It had been a little while since I left Hefei to travel to another city. The last time was when I went to Shanghai and Beijing with
my father during Spring Festival. It was always refreshing to see the cultural differences between different cities in China because
each place bombarded me with a numerous amount of new elements and experiences that were not always easy for me to
understand. I wondered how exactly my perception of each place differed from that of Chinese people. I was on the outside looking
in at everyone’s lives, with a few exceptional people, Chinese and foreigners, who were able to stand with me in my ignorant state.
Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be gone very long this time since Ricky and I were to teach only two classes for a period of about 40
minutes each and then return to Hefei.
     The school that was in the small town we went to was a typical Chinese middle school — very small, with about 200-300
students. I taught both of my classes in separate rooms away from Ricky with the middle school students. As usual, they had never
met a foreigner before. It’s strange to think that I was the first one not born in their country they had ever met. They had no way to
understand anything about where I had come from, and what exactly made me different from them, only that they could see from my
appearance that I was different from them, and my English was “very good,” as many of them said. I was hoping that my English
would be very good considering that I had lived all my life in a country where English was the first language, and I was working as
hard as I could to be an effective teacher for my regular students. They probably just never heard someone speak English so
fluently and naturally before. I tried my best to create a teaching environment where the students felt that they could speak freely,
even though they were not used to such a classroom environment. The Chinese teachers were always very strict with the students,
and tolerated no kind of disrespectful or lazy behavior from them.
     After my two classes were finished, I returned to a meeting hall that we first went to before our classes started where many of
the student’s parents were watching Ricky give a demo class to the students. He was very straightforward in his teaching,
speaking loudly and writing words on the whiteboard for students to repeat and pointing at the words strictly and energetically with
his marker. I had a much more laid back style than Ricky and many other teachers. Rather than building myself a commanding
presence in front of the students, I spoke to them as I would any other human being without talking down to them. I figured that if
what I said was not appealing enough for them to pay attention to, then I did not deserve to have their attention, and felt not much
need to force attention from them and build a poor understanding of each other. But everyone has their ways, especially with the
amount of pressure that teachers face from parents when their expectations aren’t being met.
     After Ricky’s class was over, Ricky said to me, “We need to make sure this guy (our business associate) gives us our money.”
And indeed he did as he promised with no excuses and no negotiation to try and lower our salaries. After we left the school, our
business associate, our driver, and several others from the school who could not speak English walked to a nearby restaurant with
us to have a business conducted successfully with food and drinks before we drove back to Hefei to meet the early evening there.
Every Friday and Saturday night, it was time to go dancing at Best Beautiful Club. That was the new hot spot for our circle of
foreigner friends. Dushan and I, and sometimes Spela, would take a taxi at around 10 p.m. and head over to the Walking Street.
Outside of the club, we could hear the music vibrating through the walls up on the third floor. Every night, a different combination of
foreigners would be there, but there were some that made more effort than others to be there every time. Elvis was usually there
ready to dance and have fun. He became a good friend of mine because we had similar ideas of how to treat friends, but we also
differed on how to treat people in general. Most of the people from the same country would be divided into their smaller groups, like
people from the U.K. stuck together, and people from Africa shared tighter bonds than other foreigners, but when it was dancing
time, we all mixed together indiscriminately. Each one of Dushan’s songs that he played put everyone into a different world that one
could only dream of, digging deeply into the incomprehensible realms of the imagination. Some songs had me feeling lost in a sea of
tranquility, and others had me pumped up for action. Dushan usually liked to mix up his songs a bit, but there was one song he
played quite often that got a big reaction from some people. The only way to describe this hardcore beat is to say that if The
Terminator had a dance song, that would have been it. Every time Dushan played it, Lucky would come running onto the dance floor
from whoever she was talking to and start dancing. I also enjoyed the song very much. Spela always danced in a way that looked
like she was half dancing, and half doing Tai Chi. Since she was an expert at it, she incorporated it into her dance style. Some
people thought it was funny. Many of the groups of bar patrons there ordered plates of sliced fruits and drank large clear thermoses
of Jack Daniel’s and Coke, pouring enough into small glasses for everyone. It was common for people to play rock paper scissors
to decide who will drink, and also play a guessing number game using five dice and a cup for each person used for concealing the
numbers and shaking the dice. Whenever Dushan played his music, the same two tall Chinese girls would always come out and
dance. “They only dance when I play!” he said very enthusiastically. After Dushan finished playing his playlist for the evening, he
would come over and sit with foreigners who came to listen to his DJ-ing and have a few drinks and chat.
     Sometimes, groups of us would go to other places very late at night, like 39 degrees. It was fortunate for us that taking taxis
was so convenient in Hefei that no one had to run the risk of driving drunk. Not only that, no one could afford a car either. The taxi
drivers had some interesting maneuvers to avoid unfavorable traffic situations. One was to do a U-turn only several feet in front of
oncoming traffic in the middle of the road, thus cutting them off. Sometimes at a red light, the driver would pretend to make a right
turn, and then coast around the intersection until he got around to the other side. That was usually the only time they would use their
turn signals. And of course some drivers just drove through red lights at full speed.
