The freshmen students think I live in the office!! I discovered this when several said, at different times, "Oh, I came to see you in your dormitory, but you weren’t in." Slowly it sank in with me that they’d been knocking on the door of the office when no one was there.

Ruth, Elizabeth and I have been making a unified effort to make our two-room shared office more hospitable. It had been a storage area for years before we inherited it last year, and we were at first overwhelmed by the filth and accumulated junk and discarded furniture. Little by little, we’ve taken control. This year, we even have a floor mopping rotation among the three of us. We have house plants. We have washed and dried all the slipcovers and bedding – no mean feat in a land without launder-mats. (My secret ambition is to open a chain of them in Gansu.)

The place is looking great. And the students think I live there. I quickly realized that their assumption is completely rational, completely plausible.
1. College faculty always live on campus. Ours, with no faculty housing, is an anomaly, perhaps unique in all of China.
2. People in China generally live where they work. My local grocer lives behind a partition in her tiny store. Our gate man lives in the gatehouse. For me to live apart from my job is ... not normal.
3. The fact that there is no bathroom, no cooking facilities in our office is not unusual. Naturally, I use the hall toilet. The waste pipe overhead (from the toilet above) drips on my back while I squat over the hole. And I get my hot water from the boiler plant, in my giant thermos bottle, like everyone else. And I eat in the communal canteen, like everyone else. The food is abundant and delicious. In fact, most college support staff on our campus live in exactly this way.

A student points to the most fluffy-looking cot in the office. "Is that your bed?" I’m a little embarrassed to tell her, "No, I live in Lanzhou city. I have my own apartment."

It makes my head spin, how many people there are, here in China. If every one of them gets the idea that a hot shower in the morning (a luxury I regularly enjoy) is a good idea, the world is in trouble. (Our students must go to the public bath and pay 2 yuan – a large sum, for them. I think they go weekly, if that.) I kick this idea around in my head and think, well, this scenario might go either way. If people in developing China demand the comforts we take for granted in the west, maybe we’ll finally get going and figure out how to produce those comforts without depleting so much un-renewable energy. Or maybe we’ll just deplete all the planet’s energy at an accelerated rate, and everyone will have to get used to sleeping in the office and washing up in a plastic dishpan!