The other day, as I was walking to the bus stop after class, I saw one of my students from last semester going the other way. As I’ve been doing with any of my former students that I recognize, I gave him a wave and said hello. When I did this, instead of waving back and returning my greeting, he quickly came walking towards me and said, “I’ve been waiting for you.” Although I recognized him as one of my old students, I barely knew him. “Huh?” I said. “You told me that you’d meet me this afternoon.” To the best of my knowledge, I hadn’t even seen him since December. “I did?” I’d stopped walking and we were now facing each other. As if to confirm he said, “Mike, right?” He seemed pretty certain. “No. I’m Matt, your English instructor from last semester. Remember?” He squinted his eyes, winced, and tilted back his head as a pained look of embarrassment briefly crossed his face, and then passed. “Mike said that he’d help me with the IELTS (the British equivalent of the TOEFL exam). Do you know where he is?” I wasn’t even sure if I knew who Mike was let alone where he was. “I’m sorry. I don’t.” He showed me a multiple-choice worksheet clipped into a binder. He looked hopeful. I gave him a pat on the arm and said, “If you need help with the IELTS, Mike’s the man to see.” I continued on my way. “Good luck with it.” Mike and I are, presumably, the only two white men that he’s been in relatively close proximity to this year, and he still can’t tell us apart. I thought that it was pretty funny. We all must look alike.

My overland return to Nanjing went about as well as could be expected. My bags were so heavy that the 150RMB cab ride from Pudong to Hengfeng Lu bus station in Shanghai felt worth it. The cold rain and my unfamiliarity with the surroundings even made the 200RMB price of the sleeper bus to Nanjing bearable. I stepped up the stairs, took off my shoes, put them in a little red plastic bag, and took my place in a small bunk, one of I think twenty-four on the bus. Uncomfortably reclining, I heard the ticket man telling a woman that I (the lao wei) had paid 200 kuai…but for her he’d only charge 100. I didn’t care. I was just relieved to catch a ride out of town. As we rode along in the dimly lit darkness of the highway and I looked past the Chow Yun Fat movie playing on the monitor hanging down from the underside of the bunk above me, I watched the driver and his two co-workers, sitting next to him, talk with each other in a relaxed way. As I nodded off into semi-consciousness, they began to sound to me as if they were speaking English, maybe chatting about a ballgame, complaining about the weather. Back in Shanghai, when I’d asked if the bus was going to Nanjing, the ticket man conferred with the driver and then finally said that it was. He mentioned the huochezhan, the train station, and then said, in English, “You take taxi.” Shortly after we entered Nanjing’s city limits, the driver pulled alongside the road. His assistant waved me to the front and hopped off the bus, hailing a cab. I put on my shoes and followed. Outside, he handed over some money to cover my fare, said something, and left. He seemed sheepish, as if he was sorry to be leaving me on the side of the road on a cold, rainy night, and didn’t know what to say. When I gave the cabbie my address, he said that he was only given enough money to go to the train station. “Wo you kuai.” was as close as I could get to saying that I had money. He rubbed his fingers together. I showed him a 100RMB note. Twenty minutes and 28RMB later I was at the West Gate of the university, staggering under my luggage the final five hundred yards or so to my apartment. When I had left Boston, it was 10am on February 13th. Opening my door in Nanjing, it was just after midnight on February 15th. It’s as far as it seems.

Flying from Chicago to Shanghai on my return to Nanjing, our airplane traveled in a great parabola over the frozen desert of Hudson Bay, the Queen Elizabeth Islands, and northwestern Canada towards its vertex near the international dateline, and then arced downward over Siberia and the Verkhoyanskiy Mountains, Mongolia, and, finally, China. Outside my window somewhere over the Arctic Ocean, the pinkness of the dawnlike sky and the soft, powdery blueness of the clouds contrasted with the improbable full moon, glowing sharp bright and yellow as the sun, low on the horizon, over the endless ice and emptiness below. I have come this way before. I have never seen anything like this. Equally alien and beautiful, I at once understood the powerful and often fatal attraction felt by Arctic and Antarctic explorers driven to places like this. I don't have the words to truly describe what my eyes saw in those moments-I can only be thankful that they saw what they did.