     One night after going to Best Beautiful, Elvis, and a couple of his friends from Cameroon, Evnas and Rodney, and Paul from
Namibia went to 39 degrees to continue the party. This was the number one place for dancing that we had been to. Everyone had
quite a lot to drink, and I had a turn to dance in the middle of everyone. I went down low and started spinning in circles around and
around. My coordination must have been off, because I ended up hitting my forehead on a table hard enough to cause bleeding. The
others made sure I was all right, but shortly after decided they were going to push on home. I stayed because I didn’t have enough
excitement yet. Suddenly, I heard my old song, “Take Me to Your Heart” start playing, and I decided to sing along. I wasn’t going to
sing for anyone else’s benefit. I just wanted to sing for the memory of my first days in China. Some of the bar staff came up close to
listen to me, and some of them shook their heads with their arms crossed expecting me to stop singing because they didn’t
approve, but that only strengthened my determination. I don’t know if it was because my speech was a little slurred, or because I
had blood slightly drizzling down my forehead that they didn’t want to see me singing. It could have been something else, like maybe
they didn’t have so much respect for foreigners. Suddenly I felt something hit the side of my head. Some girl sitting far away from me
next to the windows with who was probably her boyfriend was throwing ice cubes at me. When I went over to confront her about it,
she looked away like she didn’t do anything. These people showed me no love, but I had my chance to redeem myself. Two young
Chinese men sitting at a table signaled me to come over and drink whiskey and Coke with them. They played rock paper scissors to
decide which of them was going to drink with me. When one of the young men lost, he would always raise his glass to me and say,
“OK?!” with a big intoxicated smile on his face, and we would drink our glasses down together. I started wondering why I had to
drink every time, so I tried to get them to change their drinking strategy. I pointed to them both and said, “You you you!” As I
interchanged both of my pointer fingers towards them to indicate that they can also drink together, but one of them waved their
hands and said, “No no no no no!” So I was stuck drinking with them since I  didn’t want to walk away from them even though I felt
the sickness coming. The more vocal of the two started reaching his limit, and would spit a large portion of his drink on the floor as
we were drinking together each time, but I kept all of mine inside. Finally, we finished the thermos of whiskey and Coke, and I was
so glad it was over. I started flexing my muscles like a bodybuilder and walking around the bar yelling, “Yeah! I’m strong! That’s
right! Laugh at me now!” One of the bar staff there started laughing at me though.
     It was time to take another excursion into the unknown to provide my teaching services, but this time it was to help my friend
Frank. He wanted me, and several others to give a speech to some students at a high school in a city called Ningbo in neighboring
Jiangsu province, which is the same province that holds the famous city of Nanjing. I met Frank at Zhong Yi Xue Yuan, the College
of Traditional Chinese Medicine one afternoon as we waited for two of his other friends to arrive. One of them was Umesh from
Nepal who I had met a month or two earlier. I didn’t know that Frank and he were friends, but I should have guessed since they
went to the same school, and Frank was the enterprising type who liked to meet foreigners. The fourth one of us to arrive was a 24-
year old from South Korea named Daniel who once served in the military there. The four of us took a train from Hefei to Ningbo which
was about three hours away.
      That evening, we quickly found an old fashioned hotel to stay in, and we walked around the city to do some shopping. I had to
buy some clothes from a shop because Frank wanted everyone to look as professional as possible for our speeches the next
morning. Frank’s purpose in bringing us to Ningbo was to help us recruit students for a computer college. It was going to be a
competition, and Frank wanted to recruit more than any other group because there was a cash reward for him for every student that
joined. Ningbo itself seemed to be a very quiet town where not much was happening. The only interesting thing I saw in the place
was bamboo fields that the place was supposed to be known for. That night, in the hotel, Daniel, Umesh, and I prepared our
speeches for the next day. We had to think of reasons why the students would be interested in learning more about computers.
The next morning, Frank summoned a taxi on the street in front of the hotel and ordered the driver to take us to the high school.
     There couldn’t have been much more than 100 students in the whole place. We met most of them in an auditorium that slanted
steeply upward from the first row to the back row. I was going to be the first to speak because I hate waiting for such things.
Something strange I thought was when Frank asked me to introduce myself to the students as a professor in the computer college
right before I began speaking. “No. I can’t do that, Frank. I don’t even know anything about the school, so how am I going to tell them
that I am a professor there?” Frank was very honest to me, but he had a habit of using dishonesty when it could bring him gains
with other people. He actually gave his professor at the medical college 5,000 RMB to pass his final examination. Frank said to me,
“Please. Just do me this favor. Just tell them you are a professor at the computer college. It will help them to think you really know
what you are talking about.” I said to him, “You can tell the students whatever you want, but I’m not going to tell them I’m a
professor at that school.” And then I began speaking to the students about why computers are important to today’s society, and that
there seems to be no foreseeable end to the uses of computer technology. After I finished my speech, all of the students sat and
stared at me with blank looks on their faces. I was thinking to myself, “Were they really that unmoved by my speech?” But then
Frank stepped in and said a few words to them, and then I began to see the understanding on their faces grow and heard them make
sounds of approval. Umesh and Daniel also gave their speeches, and then it was time for Frank to treat us to lunch for helping him
recruit students. We took several taxis, from the school to a restaurant, and from the restaurant to the train station, but something
unusual happened along the way. When Frank waved down a taxi driver one time, the driver rolled up in front of us looking out the
window with a big smile on his face. I didn’t know why he was smiling like that, but when we got into the taxi Frank told us that it
was the same taxi driver from the night before. It actually happened two times that day that we got the same taxi driver. I wasn’t
sure if it was coincidence, or that the city of Ningbo was that small, but it certainly gave us something to laugh about. Frank said, “I
can’t believe we got the same driver two times. That never happened to me in my life before.” Then we boarded the next train
heading back to Hefei. More activities in the foreigner community were coming soon.
China Dispatch/Andrew Gramling

Night fun