Prologue: A Mysterious Coincidence

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.

I was waiting to depart from Xiàmén, an island city in southern China. I began typing on the phone’s plastic buttons. “I’m in Xiamen. Where are you?” 

Her reply came in problematic English. “I’m in Xiamen too. What do you want to do here?” she wrote.

“I came here to travel,” I wrote, being slightly evasive.

The phone lit up and buzzed and jingled, and I picked up. Without saying hello, Meimei (pronounced like the fifth month, twice) asked in a flat, managerial tone, “Did you come here to see a girl?” 

“No, I came to see the city,” I replied—not a lie.

“When did you get here?” she asked in Chinese. 

“Two days ago,” I replied in beginner’s Chinese.  

“You’ve already been here for two days? What have you been doing for two days?” 

“I did some shopping and sightseeing.”

“You were with a girl.”

“No, I was by myself the whole time,” I answered—a lie indeed.

“Don’t go back to Sānmíng,” she commanded, with more self-assurance than I had when ordering cream in my coffee. “Stay with me tonight.”

I paused, for a very brief moment, to think. I had taken Meimei on a few dates, but I had no idea whether she was really interested in me, or just using me to practice English. After about a month of casual but fruitless dating, I had given up on the idea of having a real relationship with her, and had taken this trip to Xiàmén to get my mind off her. Now, just when I was beginning to imagine that I wouldn’t see or hear from her again, she had appeared in a city I had never before visited—at the same time as I, when I hadn’t told anyone where I was.  

We were nothing alike: She dressed like a Barbie doll—wide shiny belt, impractical skirt, high heels, and wavy hair with a reddish-dyed tint. I never used a comb, and my wardrobe consisted solely of jeans and untucked shirts. She was an ambitious Chinese socialite who wanted to make money and get out of China. I was an English teacher a few years out of college living paycheck to paycheck. We were travelers—walking, talking stereotypes—equally set on our totally opposite destinations.

I told her that I would call her back, hung up, and stared out the window for a minute.

Really, I didn’t have to think much: I was 26 and had been celibate for eight months, which was making me wild and crazy, like a cat stuffed into a pillowcase. Before I had really evaluated the situation, I grabbed my bag and hopped off the train, explaining to the steward that I had changed my mind and wasn’t going home. 

As I walked away, I told myself: You can only be young and virile and invited to spend the night with a pretty girl in a hotel so many times. Also, I hadn’t been in China long—about six months. I knew little about China, and even less about Chinese women. So I had no idea how much trouble I was setting myself up for.  

I arrived at the ticket counter and got a refund before the train departed, and hailed a cab to the address that Meimei had sent to my phone. I settled into the taxi’s front seat and rolled down the window, letting the warm spring air hit me in the face and suppressing a laugh at how crazy I was feeling. What was wrong with me? Was it the fact that I was miles and miles from anyone who knew me, and two continents and an ocean away from anyone who really knew me? Or was it that life in China sometimes felt like a game, where even decisions that you suspected were wrong could seem unassailably right? 

It was pointless to worry. I had made my choice. I popped a stick of gum into my mouth, swiped on some deodorant (it had been a couple of days since I had showered, and I was viscerally smelly), and prepared to be as charming as possible under the terrible conditions I had created for myself.

Chapter One: Fujian

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. Accents are wildly different throughout most of China, but almost nowhere are dialects as distinct and mutually unintelligible as in Fújiàn. Hence, most Chinese people from other provinces admit to having trouble understanding the Fujianese—both their Mandarin and their mannerisms. 

Fújiàn is famous for tea, sweet and sour pork, and shétóu—“snake heads”—human traffickers, who have helped create the Fujianese diaspora that spreads around the world, from Omaha to Okinawa. The Fujianese, like the Chinese in general, are known for their business acumen, their sensitive-and-genial-but-not-entirely-trustworthy characters, and their willingness to go just about anywhere and do just about anything to make money. Hence, they are everywhere: a generation ago, Chinese immigrants in most of the western world were from Hong Kong or Guǎngdōng; now they are increasingly from Fújiàn. 

