinos - even Chinese people! And when the final exam rolls around, every last one of them will tell you that Americans are white people with big noses and lots of hair. Welcome to China. It's very Chinese here. And it's been that way for 5,000 years. Just how does one go about changing a Chinese city the size of Denver? Beats you. Beats me.

Do I feel that what I am doing is worthwhile? Yes. Maybe. I don't know. Yes. I think so. I just got back from Chongqing [hooting in the back row from the Chongqing contingent] and I was struck by the fact that on the bus ride home from what might be the largest city in the world, none of my fellow travelers seemed to have ever seen a foreigner before. They couldn't help but stare. Everything I did was exotic. He's reading - in English! He's sending a text message - in English! He's passed out and is drooling on my husband's shoulder - in English!

I grew up in Nebraska, a state as homogenized as the milk it produces, but Nebraska is Spanish Harlem compared to Sichuan. In Sichuan, the mere presence of a foreigner is enough to trigger moped accidents, stock market crashes and mass hysteria. So as a volunteer, you are endowed with a kind of superpower, the superpower of constant visibility. And you must decide at some point whether you will use that power for good or for evil. For two years, you will be the center of attention, wherever you go, whatever you do. Not a booger will go unpicked without comment. It is irritating, to say the least. But will you remain pleasant? Will you continue to make public appearances? Will you take the heckling with a grain of MSG? These are silly questions if you are living in America, or serving in Uganda. But they are not so silly to me. These are the questions that haunt me. It is difficult to remain pleasant. It is difficult to leave the apartment. But it is my job, a job before which my J-O-B is insignificant. Because the strangers who bother me on the street tell me about the foreigner they met six years ago. He was fat, they'll say. Or she was mean, they'll say. He couldn't speak Chinese, they'll say. They remember everything about the last foreigner they met. A city the size of Denver, and they remember one foreigner. And I am that foreigner for thousands of people I won't remember after I leave.

I will not save any lives in China. I will not dig any ditches. But this is the most powerful country on earth and its inhabitants know next to nothing about the outside world. So, simply by existing, I am informing them. By walking to the corner store to buy toilet paper, I am educating them. By successfully eating a bowl of ramen with chopsticks, I am astounding them. So is what I am doing right now worthwhile? Yes. I think so, yes.

[Here, the bearded figure in the corduroy suitcoat grows nervous, unplugs the microphone and, before your very eyes, eats it. Disgusted to the point of becoming violently ill, you watch the microphone sink down into his esophagus. He belches and takes a bow. There is a smattering of applause from the back row. In one week, you will arrive in San Francisco. There will be icebreakers.]

High Loon

And so my second semester in China ends as suddenly and chaotically as it began. This morning, I noticed a 48th student sitting all by her lonesome in the back row of the auditorium. After a series of idiotic squints, I managed to make out the blunt features of my blunt-spoken supervisor. I broke into a sweat. My knees buckled and trembled. I assumed, as I always do when confronted by an authority figure, that I was in deep shit. I mentally packed my bags, visualized the concourse of the Chengdu International Airport, and ran through my resignation speech as I switched on the projector screen and cued up The Joy Luck Club. Then, I sat in the very front row for about fifteen seconds before my supervisor snuck up from behind and swatted me on the shoulder.

"Come to the rear, please?"
"Oh, right, sure, no problem, okay!" I stammered.

"I have three things to tell," she said.
I could see where this was going already. Number one: a vague compliment. Number two: a schedule change, an upcoming Chinese holiday, a 93-year-old handyman coming to my apartment at such-and-such o'clock. It was number three that I was afraid of. Actually, I couldn't see where this was going at all.

