OK, think about this. How would you explain the difference between a microwave oven and a conventional oven? Factor in that you are speaking to someone who speaks rudimentary English. I think I made a bad job of explaining it, yesterday, when my friend Zhao Jing, a young Marketing instructor at our college, came over to bake brownies. Oven science aside, we had fun and the brownies came out great. She wanted to know everything about the process and the ingredients, and it made me aware of a science I have mastered – finding ingredients in Lanzhou. The butter comes from a big supermarket in Nanguan, the only one that stocks any. The vanilla and baking powder come from a bakery supply shop in Xiguan (these are the names of districts in Lanzhou) – walk past the big mosque and bear left under the highway overpass until you see . . . but never mind. You don’t need to go there. For Zhao Jing’s next baking lesson, we’re going to make bread. That’s more practical, because all of the ingredients are readily available, including the yeast. She’ll be getting married in October, and if she likes to bake, it will be easy to decide on the gift. An oven, of course.

Daily life is full and never dull. Yesterday distinguished itself as the only day this week without a sandstorm. Today it looks like we’ll have two for good measure. They don’t last long, but woe to the contact lens wearer walking into the wind. When I got to school today I headed for the Foreign Language Department staff room, but when I opened the door, I saw a whole new landscape. The jumbled, crowded office I expected had been replaced by a precise, orderly space dominated by a neatly-made single bed. (The main item of furniture in a university office is always the bed.) After wandering up and down the corridor, I determined that the Deputy Dean had swapped offices with the teaching staff. All this had happened since I left there yesterday morning. In the "new" staff room, three young teachers were up to their eyebrows in paper. Document storage in the old room amounted to two easy chairs piled high with thick brown envelopes full of papers. Now there is an actual cupboard, and some files will be moved upstairs to a new storage area. Today I helped cut waste paper into squares for office notes, and joked that I’d finally found a way to be of real use to the department. Our entire university is undergoing re-organization, apparently a predictable event every three or four years. Switching offices must be part of that process. Foreign Languages has a new Communist Party Secretary, and there is a new Foreign Affairs Officer responsible for my welfare. He speaks little English, so this will be one more incentive for me to improve my Chinese.

Spring! One day I looked out the window of our office and thought I saw lilacs blooming. It was true. I have been constantly surprised that many flowers, shrubs and trees in China are the familiar ones I love in New York. I can name almost everything I see. After the long, beige winter it was particularly pleasing to see lilacs and forsythia and other pastel delights. Spring also brought me my first visitors from home, good friends Eric and Caroline. Let me introduce them as intrepid world travelers. Who else would spend part of their vacation in Lanzhou, Gansu? Let me also share their review of Lanzhou, which I would be great on bumper stickers: Better Than Budapest. With apologies to Hungarians everywhere, Budapest was their all-time least favorite holiday. My friends were here for just two days. We climbed to the majestic heights of the White Pagoda and looked down on the Yellow River and the dust and grime-shrouded city – their visit coincided with some of the worst of the dust storms, both here and in the east as far as Beijing. We also strolled around Yantan village, where I live, so they got a glimpse of ordinary urban life in Gansu. We dined in an elegant restaurant where an alligator was being fileted to order before our eyes. I had hoped that they could join me at the university campus after my early morning classes were over, to meet some of my students and see the facilities. Unfortunately, I forgot to warn them that the road leading to the campus looks incredibly desolate. By appearances, nothing of significance could possibly be anywhere along that unpaved, rutted track. They and their taxi driver got that far and agreed that they had taken a wrong turn on the way. They gave up and turned back to the hotel, where I met them later. Their visit, and especially that last incident, let me see my world through American eyes, eyes that I must have discarded the first time I changed my contact lenses in Lanzhou.

It will be sad to say farewell to my fourth-year students in American Literature. They will graduate in a few weeks, and the baccalaureate program in English will be discontinued. (Students will continue to receive three-year certificates in English that qualify them to teach in public schools at all levels.) I’ve been told that American Lit. will probably not be offered in the future. Recently we studied the poets of the imagist school, notably Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. I held an imagist poem-writing contest, and I am proud to publish the winning entries here.

Tie for third prize:

Sandstorm by Han Qiang
You came following the wind
But stayed instead of going with it.
Is everything welcoming you crazily?
You make me shocked and trees twisted.

Bird by Guo Jinlun
Fly south to north
Year by year
Come and go
Asked where is your destination?
There are two.
North and South.

Second prize:
Untitled By Chan De Lan
It had sprouted on the sky.
Green and delicate
In the deepest withered and yellow leaves
I hadn’t found it until glimpsed fortuitously.

First prize:
On A Bridge at Rush Hour by Shi Yong Xia
The flow of riding people on a bridge;
Fish in a narrow, noisy river.