Fújiàn is not rich (with the arguable exception of Fúzhōu and Xiàmén, the province’s two major cities, which are pretty glitzy on their good days) although it is one of the better-off provinces per capita in all of China. Fujianese people enjoy seafood, mah-jong, and cigarettes. They are friendly, curious, and law-abiding. They love to make small talk, and eschew any subject that might make anyone within a hundred miles uncomfortable. They pride themselves on being wěiwǎn—indirect or tactful—which is often a good way to be. But it can make them hard to know. 

There is actually not all that much to do in Fújiàn for outsiders, which is why relatively few people from outside China go there. There is no great river, or mountain, or museum, or wall, or anything, really—at least from the perspective of an outsider seeing China for the first time. There are minor peaks, minor cities, minor historical landmarks, and almost 40 million people who will probably not change history very much. There are thousands of factories coiling in and out of mountain valleys, old rice paddies left fallow, and rivers of people flowing out of the countryside and into the cities—rapidly, but slower than before. Fújiàn doesn’t feel like a place where history is being made, although history did happen there, a thousand years ago, when Quánzhōu was one of the largest seaports in the world. They called it Zayton, which formed the origin of the word satin.

 Máo Zédōng came from Húnán, two provinces over. Dèng Xiǎopíng came from Sìchuān, in the west. Zhōu Ēnlái, Jiāng Zémín, and Hú Jǐntāo were all born in Jiāngsū, several hundred miles north. And, although Xí Jìnpíng worked in Fújiàn for almost a decade, he is actually from northern China. Most of the people in Fújiàn have never been to Běijīng. (I asked.) The most important person ever to come from Fújiàn is Zhū Xī, the Neo-Confucian philosopher—who was actually from a village in Sānmíng—but he died about 800 years ago. The extremely attractive movie star, Yáo Chén, is from Quánzhōu, in southern Fújiàn, but she left to be famous when she was about 14. 

Fújiàn is evidently the kind of place that people leave, if they ever wind up there at all. When I first arrived, that obscurity held great significance for me. I have always been drawn to people and places that are neglected, forgotten or otherwise arbitrarily overlooked. I enjoy the lack of pretension of the people in such a place: in Fújiàn, there’s no reason to act like you’re anything but you. 

Until a few days before I left for Fújiàn, I couldn’t have pointed out the province on a map, and I had only recently heard of the capital, Fúzhōu. After I got to Fújiàn, I realized I was lucky: I had landed in a pleasant, safe, comfortable town in a relative backwater. There were few English speakers, and everybody seemed to know Mandarin. Sānmíng—city population about 300,000—is a steel mill town, so many of the city’s residents are emigrants and do not speak the local dialects, hence their Mandarin is more standard than most parts of the province. That meant that I had at least some odds of learning Chinese. 

Two of the first Chinese characters I learned were the name of the city in which I now lived: Sān (三) was easy; it meant three. Then there was míng (明), the characters for sun and moon conjoined in one character meaning “bright” or “brightness.” The name eventually became a mantra to me. Three brightnesses, three things to achieve, whose purpose I couldn’t explain but whose importance I knew instinctively: learn Chinese, understand China, and try, knowing that failure is always a gravid risk, to fall in love. 

This story is about that mission—the pursuit of those three goals. It’s tangentially about Fújiàn and Sānmíng—a microcosm of a society that is both changed and stuck. It’s about what it’s like to be straddling two cultures and dealing with the competing pull of two homes. It’s about a group of students and teachers at a university in the middle of nowhere. It’s about a love affair with a language that is as difficult as it is beautiful. It’s about the small handful of friends, mostly women, who taught me that there are many things harder than learning Chinese. 