"Number one," she said. "The final exam is start next week."
I painted over my astonishment with a dopey grin and a string of rapid-fire nods.
"Oh, that's cool. Like, next Monday?"
"That is number two," she said. "Next Wednesday you know is Chinese Dragon Boat Festival. Monday and Tuesday there is no class. No class Monday and Tuesday. We will have class Saturday and Sunday in lieu."
In lieu? In the loo? I nodded, nodded, nodded.
"So we have a vacation? But not really?"
"Yes," she said, "vacation, but not really. So the final exam is begin on Saturday."
"The day after tomorrow. Excellent," I said, "and what's behind door number three?"
"Oh. Number three is, do you like singing a song?"
"Sometimes," I said, listing in my mind the conditions under which I have been known to sing publicly.
"I will go to KTV tomorrow loon," she said.
"Pardon?"
"Tomorrow loon I will go to KTV."
"... sorry?"
"KTV tomorrow loon."

The Sichuanese possess two of the world's more puzzling speech impediments. Surprisingly, the L/R dichotomy is a non-issue in Sichuan. My students can pronounce the word "ruler" without spraining their tongues, and the kids on the street certainly have no problem with "HELLO!" But in my leck of the woods, otherwise fluent speakers of Mandarin cannot seem to distinguish L from N. So the city in which I live is interchangeably called "Nanchong" or "Lanchong." Not even l/native N/Lanchongers can make up their minds on the issue. H and F are another trouble spot. My beard is either a fuzi or a huzi, depending on how rustic the barber is. And the Mandarin word for mediocre, mama huhu, already perhaps the best word in any language, is unquestionably improved by the Sichuanese pronunciation: mama fufu.

"Loon! Loon!" said my supervisor with mounting exasperation. Then, finally: "Noon!"

So my supervisor was proposing a karaoke date for tomorrow noon. I thought again of the conditions necessary for me to risk singing in public, and certainly stone sober at high noon with my supervisor in a simultaneously glitzy and dumpy karaoke room did not meet my crooning criteria. I nodded, nodded, nodded, and before I could weasel my way out of the appointment, found myself agreeing to meet her the next day at loon. Noon!

I've watched the first half of The Joy Luck Club exactly six times by now. I didn't have time to screen the movie before I showed it to my first batch of kids, just fired up the DVD player and let it fly, trusting that the R rating was on account of adult language and similarly adult themes, not full-frontal nudity or graphic sex scenes or realistic depictions of human dismemberment. A high school history teacher of mine used to quote a phrase, one that he seemed to believe he'd coined himself: when you ASSUME, you make an ass out of U and ME. ASS, U, ME. Assume. I'm not sure why he directed this at us, or at me in particular. Perhaps I assumed more than your average high school freshman. But this time I assumed correctly, making an ASS out of neither U nor ME. The Joy Luck Club wasn't raunchy at all. I was relieved: a wholesome family film about Chinese mothers and their daughters, Rated M for Mahjongg. But what I hadn't considered beforehand was precisely the one thing that should've been foremost in my mind in the first place: namely, whether the film contained any questionable, er, um, content.

So about fifteen minutes in, just as I was beginning to doodle flying dinosaurs in the margins of my notebook, I heard something that jolted me bolt upright in my seat and sent my blood pressure shooting up into the red, way up into the Limbaugh Zone.

"That's when I remembered what we could never talk about," said the narrator. "My mother had once told me this strange story about what happened to her in China."

A crowd of displaced Chinese men and women appeared on screen, hobbling forlornly up a gravel road. Burning buildings in the background. Screaming children. Jesus. I felt like screaming, myself. Instead, I sat perfectly still and sweated all over my flying dinosaurs and wondered whether Spherion Temp Services would take me back. Stupid, Mr. Panda. Really stupid. Now you've done it. Now you've made an ass out of U, ME, and - well, just U and ME, it looks like. But U'll be lucky if U and ME even have an ASS left after THEY are done with U. I rose slightly from my chair. I would walk right across the room and skip the movie ahead ten minutes. That's what I would do. A problem with the DVD, I would chuckle. But that was too obvious. So I stalled there for a moment, halfway in my seat and halfway out of it. A Chinese mother left her twin babies on the side of the road. They lay there sleeping. And then the flashback evaporated. We were back in 1993, accompanying the old ladies to a church picnic. There had been no mention of - well, anything, really. And the babies, as it turned out, were still alive. And Mr. Panda, he was still alive, too - at least until the next flashback.

