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A Journey to Hengshan Mountain
We took the midnight express back to Chenzhou from Hengshan late Saturday night. This meant getting dirty. I once spent four years as a grunt. Digging foxholes and wading through marshes was dirty work too. I look back at this previous incarnation with nostalgia as I board a crowded train in which tickets were sold beyond seating capacity for people to stand or sit in the aisles. The windows were sealed shut. There was the sound of people hawking up snotty yellow mucous. Chewed up sunflower seeds and cigarette butts scattered upon the floor. Old men with rotten, nicotine stained teeth smoked in the thresholds between cars. They came back…
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Teaching Thoreau in the Heartland of China
I was teaching Thoreau in a time when the Chinese were migrating from the countryside into the cities. It was a new Industrial Age—but this one was taking place during the age of globalism, cell phones, and Hello Kitty. Experts estimated that a population greater than that of America’s total population would move into Chinese cities within the next 15-20 years.  There I was at the vanguard of this exodus where some of my students had left their families behind in the rice paddies. These students were their family’s only hope. But for those now living and working in the cities, there was the heady pleasure of shopping. The…
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The Journey Began
Reality Laid Somewhere Between Daydreams and Nightmares I got out of bed at dawn Wednesday. It had been restless night spent thinking about all the clever things I would say to make students wonder if I was some reincarnated Confucius in disguise. I had spent the last few days losing track of time in a kaleidoscopic tour of Chinese culture and hospitality. And I had spent the nights of that last disorienting week of summer vacation dealing with nightmares about the first day of class. These nightmares had nothing in common with my daydreams. In them I was continuously lost in labyrinthine hallways, losing my books despite fruitless nightlong search…