There’s an evident discrepancy between Mr. Murphy’s idea of “orderly fashion” and our interpretation of the words, because soon everyone’s standing up and jostling each other trying to get to the front.

“Orderly!” Mr. Murphy cries over the squeak of chairs and the countless voices talking at the same time. “I said orderly!”

In the chaos, I manage to squeeze close enough to get a view of the paper in Mr. Murphy’s outstretched hand, the tens of names printed in tidy rows across it. But it’s not my name I’m searching for.

Peter Oh and Kevin Nguyen: Room 902.

I carve the number into my memory. If everything goes well, this is the room I’ll end up in tonight.

Once we’re all back in our seats and our plates are scraped clean, Wei Laoshi takes over, leading us out to the bus again. I think he’s really starting to embrace his tourist guide role, because he puts on a red bucket hat, waves a little flag with the school logo on it high over his head and says, with sincere enthusiasm, “Now—who’s ready for some sightseeing?”

The old districts of Suzhou are beautiful.

Like a magical secret kept safe and hidden from the outside world. A soft, milky fog spills across the winding waterways, the crooked, crowded alleys and faded white houses, blurring the lines between land and sky. There are women wringing out their laundry by the banks, leathery-skinned men hauling nets of fish from the murky green canals, college-aged girls posing and snapping photos by the willow trees, pretty oil paper umbrellas rested over their shoulders.

“Oh—oh, it’s like the Chinese version of Venice!” Julie Walsh gasps when we step out of the bus, her high heels clacking against the century-old pavement.

But the place doesn’t look like Venice to me. It doesn’t look like anywhere else in the world.

We start walking down the side of a canal, with Wei Laoshi leading the way. Every now and then, he stops to point at things—a statue of a solemn-looking official, a slanted inn, a boat drifting atop the waters—and call out random facts, saying how the Qianlong emperor once stayed in Suzhou for ten days and couldn’t bear to leave, even reciting a few lines of the emperor’s poetry.

I’m sure Qianlong’s poem is great, but all I can get out of it is something about a bird and a mountain and blood—no, snow—no—

“Wait, Wei Laoshi,” Chanel ventures. “I keep forgetting—which one was Qianlong and which one was Qin Shihuang again? Like, who was the dude that buried scholars alive?”

Wei Laoshi halts in his tracks and turns, fixing Chanel with a look that quite clearly implies: you uncultured swine.

“What?” Chanel says, defensive. “I used to go to school in Australia. It’s not like they teach you much about Chinese history there.”

Wei Laoshi just sighs and casts his eyes heavenward, like he might be apologizing to the spirit of the Qianlong emperor himself.

The bus ride took twice as long as the teachers predicted, thanks to peak-time traffic, and soon everyone’s hungry again. Wei Laoshi’s tour is cut short as a result, and with another long-suffering look, he abandons his lecture on the history of paper umbrellas to take us all on a spontaneous trip to the night market.