But I lucked out. And my students, to my surprise, enjoyed the movie. Or the first half of it, anyway. At the end of class, one of my students approached the computer wielding a USB stick.

"I want to copy movie," she said. She set to work. Paternally, I stepped forward to help, but this girl knew what she was doing. "Yes, I think this movie is very great. It address very deep, very serious topic. So I like it very much."

Mr. Panda, I thought to myself, you are on a roll. Narrowly averting international incidents day in and day out, yet still finding time to expose young Chinese college kids to the wonderful R-Rated world of human misery. Yes, the semester had been an unexpected success. In the beginning, my students didn't seem to understand a word I was saying. Stand up, I'd tell them, and everyone remained finger-trapped to their desks. But by the end, they could catch the asides that I often mumble to myself when nervous in front of 47 people. My students were wary at first, reluctant to trust the sermons I belted out from the pulpit about this schizophrenic and indefinably abstract entity we call America. But the kids warmed up to me after a while. They learned at least a handful of things that they won't forget anytime soon, I hope. Perhaps I blew no minds in the process, but I'd like to think that I inflated a few of them ever so slightly. And in retrospect, though I hadn't planned it, the semester seemed to possess a kind of internal symmetry: I opened with Lost in Translation and closed with The Joy Luck Club. Americans in Asia, Asians in America. The semester began with a text message from my supervisor - The class is start tomorrow! - and it ends on a similarly hectic lote - final exam, Saturday, loon!

There remains much to be frustrated with and much to improve upon. I walked into class this morning and asked the kids how they were doing.

"Nothing!" came the unanimous reply.
"Oh, no," I said, scrunching up my forehead like a surgeon who has just inadvertently killed his patient. "No, no. You are not nothing, my dears! You are something!"

And then there was the lecture I gave a couple weeks ago: "What Is An American?" Over the course of ninety minutes, I stripped (or tried to strip) away those pesky preconceptions my students have absorbed from years of gossip and Gossip Girls alike; that Americans are blonde, blue-eyed, hairy, rich, strong, tall, creative, grotesquely obese ... "What is an American?" I asked, wrapping things up. "An American is a human who lives in America." Some confused grunts, a laugh or two. I opened the floor for questions and a hand shot up in the far back of the room. A sophomore stood up and shifted nervously from foot to foot.

"But, Mr. Panda," she said, "how can Barack Obama be President of America if he is not American?"

This poor girl was no Birther. The Obama birth certificate controversy (not to mention the recent Tag Team imbroglio) hasn't quite made it out of the Bible Belt, and I doubt it will ever reach the Bamboo Belt. No, this girl was fundamentally puzzled as to how a black African could be President of the United States.

At the end of a long semester, and despite my best efforts, it remains inconceivable to many of my students that an American can be Dikembe Mutombo or Francis Fukuyama, Mr. Panda or Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, and that all those variously colored individuals are more or less equally American.

Perhaps cultural pluralism is an idea my students can entertain in principle, but it seems more fancy than fact to them. Sure, there exist in the world such wonders as Siamese twins, and four-leaf clovers, and black swans, and Chinese women who smoke cigarettes - but these are anomalies and not the norm. And in a country like China, the norm is the norm. The Chinese are Chinese, and Americans should be American. Like Mr. Panda. Or maybe a little more handsome than Mr. Panda. And would it hurt if he shaved every once in a while?

