There was a loud CRACK! as my head slammed into the steel luggage rack, and the passengers in the poky train cabin turned to glare at me with amazed concern, as if I had just been crushed by a falling tree. I sat down on the folding window seat, rubbing my skull, which throbbed in chrysanthemum-shaped waves, and my phone bleated with a message. I pulled the phone from my pocket and focused on the little screen. 

“Where are you?” her message read.

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Fújiàn Province is a polyglottous block of sub-tropical mountains and coastline, about the size of Pennsylvania, across the strait from Táiwān and a half day’s drive east of Guǎngzhōu. The people in Fújiàn speak Mandarin with a loose, relaxed feel, and their customs and local languages change every 20 miles or so. Young people in Fújiàn traditionally seek to marry someone from near their home village, because to marry outside would create endless difficulties for both families: different marriage rites, different family structure, different dialects . . . 

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On my second morning in Sānmíng, Allen, the English teacher who served as my liaison at the university, picked me up in his black Volkswagen to take me to meet my students. It was a hot autumn morning; the sun was already dazzling at 8 a.m.; the droning of the cicadas was ubiquitous and loud, like a never-ending fire alarm. As we drove across campus in Allen’s car, I asked if the students would be able to understand my English. Allen assured me that they could, as long as I spoke slowly and clearly . . .

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I was one of the thousands of lǎowài who flock to China every year with no idea how to teach and a blithe confidence that the teaching will somehow just work itself out. I had tried to read up on how to teach English in China, but it was hard to find one book that was definitively useful—not to mention that learning to teach is not something you can do with books alone. I needed a training course or a mentor, but neither was forthcoming. The only directive Allen or anyone at the university gave me was, “Make the students talk.”

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One evening during my second week of classes, two of my best students, Ann and Catherine, visited me at my apartment to chat. They were young teachers from the countryside who had come to the university as part of a continuing education program for primary school teachers from Dàtián, one of Sānmíng’s outer counties . . .