I arrived in Sanming University on October 9, 2009. There were lush farms rolling away from the college on one side, and green-carpeted mountain ranges on the other. There was a school-wide P.A. system broadcasting the university’s radio station, which I didn’t understand, since it was in Chinese. There were columns of students stretching through campus—slightly greasy haired, slouching with boredom, lolling in the heat. There was strange food that I pretended to love, full of bones and oil and salt. There were lithe, black-haired goddesses everywhere. I was in China, and I still had all my extremities, and everything was okay.

I had no idea that one day years later it would all seem so familiar. 

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Chapter Two: Seventy Percent

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. 

He seemed to sense that I was feeling anxious—not just about meeting the students for the first time, but about everything—so he told me about his relationship with Coca-Cola. He drank Coke all the time. The Chinese word for Coke was Kěkǒu-Kělè—a word that, like most Chinese transliterations, almost but not quite captured the original English. He told me that the students called him Allen Coke because he drank so much of it.

We pulled up in back of the building—a crumbling, five-story eyesore known as the teacher education department. Allen stopped the car and killed the engine. “This is it,” he said. He unscrewed the red cap of his cola and took a sip. “Now I try to drink less Coke, because it’s not very healthy.” I nodded in appreciation—but my body felt light and weak, as if I had just spent a few days swimming in a giant tub of Fluff. “Ready?” Allen said. I looked at the door’s handle. It suddenly seemed daunting and dangerous, like a power tool that your dad insists you use with no instruction. Pull the handle, Will. Open the door.

I was wearing jeans and a checked red and black shirt that I tucked in for the occasion of entering the classroom. I had no idea whether I was dressed appropriately or what I was going to say when I got in front of the students. “How long should I talk to them?” I asked as we walked inside.

“Ten minutes is okay,” he said. 

Ten minutes seemed inconceivably vast and uninviting, like a Walmart parking lot when you have no idea where you left your car. I followed Allen into the building. I told myself: high energy, high energy. (I figured this is what entertainers must tell themselves before they perform.) I had a vague idea that teachers are supposed to speak loudly and be physically expressive, which are things I couldn’t do. I didn’t even know how to smile for photographs. 

As Allen and I climbed the stairs to the classroom, passing students who turned to gawk and giggle as we walked by, one panicked thought rolled through my head. If it were a free-verse poem, it would look like this:

I am going to walk in there and the

students are going to know immediately

that I am a boring idiot. 

I will talk to them for zero seconds

Before my head will explode of humiliation.

I suck at everything. Why am I here?

Maybe I’ll get lucky and die before the students notice me,

And no one will feel sad or mourn or anything,

Not because I was a bad guy,

But because they would somehow just know

That given a choice between this anxiety, and oblivion,

Anyone would unquestioningly choose the latter.

Is this what alcoholics feel?

Allen led me to a door in a quiet, dimly lit hallway with sunlight streaming in at the end. There was a moment of silence as he opened the door, and then a loud squealing noise as if a bomb had just gone off. Then I realized that the students were clapping their hands and beaming and cheering, as if my arrival were important. 

There are few natural reactions to a whole room of people cheering for you, except to bow and wave and blow kisses, or sing a song and break into a soft-shoe, and I wasn’t about to do those things. I stood uncomfortably at the front of the room and a willowy, pale girl stood up and handed me a bouquet of flowers. “Welcome to China. I am Susan,” she said weightily, as if bestowing knighthood upon me. 

I talked at the students for four minutes. I told them my name, made a lame joke about my surname and making shoes (which they actually laughed at), and told them how old I was and where I was from. They were so un-self-conscious and sweet it made me blush: they let out a collective “Waaaah” at almost everything I said. I glanced at Allen as I spoke, looking for some kind of encouragement—but it was clear from his expression that he wasn’t even listening. 

When I ran out of things to say, I told them I would see them again soon, waved goodbye, and said, “That’s all for now. See you next time.”

“SEE YOU!” they cheered back in unison, startling me. 

