So I stand near the toilet and listen. “Tomato skins and corn? Good God! I don’t remember eating tomatoes and corn.” After a big chunder in the squat toilet she eats a low-cal spinach salad and feels virtuous.

Elizabeth grew up speaking Chinese in her Nevada home, where her family spoke Chinese and Chinese alone. Like after twenty years in America, her parents still can’t speak three words of English. Which means Elizabeth knows the Chinese language well enough to get straight A’s in introductory Chinese-language classes. She doesn’t have to open the book. Meanwhile she basks in the glory of her professor’s high praise. So there you have it, two felonious crimes! Not only is Elizabeth a puker, she also pretends to learn Mandarin Chinese when in reality she already knows it forwards and back. She has even tricked herself into feeling proud over this pathetic non-accomplishment. I’m a Caucasian taking advanced Chinese courses, doing the work of fifty Sabine slaves and forty horses, and still, B’s are not unknown to me. I believe that a report card with inflated A’s is as dishonest as a puker’s thin frame. I’m not some evil bitch. I feel empathy and compassion for Elizabeth, I truly do, and I don’t report her secret life to anyone. Mainland China has thrown many a young American around the bend, but enough of my tiresome clichés.

Chengdu, where I live and go to school, is in Sichuan Province. It’s a city of ten million. I’m one of the hundred or so Caucasians in this sunless, three-packs-a-day, air-pollution nightmare of a megalopolis where the sky is perpetually white with ozone-dense smog and where, as I have briefly mentioned, the tap water is undrinkable.

When you are out and about roaming the drab streets of Chengdu you drink Ice Dew bottled water only after carefully checking the aluminum-sealed bottle caps for tampering. A bottle of Ice Dew drinking water goes for less than two yuan, about twenty cents. In the little street stalls these beverages are mostly warm, though the shop proprietors sometimes keep a bottle or two of Ice Dew water in the ice-cream freezers.

I give the empty Ice Dew bottles, which are refundable, to a junkman who sits in front of five trash bins outside my apartment complex. This is what the man does for a living. My father loves junkman reports and inquires after him at every opportunity.