By Lynda Majarian

In my dreams, I am not in China anymore. I am younger, thirtyish, prettier—as I used to be—and fifteen pounds thinner. One of the famous actors I have a crush on is in love with me, or alternately telling me why he doesn’t love me. My former therapist would say this actor represents my inner man, but I don’t know what that means or what he’s trying to tell me. When I awaken, I am always sad and surprised I am still in China, because I never thought I would return to this country I love and despise with equal vigor.
Every morning I am awake by four-thirty or five. It’s still dark out, and the night watchman is playing his radio too loudly in the guardhouse outside my open window, which is probably what wakes me up. I take my Synthroid, start the coffee, open the curtains in the sitting room to watch it get light outside, and wait for the rooster dwelling somewhere in the neighborhood to crow at first light. I drink three cups of coffee with milk, often listening to my ipod, mostly Tom Waits, The Black Crowes, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Chris Whitley. On bad non-teaching days, and if there are no papers to grade, I wonder how I am going to get through another fourteen hours of boredom, depression, and anxiety. On good non-teaching days, I wonder what I might explore in Shanghai, a city which, after nearly two months, is still new to me. On teaching days, I look forward to seeing my students, all postgrads trying to learn English, and hope I have the stamina to get through my classes, which run from eight to five on Thursdays, eight to noon on Fridays. Recently, I pulled a hamstring trying to stretch, and walking is excruciating, even after taking two ibuprofen. Plus in China, the professors always stand for the duration of the classes, making my leg hurt more. Is having such an easily pulled tendon a sign of aging?
It may be, but in all modesty, I think I can pass for forty, though the fragile skin of my eyelids is beginning to sag. I have long dark hair, blue eyes, and wear a lot of black eyeliner, which the therapist mentioned above was always telling me looked “Goth.” This, and the inner man crap, are the reasons why I have cut ties with her. The ties I have cut with my friends and family back home are unintentional—a side effect of taking this job—and emails, Skype, and occasional phone calls must suffice.
Because this is a non-teaching day, and my leg really hurts, I decide to make just a short excursion—less than three blocks away. On my way downstairs I pass a family—I can tell by their accents they’re American. I smile at the blonde woman but she won’t smile back. This is pretty typical of the foreign faculty who are my neighbors here.
Right outside my apartment a bunch of old men are talking and giving their little caged birds some fresh air. The birds, I don’t know what kind, chirp merrily in bamboo cages with pretty porcelain dishes for their water and food. Further down the block, old people with their grandchildren are sitting at outside tables of tiny restaurants, eating fried bread and soup, the steam pouring from the pots and their bowls. These are things I still love about China.
I’m on my way to what I call the “fresh market” because many of the foodstuffs they sell are still alive or were recently living: squirming fish and flailing crabs, chickens and quail squeezed together in tight cages. There are also whole dead fish on ice, unrefrigerated slabs of beef on wooden blocks, ready to be cut to order, vegetables and fruits—some strange, some of which I recognize—and a few tables of cheap junk: coat hangers, pot scrubbers, flimsy toys. I like the smiling, moon-faced woman at the first vegetable stand, so I always go to her. I know my Chinese numbers up to ten: yi, èr, si, san, wu, liù, qi, ba, jiu, shi, and my broccoli, ginger, red bell peppers, and Japanese eggplant never add up higher. This market is one of the things I love about China, the freshness and foreignness of it, the sights and smells. The way the moon-faced woman sometimes gives me a discount and a free scallion.
It’s best to wear sneakers in the market, because the floor is wet with melting ice and sloshing fish water. Once I walked home behind a woman on a bicycle balancing a bucket of fish eyes and guts. Needless to say, I kept my distance. Another morning, I walked home after a second stop at a convenience mart—there’s one on every corner—with vegetables, milk, and a beer in my recycled canvas bag. It was raining and I was wearing flip-flops, and I kept slipping and catching myself, slipping and catching myself, praying not to fall. I always feel close to falling in one capacity or another: physically, emotionally, mentally, or psychologically. I got all the way to my apartment building’s marble front steps and took a header onto the pavement. Embarrassed more than hurt, though with a bleeding gash on my elbow, I cringed as Mr. Tu, who works at reception, came out to check on me.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Just wearing the wrong shoes. Sorry about the mess.” A puddle of milk was mingling with a puddle of water on the stoop.
“It too terrible,” he said. Mr. Tu is one of only two people at reception who speak any English, which is sort of funny when you think about it. “I clean it up.”
I held my umbrella under my squished milk to keep it from dripping on the lobby floor and up the stairs. Later, when I went out for milk again, this time in my sneakers, I noticed he had put a “Caution—wet floor” sign on the steps.
“I feel like an idiot,” I emailed my friend Dan, who lived in China for a long time, later that day.
“Don’t,” he wrote back. “They’re the ones who feel bad. They lost face because you hurt yourself on their watch.”
Even later, I was pissed that I fell, because every morning I pray for a lot of things, and one of them is not falling, because I’m a little clumsy sometimes. And I still fell. But maybe it could be considered testing God when you wear flip-flops in the rain. Still, I was glad I had antibiotic ointment, and that my Tsingtao beer bottle hadn’t broken, because I would have been really hurt then, and Mr. Tu might have thought I was a drunk, buying beer at nine-thirty in the morning. I wasn’t going to drink it until that night. And I’m not a drunk, though I have gotten into a lot of trouble as a result of imbibing too much alcohol, and a lot of it in China.
You see, Shanghai isn’t my first Chinese rodeo. About eight years ago, I first saw China through a tourist’s eyes. I was working in public affairs for a university in Vermont, and the director of the Asian Studies program included me in a summer trip to Beijing and Inner Mongolia in exchange for an article in the school’s alumni magazine. The trip was arranged for Vermont teachers and principals to promote Asian studies in their schools. We had Chinese guides wherever we went, and I was treated like royalty—the only member of the group to have my own room, which came in handy when I had a torrid affair with a high school teacher. (He had a live-in girlfriend but I figured he was the one cheating, not me. Bad karma, I know.) I switched vocations in 2005 from PR to teaching.
Three years ago I spent the academic year in northeast China in a sooty, remote city called Shenyang, where I taught English Composition to undergraduates who had different levels of prowess in speaking English. There, we were a tight-knit group of American teachers who were good teachers and even better partyers. My three best friends from Shenyang, who got together for dinners and outings several times a week, are still in touch and saw each other two years ago at a writing conference in Washington, D.C. But in Shanghai, there are few other foreign teachers who speak English, and the few who do keep to themselves. Ironically, I’m living in the world’s biggest city, and I’ve never been so lonely in my life.