One of my most important tasks in Hefei was to register for Mandarin courses at Anhui University. That was my practical reason for living in
the city and also what allowed me to continue living in China legally. I was worried about my ability to communicate with the teachers
there, so I asked Ursula if she would come with me and help me register. On that same day, one of my old friends named Sunny wanted to
meet me for the first time. I came to her college three years earlier, San Lian College, and hosted an English corner inside of a small lecture
hall with about 100 students. I wrote my QQ (Chinese instant messaging program) number on the whiteboard for anyone who wanted to add
me, and several of them did, including Sunny. I had maintained contact with her ever since. She was the kind of girl who always seemed
happy and was easy to smile a warm smile, as her English name would suggest. She several times hinted that she was romantically
attracted to me, but I never took it seriously for some reason, maybe because she was too childlike in my mind and didn’t seem like a
serious prospect to me, but she was still a good and light-hearted friend. That morning she came to my hotel and called me when she
arrived in the area. It was hard for her to find because it was in a lonely location and probably not many had heard about it before, though to
me, it was the place.

It was nice to stay in a small and cheap but relatively comfortable place outside of mainstream affairs in the city where most of the people
lived a quiet and simple life. The people who ran the shop below the hotel were the same as before, an older couple. The wife was always
very energetic and smiling and saying a lot of things I didn’t understand, so I just smiled back and tried to pretend I knew what she was
talking about, but she wasn’t stupid. Though I was no longer friends with Rae whose mother lived next to the hotel, I often still saw her
grandmother walking around the area. She was obviously in high status here because of the way she seemed to know everyone. She wasn’
t arrogant and never acted as though she were more important than everyone else and often smiled, but it seemed like she would be the
one who knew what was going on in the neighborhood better than anyone else, like she was the wise elder. I always wondered what they
thought about me. Here I was -- a foreigner, probably the first that had ever come to live in this neighborhood and the first that probably
many of them had ever seen. I certainly must have interrupted their lives to some degree, but it didn’t seem like they were offended by my
presence. They actually treated me very well, and a lot of them were interested in my affairs. Years ago when I first stayed here, the boss of
the hotel told everyone that she washed my clothes and hung them up to dry for me. It’s kind of funny that something as small as that would
be big news for them, but since they had such little contact with foreigners, it was! That was when the city was still very Chinese and
influences from foreign countries were at a minimum, but what had this city transformed into now?

Finally Sunny found the hotel, and I saw her standing in the street oblivious to where I was since I was up on the balcony above her, but
saw me as soon as I shouted for her attention and I told her I’d be right down. When I came down to the road, she suggested we eat
breakfast at a small restaurant next to the hotel where they serve noodles. The road looked old and abandoned, like one you would see in a
ghost town in the Wild West with tumbleweeds blowing around, but there were no tumbleweeds and there were many other obvious
differences.

We sat down at a table that was inside of the restaurant but was completely exposed to the outside world. Our noodles had a lot of red oil
that was spicy floating around in the water inside of the bowl along with some vegetables that I still didn’t know how to identify yet. One
question I couldn’t help asking Sunny was “So, do you think I’m strange?” She told me not. Back when I first came to Hefei, there was
nothing I had ever experienced in my life that seemed more out of place than a foreigner in China. The sight of a foreigner in a Chinese city
was enough to bring shock and sometimes terror to the Chinese in some cases, at least with those who noticed. It truly was the
confrontation between two totally different worlds. Not only did we have completely different appearances, but we had completely different
ways as well, almost diametrically opposed ways. While I was still living in Nanning, a friend of mine from England said he thought of China
as a parallel universe where everything was backwards.

There were two children eating noodles at the table next to us, and they made attempts to talk to me in English. After a while, Rae’s
grandmother came up and talked to the children while holding both arms behind her back as is customary. I found out that they were her
grandchildren and also Rae’s cousins. I felt bad since I was no longer friends with Rae but had no way to tell that to them, and not because
of a language problem. Apparently Rae never said anything to them about our friendship breaking apart either, perhaps to save face as
Chinese usually don’t like to tell anything like this to their families if they don’t have to. Unpleasant things are to be kept internally and not
released to the public, though it still happens sometimes. “I have to go to Anhui University later and register,” I told Sunny. “Oh. Maybe we
can walk there together,” she suggested, and I agreed to it. I said goodbye to Rae’s cousins, and knew I would see them again since they
lived in the neighborhood.

