PART THREE

China

SEARCHING FOR MY “SQUARE OF CLARITY” IN XI’AN.

 

 

A BOY IS MOANING, an echoing, sorrowful wail like a lonesome seal.

Eeeeeeeeeee … Eeeeeeeeeee … Eeeeeeeeeee…

His fingers are twisted and locked—thumb out, pinky curled, middle fingers in odd directions, almost disjointed. A teacher kneels and speaks in a soft voice as he howls.

I’m wedged in a tiny plastic chair against the classroom’s back wall, packed tight in a row of children, my knees near my chest. These are my first minutes at La La Shou—“Hand in Hand” in English—a school for special-needs children in Xi’an, and three classes are merged in one loud room: second graders, third graders, fourth graders; about thirty kids in all; most of them autistic, some with developmental disabilities; the room booming with squeals.

“Bà-baaaaa …,” yells one boy, pointing at me, looking as though he might cry. “Bà-baaaaa …”

He repeats this for many minutes.

Another boy raises his arms and shakes his hands, again and again, like an evangelist praising God. A thin girl with sunken eyes strokes a teacher’s ponytail, gently; a tall boy jumps from his seat, rummages through a box, and finds a whistle—

Tweeeeeeeeeeet!

One of the teachers—they wear orange T-shirts with Motorola logos—takes it from him and returns him to his chair, where a boy is stomping his feet. Another boy takes off his shoes and socks. Some kids get up and jump and sit back down; others say nothing, staring blankly at the floor.

Sitting next to me is Liu Baojian, a third grader I’ll be paired with most of my two weeks. He is a slow-moving boy, I’m told, and one of my tasks is to help him improve his motor skills, from exercising to writing. He looks at me with cloudy eyes, then lays his head on my leg.

The teachers speak. I understand nothing. They play kiddie music on a small stereo and lead a choreographed dance. Some of the kids follow. Most of the kids don’t.

Liu Baojian sits up and claps, but not in rhythm. Am I supposed to help him clap?

A happy pudgy boy in pink sandals and a black mafia-style sweatsuit gets up, claps, then squeezes back into his row of chairs. As he shoves his way in, a boy on the end is squeezed off, falling to the floor.

I hear screams and squawks and sobs and laughs and Chinese Chinese Chinese and see heads bobbing, twisting, bouncing.

I am overwhelmed. Culture shock overload, I write later that morning.

A tall, chubby boy lumbers up to me and shakes my hand, almost as if he’s running for office. He’s wearing a green Snoopy T-shirt, one he will wear often in the days to come. He pumps my hand, up and down, up and down, a huge grin on his round face. As he ambles away, I see the back of his shirt has a sentence in English.

“Today is a good day.”

Roughly eight million people live in metropolitan Xi’an. To cross a downtown street is not simply to evade cars, but to evade death itself. Unlike the streets in D.C., where walk signs tick the time before a light changes—where a turning Metrobus slows, and waits, until pedestrians cross the street—Xi’an is a collision of men, women, children, scooters, taxis, trucks, bikes, cars, and claustrophobic buses roaring forward at once. Hesitancy is both useless and essential as you step into traffic. You let the bus pass. Take two more steps. Taxi. Step. Wait—shit—bus—step step step—whoa— car. Then more cars. A scooter so loaded with boxes you can’t see the driver. And then you find you’ve scooched halfway through four lanes of firing-range traffic. But you keep moving forward, because if you don’t, you stay on the sidewalk.

And that, I realize now, was my life after Costa Rica. Standing on the sidewalk, afraid to cross.

I never expected to volunteer in China. I’d done my international We Are the World gig. It was time to be normal again. And so two and a half years passed between our departure from San Carlos and my arrival in Xi’an.

After Julie and I left Escuela Cuestillas for the final time, as we rode away from waving hands in a van-churned fog of dust, I felt … relief. Yes, I would miss the children—the rowdy, sweaty soccer games; Tabitha’s giggle between classes; those satisfying moments when our amateur teaching techniques actually worked. I would miss the lush, wet, sticky, steamy green country. But I never quite got over that feeling of oh my God, how are we going to teach these kids, which slammed us so hard that first day.

