I often dream of visiting China, particularly Hong Kong. In the nineties, I spent several semesters teaching English to Chinese students, which is what endeared me most to the idea of visiting. Before I taught, I had no problems with Chinese people. Since then, I've grown to see Chinese people as family. The grizzled former radio announcer from Guangzhou who now sells me green tea and herbal medicines, the shy and slightly pock-marked waitress in the vegetarian restaurant on Mott Street, the programmer from Hong Kong, the fashionable-looking guy from Shanghai who sells me minidisc recorders, the immaculately manicured second-gen lawyer on Wall Street, the tall long-haired hipster DJ who works at Etherea and is kinder than anyone else there -- they don't even have to like me for me to be fond of them. I'm always thrilled to see Chinese culture permeate the States.
A professor friend of mine named Larry McCaffery taught at a Chinese university one year and actually risked his own life to help smuggle dissident students out of the country. He is a respected editor who spends more time promoting the work of other writers than he does promoting himself. The rest of us might brag about books we've written, but Larry is better than all of us because he's saved people's lives.
But back to my teaching days. One of my students was a forty-something man who had spent his life working in the fields. He had trouble with English initially and kept saying things like "I stupid." I spent time with him privately and actually taught him to write poetry. By the end of the semester, he could write beautiful essays that conveyed an infectious warmth and revealed his gift for vivid imagery. This is from one of them: "When I arrived in America for the first time, it was nightfall. I looked down from our plane and the highways were rivers of stars."
At graduation, my student, whose name was Ming, could barely look at me. "I will be missing you," he said. What he didn't say was that he had given up living in America and was going back to China. I have often wondered what happened to him. And though I dream of going to China for other reasons, perhaps if I visit, I'll try to look him up.