Sick of Hellos/Sick of Goodbyes

I returned home from the Carsick Cars show with six kuai and a crumpled wad of pornographic pamphlets to my name. On the walk home, I dropped two of those six kuai on a bottle of frozen yogurt and stealthily slipped the crumpled wad of massage brochures into a public trash can when no one was looking. Then, on my way up the stairs, I stumbled and fell, smashing the glass yogurt bottle in my right hand. At first, I was bereaved by the loss of yogurt, which pooled in a jiggling mass of off-white slime and started somersaulting down the stairs like a semisolid Slinky. Then I noticed the black blood spurting from my hand. Well, hot damn. Though I felt no pain, I sensed that time was of the essence and I took the stairs up two at a time.

"HAH-LOO!" called my neighbor as I approached. He nudged his son. "Uncle! Uncle!"
"Hah-loo, uncle," the kid murmured.
I waved and a wallop of blood splashed audibly to the floor. My neighbor gasped. The kid let out a yelp and ran back inside.
"OH MY GATT. ARE - ARE YOU OKAY?"
"Hao, hao," I said, smiling. "I just need to go inside and fix this."

I shut the door behind me and trotted across the living room, blood raining all over the dirty t-shirts that carpet my apartment floor. I stood for a moment hemorrhaging into the kitchen sink before I realized that I wasn't at all sure how to go about treating a wound of this nature. So I retired to my study, sat down in front of the computer and tried to access Google. It was mysteriously out of order for the moment, so I settled for Yahoo.

"How to treat a cut," I punched out with my left hand. But the search only yielded information on sanitizing envelope-related injuries. I glanced at my right hand and saw that the drizzling blood had already filled the better part of a nearby cup of milk tea.

"How to dress a wound," I typed. Scrapes, nicks, diaper rashes. "How to dress a severe wound," I typed. Stabbings, shootings, farm machinery mishaps. At long last, I was getting somewhere. Step one, the instructions read, wash the shrapnel from the wond [sic] with clean water. I returned to the sink and flipped on the tap. A torrent of rust juice came squirting out. No. I ransacked the apartment for a bottle of Nongfu Springs, finding naught but a single half-empty bottle of Nongfu Orange Juice. The wound instructions mentioned nothing about O.J., and the O.J. instructions mentioned nothing about wounds. So I slipped on my favorite blue hoodie, stashed my bloody hand in the kangaroo pouch, and made a dash for the nearest convenience store.

By the time I'd hoofed the fifteen minutes across campus, my sweater was already soaked through with ominous amounts of dark blood. I grew faint. A kind of giddy delirium blossomed in my brain. I began to hobble, then to stumble. And when I finally arrived at the bright lights of the university's strip of meat-related capitalism, I was suddenly reminded, as though I had forgotten, that I was still in China. Here came the HAH-LOO birds.

HAH-LOO! HAH-LOO!
I ignored them. They were college twerps, drunk and unemployed, and here I was, a 27-year-old laowai bleeding to death on a crowded street. And on a school night! The college twerps followed.
HAH-LOO! HAH-LOO!
I walked faster. Rivulets of blood trickled down the side of my jeans.
HEY! FOREIGNER! HAH-LOO! HAH-LOO!
Enough. I snapped. I stopped, turned around, and in the loudest voice I have ever yet mustered in my life, I shouted HAH-LOO!, HAH-LOO!, HAH-LOO! But I did not win the effect I had hoped for. The college kids were triumphant. We got a big one this time! They turned and ran giggling into the fetid Nanchong night.

If nothing else, the misspent adrenaline kept me conscious long enough to complete my mission. I bought two big bottles of Nongfu Springs from my usual convenience store clerk. She raised an eyebrow as I navigated the whole transaction with my left hand.

"No beer?" she asked.
"Oh, no," I said. "No, no. No beer."

She raised a second eyebrow. Then she asked if I wanted to play with her tortoiseshell kitten, as I usually do.

"Oh, heh. Maybe next ti - "
HAH-LOO! a man shouted in my face. I turned and walked out the door.

