This first section of “Fragments of China” was written in hindsight, 18 years after the events of 1994. During that summer, I wrote almost nothing, save a newsletter. At that time, I had no overall concept of a book called “Fragments of China”. At this point, I want to fill in the gaps, and try to create a somewhat more unified whole. If I later find extant letters from that time, I will add them to the end of this section, for reference.

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Introduction: In most people’s lives, there are certain events, or decisions, or people, or times and seasons that stand out like bright neon signposts along the linear chronology of their years. The summer of 1994, in Bengbu, Anhui Province, P. R. China, at the Anhui Institute of Finance and Trade (An Hui Cai Mao Xue Yuan) was probably the 3rd most important event of my life. (The 2nd was the first trip to Africa, in 1984, and the 1st I will not say here.) It was a very important turning point in my life, from a period of going nowhere and being miserable, to a new period, with much more direction and purpose. At the time, it was seen as a turning point, but now, in hindsight, it was a logical point of time and location on an already established trajectory. Now that I can see “before” and “after” for many years, I think this way. Many things came out of that “summer of miracles”.

Body: As I mentioned before in the general introduction to “Fragments of China”, there were many events leading up to the summer of 1994. In Africa, I met Rhoda, who later encouraged me to “think about China”. I re-read her letter to me several years later, at a time when I was full of despair, and her words got me thinking. Later, an unknown woman said, “If you have a second chance, then take it.” That too, got me thinking about China. Finally, my classmate Deborah passed my name to an organization that sent English teachers to China – and someone from that organization contacted me. This is the point where the story of Bengbu really begins. It was early 1994. Almost one year before, I had finished my master’s degree in Special Education (L. D.), but had not looked for a job. I withdrew into my small apartment, and hid from the world. I could not face anything or anybody. Sometimes I met with some local people, but I was not really a part of that group; I really sat in the corner to keep emotionally warm. However, in an ironic way, they were part of the impetus for my going out to China. I dared not share my decision-process with them, so I applied to the English teaching organization on my own, without telling the local group. The results were horrific. I was told very quickly that since I had chosen to go to China, without entrusting myself to the group’s shared discernment, then they could not support me. What cruelty…. I felt very bad, and called up the English teaching organization’s summer recruiter, to tell him what had happened, and that I wanted to give up going to China. Ever so patiently and kindly, he listened to me, and persuaded me to go to China. So, I prepared to go, in hurt and in resolution. Many things stemmed from that incident, and over the next 18 years, there were four or five other, unrelated and yet mysteriously similar incidents. All served to drive me away from community. At the same time, my family was not very supportive. One of them even ripped up my “summer newsletter”, as we were talking about the upcoming summer, and what I would do!

Anyway, enough of this “psycho-babble”. Suffice to say, I gained China by breaking out, and breaking away from community, and family. How ironic, since China is a very family / group / community-oriented society.

The English teaching organization had its offices near L. A., and I flew out to attend the pre-summer training camp for all the summer teachers. It lasted a few weeks. We attended ESL pedagogy courses, lectures on out host culture, “rah-rah” meetings, slept in dorms, ate at the canteen, and gave practice ESL classes to some of the local immigrants, who came in for free “guinea-pig” classes. The campus was well-groomed, the weather was hot, and there were many palm trees. Those are my principal memories of that place.

There was one recurring theme during this summer training camp, at the next one in 1995 (before I went to Tianjin), and at many points along the life-road thereafter: you must be “broken” – in one’s will, dreams, plans – before moving on. The staff at the training camp never said so, explicitly, but this knowledge hung like an invisible cloud over the landscape of my soul. It seemed there was no avoiding it. In fact, it was a terrible, but somehow necessary dynamic to the whole project, the summer, one’s life. I hated it, the way a dog hates its rabies shots. I had to learn it each and every year, usually at the start of a year, and it became more odious each time. The English teaching organization strove to build up “group dynamic”. I still remained in my shell. It is a tribute to them that they let me be.

I enjoyed talking to the staff in the canteen. They were kind, and reminded me of other, earlier staff at my schools in England, who were also kind.

However, the most enduring memory of that time at training camp was the president’s speech. We were due to leave for Asia in a day or two, and he gave us his parting words. During the training program we barely saw him, and now, here he was. He said: I will not ask you about what you did or achieved. Rather, I will ask you, “Did you enjoy yourself?” Those words meant more to me than any pep-talk; enjoying myself became one of the themes of my English teaching work in China.