Together we walked through the streets of Hefei on our way to the university. It seemed like the farther away from the center of the city one
got, the less the influence of modernization and Westernization had an impact, but there were also other areas that were sporadically being
developed throughout the city. These areas that we walked through didn’t show any great signs of change, but they weren’t exactly the
same as I remembered. Things had changed at least a little, I guessed, though I never visited most of these areas before to know the exact
details of it, but I knew enough about what the city was generally like before to make a conclusion.  Since I was trying to pursue something
with Ursula, I tried to find a way to get Sunny not to come with me all the way to the north gate of Anhui University because she would meet
me there, but Sunny was persistent and insisted on coming all the way with me. I thought it would look bad if I came there with another girl,
but at the same time I    didn’t want to be too direct and tell Sunny why I didn’t want her to come with me, so I could do nothing.

We got to the north gate of Anhui University after about an hour of walking, and Ursula was waiting there. We got there just on time! “Hey,
this is my old friend Sunny. This is the first time I ever met her in person,” I said to try to assure Ursula that I wasn’t some kind of playboy.
After they got introduced, Sunny went away and Ursula and I went into the university grounds to talk to the educators there. I was already
quite familiar with this campus from years ago and had been to the foreign student campus inside of the university several times. We went
inside of the main building which had a small fish pond inside and a few steps that led up to a long hallway with several offices and a few
student dormitories opposed by windows. We went inside of the main office and Ursula had a talk with the dean of the foreign student
campus, a man named Song laoshi (teacher). I didn’t know what they were talking about, but when they were finished, I found out what the
tuition fee was and that the students had already been studying for two weeks. This tuition would take most of what I had managed to save
during my two years teaching for Webster in Nanning, but it was for a good cause, so there was no question about paying for it. Shortly after,
I paid my money and got registered, so now I was a full-time student at Anhui University!

I had to wait some time before I could move into the student dorms at Anhui University. Class started at 8:00 in the morning, and since I
didn’t know how to take the bus, I had to catch a taxi to the front gate, but it was not easy to find one in the morning as only about one in 50
were unoccupied, and I wasn’t the only one trying to catch one. Inside of my classroom, there were about 10 small wooden tables that
seated two each with a metallic desk at the end of the classroom opposite from the door. The door itself was made of glass and led directly
into the lobby with the fish pond.

the students gathered, I found out that there was an interesting blend of people I would be studying with from several different countries
who nearly all could speak English well. One of my first classmates I met was a tall young man named Michael from Nigeria. He wore a
baseball cap and somewhat stylish clothes and had an interesting personality. The way he spoke English was very creative, like he
invented his own expressions that you couldn’t hear from anyone else. He was also quite funny, but didn’t try so hard to be funny. It just
came out naturally. There were other students from Algeria, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Chile, Ecuador, Korea, Saudi Arabia, Mongolia, and a
couple others from the United States. I also found out that we had four different teachers, one for each of the subjects we would study:
speaking, listening, reading and writing, and grammar. We had books that were copies of books they use to teach Mandarin at Beijing
University, so they used Beijing dialect, which wasn’t much different than the standard Mandarin that is spoken around the country. In
China, Beijing is supposed to be the center of high-quality spoken Mandarin, so in the south, they say the Mandarin people speak is not very
standard. I quickly found out that writing would be one of if not the most important part of studying Mandarin because it’s hard to do anything
else without knowing what each individual character means, and there are thousands of them and are hard to remember how to write. One
thing that helped me was living in China for three years already, so even if I didn’t know how to write or speak very well, I was practicing
my listening the whole time since there were people speaking Mandarin all around me nonstop the entire time. That helped give my
pronunciation skills a boost. Many people say that Chinese is one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn, but I wondered, who
had a truly objective opinion about it?

In the morning on my way to school, I began to notice how some of the Hefei people had changed since I was gone while looking out of the
taxi window. Everyone seemed to be dressing more fashionably and not as plainly dressed as before. Their dress-style seemed to be
increasingly influenced by Western fashion. For men, the haircut that was most popular was a short flattop style haircut, but not so much
anymore. A lot of women often used to have their bangs cut perfectly evenly across their foreheads, but I couldn’t see it anymore. Hefei had
a style of its own that I hadn’t seen anywhere else in China, either because I hadn’t spent as much time in other places to notice, or
because of their own unique culture which was a combination of both ancient and modern urban style. A lot of women of Hefei were very
alluring, aloof and non-verbal. They weren’t quiet because they were naïve and foolish, they were quiet because they knew every single
thought in your mind and wanted to keep it that way! Their way was very simple, yet brilliant! I also noticed that people’s behavior had
changed as well. Before, people would walk anywhere, even across the street, with their heads down in a very introverted way and not
care about oncoming traffic even one iota. Now people were starting to pay more attention to their surroundings. It was as though they had
been woken up to the outside world suddenly, or the bulk of the population of Hefei had been replaced overnight. From my experiences in
the city, it seemed like people were less rude and crude and didn’t push each other out of the way as before. The people almost looked
physically different. They didn’t have such looks of spite and general discomfort on their faces as much as before. Their eyes had somehow
become different too. There used to be almost a faint glow and knowledge of many things that I had no idea about in their eyes, but I couldn’t
see that much anymore. People also reacted to my presence differently now. Before when people would see me, their reaction was like “Oh
my god, a foreigner!” but now it was more like, “Oh, it’s a foreigner. I wonder what he is doing here.” The old communist vibe of strictly
enforced collectivism had somewhat weakened in influence, but people were not quite ready to stand alone as individuals, though some
people were naturally more individualistic than others. Whatever elements from Imperial China that managed to survive the Cultural
Revolution continued waning in influence as well. This place was changing on all levels, and quickly!