A week or so after we got home, I met my best buddies—Julie’s brother Tom, my old college friends Adam and Terry—at Fat Tuesday’s, a strip mall bar we like because it’s so unlike a strip mall bar. The cigarette smoke soaks into your clothes (or it did until the smoking laws changed), the floor is covered in peanut shells. We drank happy hour beers, and the more I told them about Roberto and Tabitha and how Julie and I scrambled to develop lesson plans, the more I appreciated the experience. I had never immersed myself that deeply in another country or another job. I’d always been a tourist. At Escuela Cuestillas I was a teacher, a playmate, a friend.

A few weeks after we came home, I exchanged e-mails with Jonathan, who was still in San Carlos with James. Jonathan filled me in on the latest gossip from the CCS house. Rumor had it a Canadian volunteer had hooked up with the guy who drove us to Monteverde. (“Talk about immersing yourself in the culture,” I wrote back.) Jonathan and James had traveled on weekends to Puerto Viejo and Manuel Antonio National Park on Costa Rica’s Pacific and Caribbean coasts. On a snorkeling trip, James gashed his head on a propeller and sat in a bloody daze, the boat rocking in the sun, while everyone else continued swimming and frolicking with tropical fish.

Later, I asked Jonathan why he was volunteering for three months, leaving his partner in Birmingham, something we hadn’t discussed in San Carlos. “It probably started at a subconscious level about ten years ago, just before I was approaching my 40th birthday,” he wrote back. “I started to take stock of what I’d achieved in my life and, more importantly, what I’d like to achieve in the time ahead. I attended a year-long course to improve my management skills and it forced me to confront myself about what mattered in life. It enabled me to see that you only really know about yourself when you face the unknown—when you’re outside your comfort zone. This brought the idea of helping out in other communities from the subconscious to the conscious level. When the chance of severance came along I knew it was my time to face the unknown and take a leap of faith.”

I’d had similar thoughts before I traveled to New Orleans and Costa Rica, thoughts that never faded. And two years later I was still pondering my purpose, still feeling irrelevant, when something unusual happened.

I read a book.

I say this is unusual because it was a spiritual self-help book, and I am not a spiritual self-help book kind of guy. It was on a giveaway cart at work—Ruling Your World, by an incarnate lama from Tibet named Sakyong Mipham—and I grabbed it without thinking, the way I might grab a cookie from a tray; as if I routinely pick up books by incarnate lamas. Some concepts, such as drip (contamination stemming from negativity and selfishness) were easier for me to grasp than windhorse (I still have no clue). But the writing resonated.

“Getting off the ‘me’ plan is the cause of happiness,” Mipham wrote.

Caring for others is the basis of worldly success. This is the secret that we don’t learn in school.... We usually don’t pay attention to these truths until our expectations about life are interrupted by aches in our body or lines on our face, an accident, or the illness or death of somebody close to us. Then we experience a moment of panic that temporarily cuts through drip, our web of habitual assumptions.... We don’t think, “Life is precious. I’d better start helping others.” We just go back to pursuing pleasure or not rocking the boat. Thinking we have all the time in the world, we waste it.

I didn’t tell anyone I was reading this. It sounds so damn pretentious: if someone says, “Hey—how’s it going,” I don’t say, “Good—I’m reading a book by an incarnate lama named Sakyong Mipham.” But I read that book with Sakyong’s fuzzy shaved head on the shiny cover, read it on the commuter train to and from work, read it as the train crossed the Potomac: as Alexandria apartments became Fairfax parks. I hunched over the slim paperback, highlighting passages, before zipping it in my shoulder bag—hiding it—getting off at my station and driving home.

And then Terry told me a story about how he got racked.

Each March, I drive two hours south to Richmond with Terry, Adam, and Tom to root for our alma mater, George Mason University, in a college basketball tournament. Tom got his bachelor’s degree in aeronautic engineering from Virginia Tech, and then his master’s in structural engineering at the University of Virginia, but he feels little connection to those schools. So we’ve made him an honorary Mason grad.

The four of us have season tickets for men’s hoops, and this is the grand finale: the school that wins the tourney gets an automatic bid for March Madness. For us, the trip is a two-to-three-day binge of booze, beer, basketball, bad jokes, bad gas, insults, cigarettes, the occasional political rant, and talk of life’s joys and disappointments, all topped by morning hangover coffee and greasy sausage-and-hash-brown breakfasts. We hit our favorite spots: the Penny Lane Pub, run by a native Liverpudlian, the late-night by-the-slice pizza joint catering to inebriated barhoppers in lively yet sketchy Shockoe Bottom. We have our favorite stories: the night I fell asleep in the Penny Lane bathroom; the morning a guy tried to steal the cash we left for breakfast at a diner (the cook threatened him with a meat cleaver).