I followed the trail of Panda blood all the way back home. I was amazed at and somewhat proud of the amount of gore and yogurt I had left behind in the stairwell. I returned to the sink and doused the wound in Nongfu Springs. The water seemed to sizzle upon contact. I winced and retreated to my bedroom. I flipped the light on and the bulb exploded. In darkness, I fumbled through heaps of unwashed laundry and stacks of unread books for my Peace Corps Medical Kit. I unclasped the plastic hasps with my left hand and groped around in the dark. A dimebag of Un-Aspirin. A spritzer of bug spray. Sunscreen. Antihistamine. Nasal decongestant. Oral antidehydration salts. Condoms. More condoms. Tube after tube of Astroglide. A pair of surgical scissors. I shuddered. Then, finally, I came across what I'd been groping for: a bottle of Betasept, some sterile gauze pads, and a roll of Ace Bandage Wraps.

I cleansed the wound once more in the healing waters of Nongfu Spring, then I attacked it with Betasept. The stuff wasted no time in getting down to business: my field of vision went white and I found myself desecrating every religious personage known to Christendom. Then the pain ebbed away and I calmly wrapped the wound, humming a John Coltrane/Johnny Hartman tune as I worked. Done and done. En route to my study, I surveyed the scene. Man alive, man. Like they'd filmed Saw 7 in my living room. Then I sat back down at the computer and, I don't know, vanity Googled myself or something.

The next day, using my gory right hand as a prop, I successfully taught my students the words yogurt, clumsy, and dumbass. On Tuesday, my neighbor invited me in for watermelon. I flopped down on his couch and made an earnest effort to devour three kilograms of my least favorite fruit. My neighbor squinted at my hand the whole time and finally asked me how I'd hurt myself. For want of a Chinese vocabulary, I went the Tina Turner route and told him that I'd fallen down the stairs. He nodded dubiously. Then, after I'd spit little black seeds all over his parquet floor, apologizing after each errant shot, I stood up and thanked him for the hospitality. And the watermelon. I extended my hand. He bowed and squeezed the hell out of it and a jet of black blood shot across the room.

"Oh my Gatt!"
"Jesus," I said. "My bad. Sorry. I -"
"No, is okay!"
"Man. I'm really sorry. I just - "
"Is nothing, nothing!"

My sloppily dressed wound healed with a quickness that was nothing short of miraculous. By Wednesday, a garden variety Band-Aid got the job done and my students no longer asked questions. By Thursday morning, I could do push-ups again without having to mop the floor afterward. I did four of them, then I checked my email and was pleasantly surprised to find all sorts of messages from my friends back home. "Jeff Hines, you old dog!" I crooned as I clicked on the first email and waited eagerly for it to unfurl. The words materialized on screen: Jason died today. I blinked and clicked on to the next message, from my long-lost Beasley: I don't know how to put this ... surgery ... complications ... I sat very still for a while. I got up to change my Band-Aid. Then I sat back down. And the day went by in time lapse.

My old friend Jason had passed away. I had known him since the seventh grade. He was one of the charter members of our high school commune of misfits, pseudo-punks, and apostate Mormons. At an age when I was seeping miserably into the late-90's janglepop oeuvre of Counting Crows and Matchbox 20, Jason introduced me to Sparklehorse, Camper Van Beethoven, Pink Floyd, and a long list of iconoclasts I still listen to today, while my moth-eaten janglepop collection decomposes in an attic somewhere in suburban Nebraska. Jason had survived open-heart surgery as a child, had heart problems all his life, was a regular at the Offutt Air Force Base emergency room. So his death didn't exactly hit me out of the blue. But when you're young, or young enough to believe that you are young, everything hits you out of the blue.

For several hours, not a single articulate thought formed in my head. All was blank. But after a while, as the sun sank below the vacant 32-story apartment building on the hill, the wheels started turning again, and I began to ask the sort of questions I imagine most people ask upon the loss of an old friend. When did I see him last? What did we talk about? What was the last thing he said to me? I struggled to remember. Was it ... no, couldn't have been. But maybe ... Then - ah, yes. It must have been a year ago. Early summer in Nebraska. It was a UFC party, a suitably geeky occasion, at Jonathon Payne's house. You and Beasley showed up at Payne's doorstep around ten with a sixer of Old Style. You hadn't seen Payne in years. You knew him as his mid-pubescent Trekkie incarnation - Coke bottle glasses and socks with sandals, a bowl cut and a dirtstache - so you were surprised and more than a little depressed to walk in and find Payne surrounded by a throng of disproportionately hot platinum blondes in haltertops.