I felt a little bit like a cat that has just been thrown into a swimming pool—traumatized, jumpy, adrenaline-high. If somebody had come and tried to dry me off with a towel, I would have been able to run 100 miles an hour. But it had been fun to have 50 college students—girls at that, only a few years younger than I was—listening to me speak as though I possessed the charm and smooth boyish handsomeness of a young Leonardo DiCaprio. If all of our classes were going to be like this, teaching was going to be fun.

Of course, their reaction was only 70 percent genuine, 30 percent performance. Chinese college students know how to flatter. It’s a necessary survival tactic in an education system in which class sizes are huge, teachers undercompensated, and everybody is pretty much just a number. There was also a cultural element to the reaction: I was a visitor, and a foreigner, so for reasons of cultural and perhaps even national pride the students had to give me an overwhelmingly positive first impression. If I had walked into the classroom wearing cowboy boots, leopard-print spandex, and a yellow satin cape, their reaction would have been precisely the same.

In the years to come, I would see this interaction hundreds of times between groups of Chinese people and foreigners new to China. Over time, it started to seem a little creepy: if the foreigners were tight-lipped and refused to reward their Chinese hosts’ enthusiasm, they seemed cold and impassive; if they smiled and laughed and bought the Chinese greeting wholesale, they seemed naive and narcissistic. It was a bit like watching someone from New York City meet someone from Michigan. I never really figured out which way of dealing with such greetings seemed best, so I aimed for the middle: a modest smile, a polite nod, allowing myself to be 70 percent flattered—kind of like how Máo Zédōng was 70 percent right. 

But in the beginning I was blind to it all—the complexity, the subtlety, the intersecting currents of genuineness and performance, real human feeling and cultural obligation. I stepped off the lectern, Allen nodded and smiled politely—Okay, let’s get on with it, he seemed to be thinking—and we walked out of the classroom together. 

This is how I knew that the students’ reaction was at least 70 percent genuine: as we closed the door behind us, the sound of 50 students’ voices roared riotously—and it seemed to me, happily—to life.  

Chapter Three: Obligatory Chapter In Which Author Realizes He Doesn’t Know The First Thing About Teaching

As previously noted, 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.”

I told Allen that the thing I needed most in my new apartment—more than water (which was broken), more than a toilet (which was also broken, and caked in brown guck)—was internet. A few days after I arrived, a tech guy delivered a computer to my apartment, a couple of students helped me navigate the Chinese-language operating system, and I was online. Problem solved… but not really. 

The internet is wonderful for specific, useless things: videos of people getting hurt and/or falling out of boats, extensive information on all the kinds of cancer that you probably have, and meaningless news about what Hollywood celebrities are doing with their lives. (It’s also the world’s number one purveyor of porn, but I assumed that the university was monitoring my internet traffic, so I didn’t dare look at any for at least two months.) But it sucks at most substantive things, such as helping people get along with others, making life simpler, and teaching me how to do my job. 

The textbook Allen had given me was a flimsy blue book called Oral Workshop: Reproduction. It had been published in 1990 and updated in 2002, but it looked like it had been written in the 1940s. The first chapter was a dialog between a man and a woman, with a creepy little Kafkaesque ink drawing above the chapter head. After meeting my students for the first time, I went back to my apartment (which had apparently been previously occupied by coal miners, because everything was covered in soot), sat on my sofa, and read this: 

TEXT B

Could I Speak to Jim, Please?

A: Hello, 332440.

B: Oh hello, Sally. This is Dave Thomson here. Could I speak to Jim please?

A: I’m afraid he’s not in at the moment, Dave. He went out about an hour ago and he’s not back yet.

B: Any idea when he might be back?

A: Well, he shouldn’t be long. He said he was just going to get some paint. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s stopped off at the pub on the way back. 

B: O.K. well , tell him I’ve called, will you, and I’ll try again later.

A: All right. Goodbye, Dave.

B: Thanks then Sally. Goodbye.

The language was painfully stiff and in places just bizarre. I had never known a world in which people recited their phone numbers when answering calls. And why was Jim stopping at the pub on his way home from getting paint? Were my students supposed to infer that foreigners are willing to get drunk anytime, even in the middle of construction projects? 