Terry told his story after a late morning walk by the James River. We stopped for coffee at a café in Shockoe Slip—a brick-sidewalk area of restaurants and bars—sitting outside, enjoying the sun and the unseasonably warm weather, trying to ignore the creepy guy behind us engaged in an argument with himself.

Adam took a call from his wife.

“How’s the home front?” I said when he was done.

“Good. Erik and Amber both have soccer games.”

“I miss my boys,” said Terry of his two infant sons. “But I need this weekend. It scares me how much I look forward to this weekend.”

Terry and Adam are great fathers. They’re not remote control dads who dump the dirty work on their wives. But Adam talked about the stress of raising kids.

“Every night’s an ordeal. They get so much homework. It’s crazy how much homework they get. And then it’s a pain getting them to do it. And then getting them to bed, packing lunches, telling them again to go to bed.”

“Yeah, but they give so much love,” said Terry.

Terry and I were roommates at Mason. I was already living in our on-campus apartment when he moved in. I peeked in his just-unpacked room and saw a God poster on the wall, a black leather Bible on his bed, his shoes perfectly aligned on the floor, as if he’d straightened them with a laser. Great, I thought: he’s an anal retentive religious fanatic. A pious Felix Unger. (Terry had his own concerns. He saw three half-gallons of vodka on my desk, and found me asleep one morning on the bathroom floor, and assumed I was an alcoholic.)

We both learned we were way off. Terry became a minister and one of my best friends. What I like about Terry is that he never self-righteously shoves his Baptist beliefs down your throat. He lives his life (happily), he helps others, he cares about people, which says more about his relationship with God than any holier-than-thou pronouncements.

At the café in Richmond, he told a story about his sons, Clarence and Ray. “I was lying down on the bed. I had the flu—a fever, upset stomach—and Mary kept the boys out of the room. I felt awful. And then Clarence kind of slipped past the door, and he climbed on the bed, and he sat next to me, and he didn’t say anything, but he just really gently rubbed my stomach. It’s the same thing I do when he’s not feeling good.”

Major awwwww moment.

“That’s nice,” said Adam.

“Yeah,” said Terry. “And then Ray got up on the bed and stepped on my balls.”

We laughed, but it struck me as soon as he said it: that’s what I’m missing by not being a parent. Those precious, life-affirming, unspeakably touching moments punctuated by the occasional shot to the balls.

The sun warmed our winter-pale skin, and the creepy guy behind us insisted to no one that his brother-in-law was a fool for buying a Cadillac, and I drank my coffee, quiet as Terry, Tom, and Adam talked a bit louder to drown out his voice.

Not long after the Richmond trip, late one night after Julie went to bed, I brewed a cup of tea, went upstairs past our darkened bedroom, and pulled a folder labeled “Dad” from my desk. This room, which would be a child’s bedroom, is my office. I started the folder after Dad’s death to store the letters we received from family and friends. Here I keep my eulogy, my sister’s eulogy, the funeral program; photocopies of the letters Dad wrote, which Mom found after his death.

I pulled out the worn photocopy of his China journal. Dad was insecure about his writing—he’d labor into the night before giving a presentation at work—but I’ve always found his work to be honest and vivid, like this passage about his Chinese road trip:

We drove for ten hours with the horn blowing constantly, swerving around cars, carts, people, large pot holes and once a pig. My bottom became numb.

I was surprised at the poverty and the junk and garbage everywhere. For all ten hours there was an endless stream of people and buses (totally full).

We finally stopped around 1:00 p.m. for lunch. The dishes were so dirty we had to wash them with hot tea and wipe them with napkins. Food was good, but I tried not to visualize the kitchen!

A few days after reading this, I visited the cemetery, a place I rarely go. Mom believes you should go out of respect. But after Dad died, Terry gave me a copy of A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis’s angry and often self-pitying pontification on life, death, and God following the loss of his wife. In it, Lewis writes of ballads and tales he’s read “in which the dead tell us that our mourning does them some kind of wrong. They beg us to stop it.... It made the dead far more dead.” My own interpretation is that the dead want us living, doing, being. Groovin’ rather than grieving. Not hanging out in cemeteries.