"Oh, hey guys," Payne called. "Beer's in the fridge."

Then he absconded to the basement with his harem. Giggles bubbled up through the air vents. You and Beasley sat there in the empty living room and shot the bull, idly watching men kick the shit out of each other on the flatscreen in HD. Together, you polished off 66.666% of the sixer. Then the doorbell rang. Payne did not come upstairs to answer it. You were surprised to find Jason at the door. You greeted him with a tallboy. Then the three of you sat there for hours talking about, well, music, what else?

It wasn't such a bad last memory, when I thought about it. I began to feel less guilty about Jason's death. More selfish concerns came to mind: Jason was 28 and I am 27. He had heart problems. Once upon a time, I had heart problems. I lit a cigarette and glared at the pack. Stupid. Jason was the first of my friends to pass away. All my teenaged and twentysomething delusions of immortality suddenly seemed as ramshackle as a Council Bluffs patio. But I am young, I told myself. I am 27, which is still young. And yet ... I snubbed out my cigarette in a rice bowl. Stupid. I needed to get out of the apartment. Take a walk, go for a run. Something. I needed to get out. So I slipped on my favorite blood-encrusted blue hoodie and scurried out of the apartment.

Ah, yes. As though I'd forgotten: China. On my way out the door, I was greeted by a couple of two-year-olds who pointed at me and shouted lao-wai, lao-wai, lao-wai! Jesus, I thought, does it begin that early? These kids can't even walk, can hardly speak, and yet they sure as shooting know a foreign devil when they see one. I could imagine their parents, holding up flash cards at the dinner table. What animal is this? It's a tiger! What animal is this? It's a dog! And what animal is this? (A blurry Polaroid of Zach Galifianakis) It's a laowai!

I walked. I orbited the university's manmade lake, its nocturnal beasts silent and sleeping in the late evening sun. Up until eleven o'clock, there are young couples making out on the benches along the lake. Then the young couples scurry home to beat curfew and the nocturnal beasts come alive and the night starts to sound like Merriweather Post Pavilion, an album I'm sure Jason enjoyed. An album I enjoy. "Foreigner," murmured a Chinese couple as they passed. "Chinese couple," I said.

I circled the manmade lake for a while, then I trekked the five miles to the city proper. It had rained the day before, so the shoddily lain sidewalk tiles belched up mud and live toads with every step. Then the sidewalk ran out and I walked along the shoulder of a two-lane highway for several miles, the cabbies executing kamikaze lane changes with inebriated nonchalance, the dump trucks billowing black chalk and screeching their horns as they clattered past. The air was metallic, the noise deafening. But it felt good to be outside, to be alive and walking, to be touched however feebly by the sidewards glance of the Sichuanese sun.

When I'd arrived downtown, I decided to buy some cleaning products at the supermarket. It seemed like an opportune time to tidy up my apartment. To start anew. And maybe I'd buy a six-pack of Carlsberg and dump one of the cans out in my bloody sink, in memoriam. And to sterilize the sink, perhaps. I checked my backpack at the front desk and I grabbed a shopping basket. As soon as I'd passed through the turnstile, a couple of college girls shouted foreigner! and started following me.