In 1994, the 13-hour flight to Beijing was a novelty; people sometimes made long lines in the aisles, to give the person in front a back-rub. That was before 2001. Now, having gone over the Pacific many times, I just try to sleep away the 13 hours. At the Friendship Hotel in Beijing, where we stayed for three days, I often made faces into the mirror, as I imagined there were observers behind the one-way glass, who were watching everything I did. Now, I don’t care what they see; my own inhibitions have gone, but “they” have not. We visited the usual, “must-see” tourist sites – the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, Tian’An Men Square, the Temple of Heaven, and others – and ate Peking Duck. Then the sub-teams joined their Foreign Affairs officer, went to the train station, and took off to their respective work-sites.

There was one incident which happened during this three-day visit in Beijing. I still had a few copies of my summer newsletter with me, and I asked some of the other summer teachers if they wanted a copy. They said yes, so I passed out a few copies. We visited some restaurant, or tourist site. When I came back to the bus, there on the floor was a discarded newsletter. Since the letter contained much personal “in-house” information, I felt very much betrayed. This lack of concern has repeated itself in many similar “information situations”, with both people in the field, and family and friends back home. It was a good lesson: now, I tell very little to others. I even let it be known, “Don’t ask me for news. Consider me dead. If I see you in five years, I will tell you something.” Something… but not everything.

Many of my most important lessons concerning how to live in China were learned that summer in Bengbu, and reinforced almost every year thereafter. In a nut-shell, most of life’s problems come from the other foreigners, the “in-house” crowd, those who were supposed to be “one’s own kind”. It took me several more incidents before I made the choice to have only token-contact with other foreigners in China, and very guarded communication with my family. The consequences can be easily imagined…. That is why, as the narrative of “Fragments of China” progresses, references to other foreigners become fewer and fewer. I came to China for the very antithesis of China – I came for social isolation. I came to see the land – barren deserts and high plateau-land. I came to be with my many and varied students. These, then, are my themes in this book.

The overnight train ride from Beijing to Bengbu took about 12 or 13 hours. We travelled by “hard bed”. This means an open bunk-house carriage, with 3-level bunks, and a total of about 60 beds in the carriage. Each cluster of six beds is only semi-partitioned. At once, I realized that China was going to be great fun; over the following years, I exploited this knowledge very deeply. China is one of the world’s great travel playgrounds; everything one needs to enjoy life is here, “in spades”. That first night on the “hard bed” sleeper had a dream-like quality to it, and this feeling lasted all summer.

The following is an overview of the school I worked at – The Anhui Institute of Finance and Trade (An Hui Cai Mao Xue Yuan). The school is in Bengbu, Anhui Province. For many years, Bengbu had the reputation of being a poor town, located on a vital rail junction, where the Beijing to Guangzhou line and the Beijing to Shanghai lines separate. I think this is an unfair assessment of Bengbu, for as my first work-site in China, I consider it as a sort of “ancestral home”. True, that summer I did not venture out of the campus a lot, but my affection for Bengbu grew nonetheless.

To this day, I do not know why I was assigned to Bengbu, but such is life. The campus of AIFT had about 20,000 or more students, but since it was the summer holiday, it appeared fairly quiet. The campus was spread out, with wide walkways, paved access roads, and concrete-and-tile buildings. Generally, the campus was well-maintained. I often got lost in the grid-work of buildings, so I learned the routes between the dorm, the classrooms and one of the gates, and ignored the rest of the campus, just to keep things simple. The three foreign teachers either went out to the local restaurants, or the school caterers brought it in to us. After class, when we came back to our dorm, there was the food on the table. At that time, I did not venture outside the campus, as I was afraid of the unknown, and had no language skills. All I could say was, “How much is it?”, and “Where is the toilet?” In some ways, this summer set the tone for the later years in China: learn the bare essentials for daily survival; ask the students to handle the more difficult language problems. After all, my job is to be with the students, and my pleasure is to travel, alone.