I don’t really believe that Dad’s here. If a spirit or soul lives within us, or beyond us, his is far from this cemetery, and far beyond his grave, which rests on a hill, looking down on a bank of trees, yellow leaves falling to hard autumn earth. In summer, fireflies blink in clumps. Many Koreans and Vietnamese are buried here—behind Dad are the names Chu and Tse, below him Choi and Lim—and their families hang wind chimes, which tinkle and sing as breezes tap branches. Asian families often picnic here, sitting on blankets and eating by their loved one’s grave.

I brushed away leaves from the brownish bronze stone. Sometimes when I’m here, I’ll talk to Dad. But on this day I just watched the trees. I remembered one of those Dad-isms he said my entire life.

If you’re going to do something, Budo, always do it right.

Yeah, I know.

It’s like…

Running. Sometimes we run around the block and think we’ve run a marathon.

That’s me, I realize now. New Orleans and Costa Rica were the start of the journey. Not the journey itself.

I need to do more. Like Jonathan said: Face the unknown. Be selfless instead of selfish. But wait—

Normal people don’t do this.

Right?

Normal people with a wife and a job and a mortgage who commute to a tidy office five days a week don’t jet around the world paying good money to work for free and perspire in developing countries for two-week intervals.

Not usually, no.

But if I’m doomed to a life without children, isn’t this one of the peculiar benefits? The time not spent in Cub Scout meetings and parent-teacher conferences? The money not spent at Chuck E. Cheese or squirreled away for college?

If you’re gonna do something, Budo, always do it right.

A breeze blows. I stand and I think, and dream, and wonder, and scheme, and I listen to the Asian wind chimes tinkling across the acres like the tiptoes of ghosts.

So here’s the plan, not expressed to a soul, not even in the silence of the cemetery, formulated largely on my twice-a-weekday walks from the train station to the office, past government workers playing Frisbee golf on the National Mall before work.

I would fling myself around the globe. I would volunteer like I did in Costa Rica. I would rip myself from my comfort zone, scrape away the layers of myself and discover what’s underneath; scrape like I scraped that stubborn shed in New Orleans, peeling off what’s dry and chipped and dead.

I would take the old me and make a better me. A kind of basic training, for—

Something. I’m not sure. I won’t know until it’s over. But I will be trained in patience and compassion. I will think differently, eat differently. Push myself—emotionally, physically, spiritually. Meet people with real problems and different perspectives. Meet people who matter. Meet people who don’t matter. See if there is power in kindness.

Asia. South America. The Middle East. Africa.

Soon.

Four trips, nine months. Trip one would replicate the Richmond trip. Because for all its beer-battered testosterone charms, I always learn something about me and my friends. Adam and Terry can’t go: they’re parents. It’d require too much time and money. But Tom can do it. I’ll convince him.

The next two trips I would do alone. If I’m determined to break out of my comfort zone, I can’t jaunt around the globe with the person I’m most comfortable with—Julie—the person I most enjoy traveling with, the person I most enjoy being with. I need separation, space, a jarring jolt of distance from my everyday life.

The last trip, Julie and I will go together.

I’ll write about these trips. To pay for them. The book advance won’t cover my expenses, but it’ll help. And I’ll use this book as a crutch, because I of course won’t sit with Julie, as she deserves, and explain any of this. I won’t tell her: “I was reading about windhorse and then Ray stepped on Terry’s balls and I’m volunteering in China and Ecuador and Palestine and I’m traveling by myself because I’m not satisfied with who I am and I’m still searching and I want to create a new and better me even though the old me is the me you fell in love with and oh yes, I hope you’ll join me in Kenya in nine months to work in an orphanage.”

What I tell her is, I have to go alone for this book project. And because of that, I don’t think she understands why I need to do this. How could she?

So, Tom—

Want to go to China?

Tom and I were friends long before Julie and I started dating. As kids we rode bikes together, swam together, blew up model airplanes with fireworks—the usual stuff. When Julie started dating Dave, the McDonald’s manager, Tom bolstered my spirits as I sulked. Not long after Dave and Julie hooked up, Dave gave her a rubber-tree plant, and told her that unlike flowers, the rubber plant would never die.

Tom injected it with Windex.

Twenty-five years later, he remains my friend—a mild-mannered eccentric, analytical yet artistic; a talented weekend painter who does trigonometry for fun. And because he thinks logically—really logically—Tom rarely worries if his decisions seem…

How do I put this.

Unconventional.

