Friday, September 2, 2005, 6:30 PM: Outside the window are the sounds of never-ending construction, and the crying of a distressed child, “Maaaamaaa! Maaamaaaa!” The smell of my own dinner simmering mingles with other city odors. I could be in almost any city in the world, but it happens that I’m in Lanzhou, Gansu, Peoples Republic of China. This is my eighth day in Lanzhou. I had to count on my fingers to be certain. It seems both longer and shorter. On the one hand, an abyss of space/time separates me from every other experience I’ve had, either here in China or in my life. On the other hand, I am still so ungrounded and disoriented, I might just have stepped off the plane.

I have just had a truly satisfying and productive day. I took the early University shuttle bus to my office, did some paperwork, met with my Foreign Affairs Officer, and then caught the noon bus home. I did a load of laundry, ate lunch, and then headed downtown by taxi to shop for some household stuff. (There are no potholders in China, I conclude. I did find rubber gloves, however, thanks to my lame pantomime and the good intuition of a store clerk.) On the way home, the cab driver took a wrong turn that I recognized, and while I was plumbing my brain for Chinese words to tell him so, we plunged further and further off course. (Urban driving is FAST here; more about that anon.) It all ended well. I paid twice the necessary fare (instead of the equivalent of 88 cents, I paid $1.80!) but I had a good laugh with the young driver. Finally, on the way down my lane, I bought a head of broccoli, a favorite I have missed.

Yes, this was a perfect China day. I climbed the stairs to my apartment, opened the front door, set down my packages and – OK, just bear with me – yielded to a wrenching bout of homesickness. Earlier today I was gazing out a window on campus, drinking in a sunny day after two overcast in a row. As I wondered, idly, how winter light looks in this high desert in western China, my mind turned to the long violet shadows cast by winter sunlight in the Hudson Valley. And I was blind-sided by sadness. This is the unexpected thing about missing home. It hits me when I’m feeling upbeat and satisfied. When I am lonely, exhausted, frustrated, tongue-tied, embarrassed, exasperated – or any combination thereof – I am so busy coping, it seems, that there’s no psychic energy for anything else. I’m confident that as the weeks go by, most of these emotional highs and lows will level out. (Please!) In the apt words of this morning’s psalm, “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning” (30:6).

Gansu Union University, where I teach, is on the frontier edge of a frontier town. The campus is right on the banks of the Yellow River (which, as you see, is not yellow). Some campus buildings are brand new, while others have seen some hard use. The university formed in 2001, a confederation of smaller colleges. A small fleet of shuttle buses ferries teachers and administrators from their neighborhoods to the campus each day. We pass through vast areas of new construction and little bits of rural Gansu crouching the path of the bulldozer. On my first morning, the bus followed a cart hauling a freshly killed hog. Its hoofs pointed skyward, and its headless neck rolled from side to side as it bounced along. (I’m confident that the head had been put to good use – nothing goes to waste here!) The roads we follow are of three types: paved (the first couple of blocks of city street), unpaved (the tracks gouged through the construction areas) and formerly paved (the road along the river that leads to the college gate, whose asphalt is in ruins). My private name for our driver is “Angel with Nerves of Steel.” He has a beatific smile and a sunny disposition, but he takes no nonsense from the traffic and road conditions. There’s one single-lane stretch where the edge of the crumbling roadway verges on washed out gravel and a steep drop to the river. Nothing so frivolous as a guard rail. In every showdown with bicyclists, carts, or dump-trucks, I pray there will only be winners.