They followed at a close distance, no more than four feet away, pointing and laughing all the while. For a full five minutes, I pretended to be fascinated with a women's deodorant display in the hopes that they would find something better to do. But I was the best show in town. Horrified, I realized they could watch me for hours. So I wandered all the way to the opposite end of the supermarket. They gave chase. Then I executed a military about-face, the one my dad taught me as a kid, and wandered all the way back to the women's deodorant display. And there the girls were, four feet behind me, pointing and laughing, laughing and laughing. Perhaps in another part of the world, I might've been flattered - but I know China well enough by now to understand that when a girl laughs at me in public, it isn't because of the rakish figure that I cut, but because I am an oafish-looking foreigner. I possess about as much sex appeal in China as Louie Anderson, which may be an over- or understatement, depending on your opinion of Louie Anderson.

I hid out in the tea aisle for a moment before jetting off to the toilet paper aisle. Then, in the pest repellent aisle, I removed and replaced several cannisters of Raid while the girls looked on and laughed. I wanted to pull my beard out, but what could be done? Finally, I walked very deliberately to the most secluded corner of the adult beverage aisle, turned to the girls, and asked, in Chinese, "Why are you following me?"

The college girls acted so dumbfounded that for an instant I almost believed that they had never been following me in the first place. But no, I reminded myself, these girls had followed me for fifteen minutes, had laughed at me and mocked me as I struggled through the already odious task of shopping. And they were women, more or less, these girls. So I was justified in asserting myself just this once, wasn't I? I mean, wasn't I? I was an adult, after all. They were adults. A crowd had gathered to watch the confrontation unfold, and I knew already whose side they were on.

"Why are you following me?" I asked once more, trying to weigh my voice down with paternal authority, only to hear it come warbling from my larynx like a prolonged, high-pitched blast of flatulence. The girls trembled with newly acquired innocence. The crowd glared at me.

"I am a human being," I said unconvincingly. "You are human beings. I came here to buy things. You came here to buy things. So let's buy things!"

My appeal to capitalism did not seem to win anyone over, not right away.

"But please don't follow me," I went on. "I've had a bad day, and it's very annoying to be followed and laughed at."

The girls did not answer, offended as they were by my brash behavior.

"Very annoying," I said, and walked away.

Upon my departure, the crowd clucked their collective tongue and offered condolences to those poor college girls for having suffered the verbal abuse of an obviously deranged and profoundly hairy/sweaty foreigner. But, I thought to myself, it was entirely true that I had had a bad day. And the girls had been following me. And a Chinese man my age would have responded with at least ten times as much hostility. I had merely asserted myself, politely and in a voice that was so soft and feeble as to warrant even more laughter. And surely a man who deals with xenophobic taunting and less-than-admiring admirers day in and day out is entitled to one or two self-assertion cards a year? I mean, isn't he? It was no use. I could not prop myself up. As I often do after asserting myself, I sank into a troth of self-loathing guilt.

But no matter, I said. It's behind you. And so are the college girls, watching and laughing from a safe distance of twenty feet. I wound up buying several bottles of bleach, a 24-pack of toilet paper, a pair of rubber gloves, and a six-pack of Carlsberg. The cashier, like almost all the supermarket employees I encounter in Nanchong, turned out to be one of my former students. She waved as I approached and called me by my Chinese name, Pan Da, which is the password that unlocks my civility. I brightened suddenly, asked her how she was doing, how long she worked every day, why she wasn't teaching Engl - no, that question was off limits. She gave me only short answers and didn't look up at me once, either because her manager was watching, or because she was more than fascinated by the array of sanitizing and brain-sanitizing goods I had purchased.

On my way out, I was very nearly peed on by a baby who, with the blessing of her nearby mother, suddenly decided to pop a squat on the floor, right there in the doorway of a Rolex shop. I couldn't help but look. It is an image that promises to endure in my brain even after a million Carlsbergs, China summed up in a single stomach-churning, heart-rending tableau: a baby, squatting and copiously urinating in the doorway of a Rolex retailer. And meanwhile, China sped past at 1.3 billion RPM. The crowds swirled around the baby, then instinctively stepped over the puddle she left behind, stopping only to crane their necks and scream out their friendly greetings and salutations at the oafish-looking laowai who was by then a mere hairy speck on the fluorescent horizon.