The Danish girls had it right. Life in China is so arduous, there’s never a single day when I don’t wish I were somewhere else. Bad things happen on a daily basis. But I don’t necessarily want to go home. I’d happily join a wandering Gypsy horde in Romania or travel the Australian desert with a tribe of Aborigines. My big fear is that I will return to an America unknown to me, an America where I will face plasma TVs with impossible remote controls, an America with a new jacked-up level of road rage, with an indecipherable new wave of computer software. I will return as Jennifer Crusoe. Or Rip Van Jennackal. This is what often happens to Peace Corps volunteers, or so I’ve heard.

Chengdu is such nonstop noise. Bulldozers and stuff. We had a water pipe in the bathroom burst and the whole bathroom had to be remodeled. You had to step over the construction workers when you came and went since the workers sleep at the job site. They sleep, wake up, drink a cup of tea, eat a bowl of rice, and then work for hours on end. Smoke two packs of cigarettes, go back to sleep in the stairwell, on and on they go twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, every day the carbon copy of the day before. Chinese Groundhog Day. Building and construction work gets done quickly but it’s highly dangerous employment. People doing manual labor, people who work in factories or in coal mines, are constantly getting maimed or killed on the job. You don’t want to be a doctor or lawyer in China; a janitor has more clout. The highest-status job goes to the engineer or computer geek or an entrepreneur versed in American business know-how.

My junkman is always standing by the garbage cans like a prostitute on a street corner. He’s short even by Chinese standards and he likes to clasp his hands, swinging his arms back and forth while whistling to himself or smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. My father is greatly amused by this man of mystery but there is so little to say I have to make things up. One of my goals for China was to get to know the common man but this is impossible because of class differences and the fact that the Sichuan dialect is pretty much impenetrable.

My dad doesn’t get that. In every email or every calling-card phone conversation home he interrogates me about the junkman. “What kind of clothes does the junkman wear?”

“A charcoal sports jacket with gray slacks, suspenders, and a pair of Nikes with white spats.”

“Oh, ho ho. There you go again but really, a sports jacket? Like a businessman, a stockbroker? A lawyer? Does the junkman have a family? How old is he? What career path did he follow before he was reduced in circumstances to the five garbage cans?”