There were three classes of summer students, assembled for the five-week summer English program. Each foreign teacher had one class. Classes “A” and “B” were largely composed of students from AIFT, who had stayed behind for the summer program. They were Business, Finance, and International Trade majors. Class “C” was largely made up of teachers from high-schools, vocational high-schools and the like. They were clever, and came from all over China. This last fact is very important, for out of these 50 or so summer students, I visited about 45 of them, one by one, over the next year or two. That is a lot of travelling. They provided the perfect template for the exploration of China, the world’s best playground. All of my deepest “blue-chip” students came from this summer program. We taught them materials from a “canned curriculum”, which the English teaching organization issued to all of its China-bound teachers. Everything was planned: the English teachers taught, expecting their own outcomes; the Chinese listened, filtering everything after their own purposes. The great game of teaching English in China was no more than a choreographed ballet, between two established positions. As in Africa, I joined an organization as it provided a “pipeline” for me to access a new foreign culture. The organization, and its target audience, really meant very little to me. It was isolation, a new land, travel, and the common folk that I wanted. However, it was 1994, a new country, a new language, and I needed the “infrastructure” of an organization. In time, I left that group, joined another, left them too, and “went independent”. In Bengbu, we taught Culture, Oral English, and Listening; after class, we had “Free Talks”, to develop the students’ conversational skills.

As I said earlier, some of the most important students – and friends, too – came out of this summer. Phone-calls became visits, visits became better and more wide-ranging friendships, and time went by. I dare not write the details here, for they are watching, but suffice to say, they provided enough material for many, many short stories. Later, somewhere else, I will write about them.

There were two other foreign teachers that summer. One was a veteran of many such summer programs. She came from “the old breed”, those who won their honours in the 1950’s (and before), and were the embodiment of dignity. She was “old-school”, rugged (even at 70+), and politely firm and persistent. She was certainly very devoted to her work; every summer, she put her grandmother-role back in the U.S. on hold, and came out to China to teach. She continued to do this for some years, afterwards. The other English teacher was a college student. He was very active and humorous, and liked to have many social activities with the students, such as playing basketball and having “Free Talk” conversations. All three of us summer teachers were very different, but we got on well with each other. We kept our boundaries, respected the senior teacher, got involved with our respective classes, and enjoyed the “summer of miracles”. I also suspect that those who chose who would be on what team, back at the training camp, had something to do with this.

The summer of 1994 in Bengbu was really, really hot. Officially the temperature only sometimes went over 40 degrees C., and then, classes would be shut down. However, we often suspected that unofficially, there were many days over 40 degrees C. All over the campus, especially during siesta time, the cicadias would sing from their trees, and make sleep impossible. We often tried to find them on the branches, but they were too well-hidden. A certain type of ice-cream, made of green mung-beans, vanilla ice-cream, and raisins, became very popular. They were called “cold dogs”. We ate many chilled watermelons. We put hollowed-out half-watermelons on our head, like a swimming cap. We rubbed chilled watermelon peel on our face, to clean the skin. We lay down on a sofa, and had a friend slice up a chilled cucumber, with the slices very thin, and lay them on our face to make a “cucumber mask”. The students said, “It is good for your skin.” I do not know if that is so, but it was cooling, and novel. We stayed inside at noon, but even inside, it was hot. Our rooms had a distinct “one-star hotel” feel to them, but that was no problem to us. We sat and read, or else lay down. If it was obviously over 40 degrees C., then we did no work. There were many conversations about the weather; everybody remembered it for years afterwards.

Every one or two weeks, the AIFT leaders / Foreign Affairs office took us out for a banquet. Dinner-table hospitality is big in this culture – they stuff your face. In those days, I was a merry little glutton; now, I am tired of public eating. In 1994, in AIFT, our hosts were very polite and kind: they offered us very good dishes; we were spared the infamous gauntlet of serial drinking. The senior teacher said “no”, and got away with it because she was older than the others around us; the youngest of the teachers stood on his no-drinking principles; I hid behind the form of the senior teacher. In years to come, it always dismayed me how the hosts often encouraged us to eat so much, yet barely ate themselves; the guests complied out of obligation, and crawled away from the table with bloated guts. It was in Bengbu that I first discovered “mu’er” – the so-called “wood-ear”, black fungus. It is still my favourite Chinese dish. When I tell this to my friends in China, they are surprised and embarrassed, since “mu’er” is such a common dish.

I wish to say something of the social climate towards foreign teachers at that time. The people we dealt with were very vigilant over us – they were worried we would spread ideas among the students. They were also very hospitable, and generally paid attention to the foreign teachers’ daily needs. In those days, foreign English teachers had better status than they do now. There were more “perks and benefits”, and the pay – although less – seemed to stretch farther than today. Although there were reservations on both sides, foreign teachers were more valued; it was something of a “honeymoon period”.