The first year students arrived this week, and the atmosphere on campus was festive. Meanwhile, I met with my second-year students for Survey of British and American Culture, and with adult students (teachers) at an extension site on the other side of Lanzhou. That course is Newspaper Reading. Next week I’ll also meet the freshmen for Listening Skills. Altogether I teach eight two-hour classes, or “lessons” as they are called, each week. There are about 40 students in each of the 8 groups; you can do the math for yourselves. I clearly won’t be able to give the kind of individual attention I’m used to giving my students. There is a brand new classroom building on campus, but I haven’t seen the inside. The School of Foreign Languages is housed in an older building. Double doors lead to the area. On one is painted, “Please Be Quiet” and on the other, “Please Speak English.” I observed students responding to the apparent contradiction by standing around chattering loudly in Chinese. The condition of the classrooms would make our poorest inner city schools look well equipped. Cracked plaster, peeling paint, broken furniture, debris everywhere. It’s unclear to me why there is no electricity to power the fluorescent lights, and whether this is normal and/or temporary. Everything is covered with a predictable layer of Lanzhou grit (more about that later). In dramatic contrast to the dreary environment, the students are cheerful, friendly, bright and enthusiastic. I will never need to wonder why God sent me here!






My apartment is in an unpretentious neighborhood that is a true reflection of Lanzhou’s growing pains. My building is old but not ancient; the one behind it is brand new. Nearby are some smaller, older buildings, and there’s a coal yard at the far end of the street. A neighbor told me that last year there was a fruit orchard where, now, a huge building is going up. There are two cranes on top, and the work goes on from sun up until well after dark, seven days a week. (Yes, it’s noisy. I’m already used to it.) My windows look down on an alley that is a hub of activity, a constant source of entertainment. One day I watched two people make a futon out of sheep wool, from start to finish. Fascinating. The man in the picture is sifting sand by hand. In the courtyard behind him (see the wet spot?) there had been two one-story brick buildings that were demolished over the course of my first two days here. No wrecking ball, just human sweat, and every scrap of building material sorted, stacked and hauled away. My lane is a narrow estuary of a busy four-lane street. Each day fruit and vegetable sellers and food stalls set up shop along the way. So far, my favorite street snack is tu dou bin, a bread roll stuffed with spicy matchstick potatoes. Taxis, carts, bicycles and pedestrians compete for what’s left of the small thoroughfare. It’s a visual feast, but I’ve avoided snapping pictures because I live here and so I don’t want to offend my neighbors. The apartment itself is more than adequate, although I would gladly offer it as the location for the shooting of Martha Stewart Goes to China. I would have to warn Martha to keep the knick knacks to a minimum, however. I’ve already fallen behind with the dusting! Between the building construction and the surrounding desert itself, every surface is coated with the aforementioned Lanzhou grit. This morning I noticed that there was about a quarter teaspoon of sand in the bottom of my electric teakettle; it insinuates itself everywhere! And this is in the absence of the notorious dust storms I’ve been warned to expect.

This post barely scratches the surface of my experience so far – and it’s been just one week! I’ll close with a clip from my journal of 8/27:
I have been perfecting the gentle art of crossing the street, risking serious injury or death, either from being run over or else from cardiac arrest. Rule one: a “walk” signal or crosswalk markings should not provoke complacency. To the Chinese motorist, these things are meaningless. Rule two: Plan to navigate the crossing in two stages; there will never be a time when both lanes of traffic may be bisected in a continuous walk. Rule three: Expect moving vehicles to materialize from unlikely directions and ruin your crossing plan. OK. Armed with these rules, we are ready to begin. First, hesitate. No one will interfere if you just want to stand on the relative safety of the curb and size up the intersection. If you wait long enough, you can at least be reassured by direct evidence that a few others have crossed before you and lived. Second, choose the moment of minimum risk to cross the first lane. There will never be a perfect moment; choose potentially being run down by a motorbike over being flattened by a dump truck. Move briskly. Stop precisely on the yellow line (more about that later). Next, repeat step two to cross the other lane. There. How hard was that? All you need to do now is cross the bicycle lane, and the only risks here are motorbikes, deranged bicyclists, and the occasional errant taxi. Extra tips from a would-be expert: Prayer is recommended, both before and after crossing. Whenever possible, attach yourself to a pack of people going your way, or at least a confident-looking young mom with a baby stroller. Do whatever they do. In the event that things go terribly wrong in the middle of your crossing, freeze. Just stand there and let others decide your fate. That yellow line that I mentioned earlier is also meaningless to Chinese motorists. They are an impatient lot, and think nothing of passing unexpectedly, even into the path of an oncoming public bus. There is no concrete way to predict or guard against this behavior; see “prayer” above.