Sometimes Ursula would meet me at her old university, Anhui University of Agriculture at night when there were relatively few people
around compared to the daytime. It was very close to my old neighborhood, Hu Po, and I had been there many times to play basketball and  
soccer with my foreigner friends against Chinese students of various universities around Hefei. She liked to meet at the soccer field which
was surrounded by a running track and rested in a pit down from the road and was surrounded by tall fences. Some students at this time
would sit together in groups or in couples in the grass and others would run and walk around the track. That fortune Ursula read for me the
other day told me to say something to her at the right time because she was someone who was parallel to me, but the right time never
seemed to come. I  didn’t want to make a move at the wrong time, so I waited patiently and hoped my chance would not slip away forever. I
never knew what was in her mind, if she was waiting for me to say something or if she had no interest at all, but I didn’t want to mess this
up because of how long I had known her and how much respect I had for her. We talked about a lot of things, and I was especially curious
about how she felt about the changes that were happening here in her hometown. “The people are so different in this city now! When I lived
here three years ago, the people almost seemed to glow from the inside, but now I don’t see it anymore. And they don’t dress the same
either now. How do you think the people have changed?” I asked. “Well, I think the people have become indifferent,” she said. It seemed as
though the two were related somehow. I thought that the spirit of the people had been sucked out because of this excessive focus on
material and economic concerns. Certainly China was far behind many other countries in an economic sense, but what price were they
willing to pay to catch up so quickly?

Zhang laoshi of the Anhui University foreign student campus informed me that there would be an English corner held at Anhui University’s
new campus in the deep south of the city every Friday night and invited me to attend for a small salary. It was my chance to get back some
of the money I lost paying the tuition (not much), so I decided I would do it. They had any foreigners who wanted to go to English corner (two
at the most) board a school bus that looked like a long-distance travel bus at the south gate in front of the library and head off to the new
campus. Zhang laoshi sent a guide with me to make sure I got off at the right stop. The main road that linked the south of the city to the
center of the city was called Jinzhai Lu (jeen jai loo). The school bus would take this road to go to the new campus, but it was completely
revamped. They built a second road on top of the old road but rebuilt everything, and people who wanted to travel quickly would take the
top road, and city buses and other traffic would take the lower road. This road bore an astonishing similarity to the one I dreamt of right
before I came back to Hefei.

The whole south region of the city had developed greatly since I was last here. What used to be the outskirts of the city was no longer that.
The bus entered the new campus of Anhui University, and after two stops, my guide informed me that it was time to get off the bus. The stop
was next to a huge outdoor forum-type place, which is where the English corner would be held. After we arrived in the center, I noticed a
lot of people grouped together, and one of them left the group and approached me. “Hi, I am Rebecca. I am a member of the English
Association. Are you here for the English corner?” she asked. “Yes I am,” I replied. “Good! Tonight is our first English corner, and we will
have our opening ceremony and would like for you to say some words to the students to encourage them to study English. Can you do
that?” she asked. “Sure, I can do that,” I replied. It was not only me, but there were a few other foreigners there as well. The students made
a circle around the edge of the center of the forum which gave us foreigners plenty of space. We all gave our words of advice, and I told the
students that persistence was one of the most important keys to learning a foreign language. Several other members of the English
Association made speeches and there were also a couple of musical performances. After the ceremony was over, it was time for free talk,
so we foreigners got surrounded by students. This English corner was quite different than the English corner I used to go to at the old
campus. Here, it was mostly freshmen students who had very limited things to say. At the old campus, all different kinds of people would
come, so the conversation was quite lively. I suppose this is why they paid people to come here, but it was a chance to help other people
and make some cash, so how was I going to pass this up?

Life in Hefei didn’t take long to pick up again, but of course not all of it would be desirable or expected.
China Dispatch/Andrew Gramling
Going to school at Hefei