I threw the book aside and went back to the computer. I had nothing to do for the rest of the day except plan my first class. I figured that if I focused on classes all afternoon and evening, I would eventually come up with something. I had no printer, so I couldn’t print off any materials for the students. I had to think of a lesson plan that would require only a blackboard, and occupy 90 minutes of class time. 

In the end, I settled on a highly innovative activity called “Introduce Yourself” and a writing exercise, and sometime after 1 a.m. I went to bed. I tossed and turned for most of the night—I was still jet-lagged, exhausted during the day and unable to sleep at night. In the morning when sunlight poured through my tattered blinds, I got up, took a sponge-bath (still no water, and I hadn’t showered in five days) and went to class. 

For my first class, everything went wrong, including most of the things I didn’t know could go wrong. I expected that the classroom would be the same as the one I had seen the previous day: fifty chairs, movable desks, and a blackboard. Instead, it was an “electronic classroom” with desks installed in the floors and a computer at every seat, many of which were broken. The computers that weren’t broken were turned on, and students were already watching movies on them. On every student’s desk rested a textbook that I had never seen before. (Allen had neglected to tell me that this course had two textbooks, not one.) 

On top of that, the room was enormous, so most of the students couldn’t hear me. I started explaining “Introduce Yourself,” shouting as loud as I could. The students glanced at me and went back to their movies. 

“Introduce Yourself” was simple enough: Each student was supposed to say her name, her hometown, and three things about herself; two of those things would be true and one would be a lie. The other students then had to guess which one was a lie. 

But some of the students didn’t have English names, and wanted my help choosing one. That was fine, except that they hated my suggestions and couldn’t explain why. Then, many students refused to say a made-up fact about themselves, and the ones who did say a made-up fact about themselves made it so obvious that nobody around them even cared to guess which one it was. Of course, I didn’t know which one was a lie, because I am a stupid American.

Finally, Chinese students’ English names are often impossible to remember or even understand. Some of the English names from the roster of that day’s class were Apple, Head, Merchell, Pepper, Synel, Vailing, Quiet, Jolice, Abner, Dinky, Snail, Khaki, Cameal, Silvio, Roning, and Living (all women). Asking someone’s name in China is a delicate matter, requiring finesse and indirectness, and it’s generally considered rude to repeatedly ask someone’s name. So the students gave me exasperated looks when I couldn’t understand their names and asked them to spell them aloud. 

It took almost an hour to complete the “introductions” activity, including a five-minute break in the middle—about 45 minutes longer than it should have taken. I ended the hour-and-a-half lesson by giving them time to write about themselves and what they wanted to learn in my class. When the bell rang, they gave me their papers and rushed out of the classroom to join the crush of students in the dining halls. I stuffed the composition papers into my bag, and walked back to my apartment without getting lunch. 

Back on my sooty sofa, I took out the papers and leafed through them. Most of the students had written the same thing: they wanted to learn more words, improve their grammar, learn about American culture, and improve their oral English. Some admitted they didn’t like English and just wanted to learn how to be primary school teachers. The only “takeaway” from my first-ever English class was that I couldn’t do “Introduce Yourself” ever again.

I had more classes the next day. I stayed up late that night, trying to think of something to teach, and came up with nothing. All I had was the book: Oral Workshop: Reproduction. I read the first few passages over and over, writing discussion questions in the margins. I realized that I was just as clueless about how to teach from the book as I was about how to make my own lessons. I had set some big goals for myself in China—learn how to teach an English class, learn Chinese, become adept at life in China—and I was not feeling very confident in my ability to achieve any of them. 

Some people are undaunted by a task like moving to China. Those people are obviously way tougher than me, and are probably capable of doing awesome and meaningful things, like war journalism and driving manual transmission cars. The difference between them and me is our relative capacities, or lacks thereof, for self-doubt. They probably don’t have it—or if they do, they have figured out some way of managing it. For them, I imagine that doubt is a helpful and friendly little squirrel in a top hat and tuxedo that reminds them when they are about to do something bad. For me, self-doubt was something I dealt with every time I opened my mouth or put on my jacket—a man-sized electric jellyfish that I carried on my head, which let me relax only when it sensed that I might soon die of fright.  