The summer teaching program lasted about five weeks. Much of that time – the actual hours spent in the classroom teaching English – is blurred from my memory. It is the large number of small scenes, recollections, anecdotes, set in a dream-like matrix which fill my mind. I think of veggie-filled buns (cai bao zi), “cold dogs”, cold watermelon, “mu’er”, a trip to Nanjing, a student helping me to rent VCD’s for “film night” with the students, my uneasy but untroubled social position within the small group of foreign teachers, the cicadias singing their hearts out, the privet hedges along the AIFT campus walkways, the faces of those I knew as students that would change over the years (while I remained largely the same), real turtle soup, the blissful exclusion of the outside world and all that had hitherto troubled me (for life in China, under the right conditions, is better than Nirvana, the Island of the Lotus Eaters, and more), the beginning of something new, an awareness of something valuable given to me, and more – much, much more.

Then there was the vision of the walking trees….

One afternoon, I was walking down a street in Bengbu. It was, I imagine, the late afternoon, when people are afoot. It could have been any afternoon, any Chinese city, any group of people… but only me. As I walked along the street, going one way, there were many people walking the other way: I passed though their midst, as through a forest of trees. No one spoke to me, and I could not speak to them – nor did I want to. The people had become a forest of walking trees, leaving me alone. Real trees would talk to real stones more earnestly than I did to those people, or the many who came after them over the next 18 years. All of a sudden, I realized I had found my psychological home – a land of walking trees, a landscape of tolerant exclusion and shades of grey, with hills of concrete, rivers of humanity embalmed in “amber”, an enormous playground both imaginary and actual to play in, and freedom from almost everything I did not want to see. However, at that time, it was the image of the walking trees which took my attention the most. Here at last was a land I could call my own, and yet still be the perfect outsider, alone, doing my own things. If there is one thing I will always love Asia for, it is the tendency of Asian people to automatically exclude me, and yet allow me to live among them. In time, some people let me in, and now I have a home (of sorts). In a “moment of epiphany”, China became an asylum, but with no walls of iron or kapok, a land stretching in every direction. The future was obvious.

“I see men, walking as trees…” – and sometimes, I like it that way.

The summer term ended, and it was time to pack up and go home. As a final friendship offering, the AIFT took us on a short trip to Huang Shan, or “Yellow Mountain”. Quite a few of the students joined this trip, before returning to their homes. Huang Shan is easily China’s best mountain, with laboriously-installed stone stairways going up to the top, as well as a cable-car. At one point, the path went over a “razor-back hog’s back” ridge, with steep drops on each side. We saw the famous pine trees, the epitome of Chinese mountain scenery, but no “sea of clouds” morning fog. We came down the mountain, and then took a long and bouncy bus ride, via Hangzhou, to Shanghai.

We spent a day wandering about parts of Shanghai, along Nanjing Road and the Bund. At that time, the Foreign Affairs officer of AIFT took us to a very memorable dumpling restaurant. How strong is nostalgia! Some years later, I went back to search out that dumpling restaurant and re-live the memories of 1994. The restaurant was there, but the ambience had completely flown away. It was a reminder that today’s memory will not be there, or the same, later on. In fact, over the years, I have seen a steady procession of well-loved restaurants disappear, usually because of urban re-development. We flew back to L. A., and then I returned to the city I had been living in.

My cold fury now resolved, I left the small group, its parent group, what little social life I had, my apartment, the painful memories of the past few years – everything I could set hands on from that mini-chapter of my life. I loaded up a U-Haul trailer, and left. I returned to my father, with new plans.

Over the next year, I did many things, all with a return to China in mind. I studied very basic Chinese at a cultural center in Boston’s Chinatown for a short time. Using their textbook, I began to study by myself. Studying the textbook became like a new religion, and the “Dick-and-Jane” characters therein became my new friends. I watched Zhang Yi Mou and Gong Li films in absolute and spellbound fascination. I made friends with some Chinese students who were in Boston then. I read specialized books on China in libraries which were then open to wandering visitor-readers, but are now closed and restricted. I made plans for a return to China, as soon as possible.

Conclusion: Where did all this lead? This summer of 1994, like 1984 / 1985, was hugely important. It lead to 13 years of active English teaching in China, vast amounts of travel inside China, and many more countries visited. Of the neighbouring countries, Burma and Kyrgyzstan became my favourite, and wellsprings of writing. Bengbu became a sort of Chinese “lao jia” (ancestral home) to me. The summer of 1994 gave me a new lease on life. How good and pleasant it was!