I get to see the ocean every day

About a week before we left Xi'an, I tagged along to Blondie's Friday afternoon sophomore English class. As I was once (and sometimes still am) pretty interested in teaching English overseas, I was curious to see it in action. Blondie told me that everyone would be interested in the new Foreigner, but I thought I could kind of hide out in a back corner.

Unfortunately, there was no corner. The classroom was small and packed with three rows of two-seater desks that lined up all the way to the back wall. I asked one student if I could sit in the empty seat at her desk, but she shyly told me that her classmate was on her way. There wasn't an extra chair and Blondie was about to raid another classroom when one student appeared with a small stool and set it right next to her own desk. I sat down and realized, painfully, that I was in the middle of the room, blocking an aisle, and very much on display. The student next to me just smiled, patted my arm, and turned her attention to Blondie.

The student's English name, I learned later when we were practicing introductions during a "cocktail party", was Kitty and Kitty wanted to know everything and anything about America and American students. She introduced me to half the girls in class (English classes in Chinese universities are almost all made up of girls) and did not leave my side. Kitty was harder to understand than Audrey and Linda and some of the other girls, maybe because she didn't speak as loudly? I don't know. But she felt an awful lot like the good student assigned to be friends with the New Girl At School and did her best to make me feel welcome. After class she and Audrey invited Blondie and I to dinner. I'd told the girls about my freakishly tall Chinese-American husband and oh, that was incredibly intriguing and he was welcome too!

So commenced the evening of eating what shall ever after be known as Glorious Hot Pot. It was the nicest restaurant we went to in Xi'an, with waiters who brought you slices of watermelon while you waited for your table and waitresses who, seconds after seeing you lift your hair up and fan your neck because the POWER WENT OUT and the AIR CONDITIONING WAS OFF, brought you a ponytail holder!

On the drizzly dirty walk back to campus, Kitty worried about the fact that I wasn't using my umbrella. "Kitty," I patiently explained, "in my hometown [in China you are not "from" somewhere, you have a "hometown"] people call you a Big Fat Wuss if you walk around in weather like this with an umbrella." As this just confused her more ("Huh? Big Fat What?"), I opened my umbrella. When we got to campus, Kitty held my hand and made sure I didn't inadverdently step into a filthy puddle or slip off a sidewalk. She desperately wanted to show us her dorm room, but worried about how dirty it might be and how she lived in the "oldest dormitory in China", surely a shack compared to the luxurious American dormitories she'd heard about.

I regret not bringing my camera to that dormitory more than I regret not making it to the Great Wall. We had to get special permission for Phillip to enter- the students are shocked- shocked!- that there are co-ed American dorms, let alone co-ed FLOORS in American dorms!- and then climbed a flight of stairs to Kitty's floor. It turned out that all the girls in the English class lived on this floor. The students live together, go to the same classes, and graduate with the same major. They also live eight to a room, studying and sleeping on skinny bunkbeds with a curtains strung on wires for privacy. We admired Kitty's choice of fabric for her curtain, said hello to the girls hiding behind their curtains because they were wearing pajamas, and popped our heads into Linda's room across the hall. The hallway was filled with open umbrellas drying out and girls carrying their toiletry baskets back from the bathroom. It was a lot like the dorms I lived in, except the floor was cold concrete, the ceilings were too tall, the building was too dark and bare, and I had one roommate instead of seven.

I saw Kitty, Audrey, and Linda one last time before we left, when their class came to our apartment for "office hours" and we spent an hour talking about the differences between the United States and China. Kitty, particularly, was very concerned about my impression of China and if I was enjoying myself and whether I might come back. What kind of Chinese food did I like best? What was my favorite sight? Did the weather bother me too much? What other cities in China might I like to visit next time? I told Kitty that if she were ever able to visit America, I would love to have her stay with me. I expected her to play along, but she frowned and said, "Oh, I don't know if I'll ever get to see your hometown!"

Kitty wrote to me the other day about "your Hollowing Festival" and how Blondie is planning a party for her class. Kitty wanted to know how I plan to celebrate this great American festival. I spent half an hour writing about trick or treating, carving pumpkins, the costumes I wore when I was a kid, and how my brother's birthday was a few days before Halloween and he always had a Halloween-themed party. I even wrote about All Saint's Day and All Hallow's Eve and the muddled origin of the completely secular 'holiday' that now, apparently, offends Wiccans. I wanted to send Kitty a link to this site so she could get a glimpse of the Great Pumpkin Massacre, but you can't view Typepad sites in China. (In case you're wondering, you can access www.typepad.com, but typing in soandso.typepad.com always returned an error. If I ever wanted to see the published site, I had to remote desktop to our computer at home and look at it there.)

The first email Kitty sent to me was about a trip to the coast that she and Audrey took during their Mid-Autumn break. It was the first time she'd ever seen the ocean. She was jealous of me, she said, because I get to see the ocean every day.

It's cold in my office (I actually broke down and asked my grandmother for one of the laprobes she knits for people in retirement homes) and colder outside, but we've had a run of bright sunny days and no rain. From my desk I can see the narrow channel that connects Lake Union and Lake Washington to the actual Pacific Ocean. The Ballard Locks are a mile down the road and every day we see all kinds of boats and ships floating past on their way to the ocean. There are binoculars on the window sill so we can get an even better view.

I don't want to tell Kitty that, technically, Puget Sound is not the ocean. Because, well, I FEEL like I see the ocean every day.