On this, my third day in China, it seemed thoroughly possible that I wouldn’t be able to hack it. Another few weeks of this, and I would probably be a quivering blob of anxiety, and my parents would have to get on a plane to escort me back to New Hampshire, where they would have no choice but to check me into some sort of treatment facility where I would wear diapers and play “Go Fish.” 

I had only one way of dealing with the jellyfish, a method that originated in my childhood in New Hampshire, when my mom took me on hikes in the White Mountains. Back then, she’d drive us to a trailhead and tell me that we were going to hike for eight hours, and I would think, You’re fucking crazy, lady. 

But as I got older and started to like hiking, I learned the key to enjoying a walk in the woods: Don’t look up. If you think about where you’re planning to end up, or how long the enterprise will take, the whole thing seems absurdly drawn-out and your legs feel impossibly fat and weak. So it’s important to keep your goals carefully circumscribed—Keep your head down; don’t look at the mountaintop—until the rhythm of walking, the smell of the trees, and the sound of the wind takes over the senses, and your brain’s commercial-jet-engine anxiety dims to a manageable droning. 

China’s smells and sounds were far less soothing than a forest or a mountain. But I gave myself the same goal: Don’t look up. Tonight, go to sleep. In the morning, go teach your classes. It doesn’t matter yet if your teaching is shit; it only matters that you get through these first few weeks without going AWOL. 

I slept terribly for the first few nights, and I spent one long morning in a panic, waiting for sunrise and questioning what I had done with my life. But as time went by I felt better, and stopped worrying about my far-away goals, and just did what was in front of me. That made it easier to relax and learn. 

Eventually, the jellyfish more or less went away on his own.

Chapter Four: Mothers

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. It would have been unusual, and verging on inappropriate, to invite two younger undergraduate students to my apartment in the evening, but Ann and Catherine were about my age, and married with children. Their life experience made them way more mature than my 18-year-old undergraduate students—obviously, more mature than me, too. 

Case in point: When they visited, my apartment was still as filthy as when I had moved in. Everything was covered in dust and grime, there were rust stains in the tub and toilet, and a layer of grit covered the kitchen counters. The place must have sat vacant for months before I arrived, and in Sānmíng dust accumulated quickly. The factories downtown pumped out huge clouds of smoke that flowed down the Shāxī (pronounced “Sha-shee”) River valley and blanketed Sanming University. Also, the villagers burned garbage outside the school gates. Sānmíng’s air quality was about as good as the dust bag of an old vacuum cleaner. Hence, an empty apartment quickly became a very dirty apartment. 

A few days after Ann and Catherine visited, Ann sent me an email: 

Dear Will

I’m very pleased that we can have conversation and go shopping with you, I found that I have more confidence to learn English now. I really can’t believe that I can speak to you so much words with my poor English, Even though that has lots of mistakes, but I’m using it!

We know, you have put a lot of effort into our English course, and you live here alone, So we really would like to help you for something that we can do, We think your home is a little untidy. As a man, Maybe you have not enough time, and you can’t do the housework so well. Next weekend, We won’t go home, so Catherine, Cindy and I plan to tidy the house for you, If we do that, Maybe it can make you more comfortable, and we can offer more chances to talk to you for ourselves, I think we can learn more from the conversation, Of course, We’ll wait for your respond.

Fresh rat droppings had been appearing on the floor of my apartment every morning—once, I woke up to find a small puddle of sticky rat piss on my computer’s keyboard, with a raisin-sized special delivery next to it—and the wall in the living room was home to a huge, grotesque patch of black mold. The filth was whining in the back of my brain like a dentist’s drill every day, accompanied by a jackhammer of self-censure: Why isn’t your apartment clean yet, Will? Two weeks isn’t enough time to pick up a mop? Huh, Will?? 

But I had no experience with moldy walls or rat excrement. So a few days after getting Ann’s email, I sheepishly called her and admitted that yes, it would be great if she could help me clean. That weekend, Ann and her roommates showed up at my door just before sundown, rags and buckets in tow. 

The mothers were tremendously sweet. Most of them taught in deeply rural areas, where subsistence farming was common and there were almost no frills—few cars, no buses, no restaurants or glitzy shopping malls. Hence, they were excited to be back in college, studying English for a year with a foreign teacher. A few of them told me that coming to Sanming University was one of the most exciting things that had ever happened to them. The women seemed to want to take care of me compulsively, which I desperately needed. 

And yet niceness alone does not a friend make: Ann was the only Dàtián student with whom I became truly close. She was enthusiastic about English, which was part of the reason she went out of her way to befriend me. But she was also curious and sensitive to cultural differences in a way that other people weren’t, and she had character and a willingness to talk about herself with a foreigner that almost no one else possessed. In my first few weeks in Sānmíng, I was pretty much all on my own; after Allen gave me my class schedule and textbooks, he stopped contacting me. Ann sensed that I was isolated, and helped me. 

It took less than 30 minutes for the mothers (with my dithering assistance) to clean my apartment. When they were done, I asked if I could pay them, but Ann made it clear that they wouldn’t accept money. I tried to compensate them by chatting with them in English, but they hadn’t come to chat either. Apparently they were doing this just to be nice, and they didn’t want me to ruin their niceness by giving them anything in return.

In general, Americans don’t expect help from anybody, and on those occasions when we do accept help we feel obliged to offer something in return, almost as payment—a big, gratuitous “thank you” at the very least. It’s striking, visiting the U.S. after a long stay in China, how anal-retentive Americans are about their personal property, time, and space—even between family members. It can feel alienating to outsiders: it seems as though even close friends and family members are constantly tracking each others’ intrusions on their lives, like coworkers who can hardly stand one another.  

Chinese people, on the other hand, generally say thank you only to strangers. It’s not rudeness; rules of etiquette in China are equally as complex as those in America, if not more so. Instead, the lack of thank yous is itself a form of etiquette. If you’re really close with someone, there’s a degree of careful nonchalance with which you’re expected to treat them, as a way of expressing your intention to keep nothing private between you. Hence, thanking a friend or family member is usually viewed as too formal—a distancing maneuver, sometimes even hurtful. 

But I am American, and I was feeling exhausted by how grateful I felt all the time, and how people looked at me suspiciously when I tried to thank them. I really wanted Ann and her roommates to take money or a free English lesson so that I wouldn’t have to feel so bad. Instead, they refused money, showed no interest in practicing English, and when I offered copious thank yous, they blinked as if I was offering to count the hairs on their heads. 

There are times when you have to accept help, and accept that you have nothing to give in return and that the universe is nonetheless fair. Now—in my third week in China—Ann was teaching me that in times like this I just had to accept, and not feel bad or indebted or guilty, because those feelings did nothing for anybody.

Before the ladies left, they reminded me that they wanted me to visit them in Dàtián sometime soon, and I promised I would. Satisfied that they had adequately rescued me from squalor, they squeezed out their rags, dumped out their buckets, and filtered out the door to go back to their dorms. I hadn’t even realized how filthy the apartment had been until they finished cleaning. 

Boulders of stress fell forthwith from my shoulders. I had a clean apartment; I had gotten over jetlag; I was getting to know my students; and my anxieties about teaching had begun to subside. I was checking things off my list and getting used to life in China. 

There was just one thing left that was still causing me anxiety, whose resolution was going to take more than a mop and elbow grease—a problem that had been occupying at least half of my conscious thought since I had left the U.S., and that for the past three weeks had been a source of near constant internal conflict, which I had struggled, and failed, to turn off. It was, of course…

My girlfriend.