Take his tactical measures to prevent sunburns. Tom is fair-skinned. A few years ago he and his wife, Teresa, traveled to the Caribbean. They walked along a white sand beach, Teresa wearing a bikini, Tom wearing long pants, hiking boots, a long-sleeve shirt, a wide-rimmed floppy sun hat, and—my favorite part—gloves.

There was also the period when he decided soap was unnecessary.

“I was curious about whether you could get clean with just water,” he said.

After about two weeks, Teresa convinced him this wasn’t working.

“I wasn’t sure you actually needed soap,” he explained one night at his parents’ house for Sunday dinner. “Turns out you do.”

“You stunk,” Teresa said.

“I didn’t really smell bad, I just smelled stale.”

“You stunk.”

“No—it was more stale. Kind of like a homeless guy.”

“Homeless guys don’t usually smell good.”

Like Julie, Tom is wonderful with children, yet childless by choice. Teresa insists she doesn’t want kids, then becomes a hormone-stirred look-at-the-baybee maniac whenever she’s near an infant, so I’ve wondered if she doesn’t want kids because he doesn’t want kids. I think Tom is content with his life as it is: to have the free time to read, to hike, to paint, to ride his motorcycle. But this I know about Tom, and about Adam and Terry as well: He’s a great friend. He’d walk off a cliff for me, just as I would for him. He makes me laugh. He makes me think. When I asked him to come to China, I wasn’t sure he’d be willing to travel so far, to be away from Teresa, to spend his free time working. I sent a string of e-mails to sway him. “This will be one of the most memorable experiences of your life,” I wrote. “It’s unique! You’ll never be at a party and hear, ‘Oh, really? I worked at a special-needs school in China, too.’” But he agreed, of course, for the simple reason that I asked him. And because he knew, I think, that I needed him to come.

And so on a sunny May morning, Tom pulled up in front of our townhouse in his ancient Honda Civic. I tossed my bag in the backseat. Julie hugged me. We kissed. We said we love each other and embraced again. She hugged Tom, and then we got in the car, waving as I left her at home, alone.

My renewed quest to be a better person began with my being a selfish jerk.

It took us twenty-four hours to reach Xi’an. I already wonder if Tom regrets coming.

Our flight left Virginia on a Thursday at noon. We arrived at our hotel around two in the morning Saturday. “What the hell happened to Friday?” I said as we dropped our bags in the room.

Here’s what happened to Friday: Fourteen-hour flight to Beijing. Twelve-hour time difference. Four-hour delay from Beijing to Xi’an.

We had boarded the plane in Beijing. Then we taxied for forty-five minutes before returning to the terminal, where we waited some more. Passengers revolted: angry white-shirted businessmen berating some poor Air China ticket agent struggling to explain the situation.

A college-age kid in white sneakers and jeans and a white Hollister T-shirt translated their shouts for me and Tom.

“They’re asking, ‘Are you putting us up in a hotel? Are we flying to Xi’an?’ You know—they want answers.”

“And what’s he telling them?”

“He’s telling them he doesn’t know shit.”

It rained our first day. It rained most of the first week. Someone later told us it was the most rain the city had seen in over fifty years. With damp shoes and dripping umbrellas, we sloshed through the city on Saturday, avoiding the spray of buses; inhaling a rainy stew of car exhaust and tangy spices, the occasional whiff of sewage; noting the shop signs in Chinese characters, the occasional awkward English (“The China Association of Nail Embellishment,” which appeared to be a nail salon).

Most of Sunday is spent in the Xi’an Empress Hotel for a four-hour orientation, which is periodically interrupted by fireworks outside.

“It’s either a wedding or a coup,” says Ralph, a fifty-year-old architect from Brooklyn (or awk-itect, as he puts it).

Afterward, Tom feels nauseous. He decides to skip a late afternoon meeting with folks from the various schools where volunteers will be working, a meeting we are most definitely expected to attend. When I leave our room he’s on his bed with cramps, face pale, clutching his stomach, trying to sleep. I close the door quietly and think … I hope we’re still friends when this is over.

“Where is Tom?” asks Wang Meilin, the twentysomething team leader for Global Volunteers, our host organization here in China. We’re in a hotel conference room. She looks somewhat concerned, somewhat annoyed.

“He’s back in the room,” I say.

“Is he okay?”

“He’s in the fetal position with intestinal cramps.”

“Ohhh,” she says, now just looking concerned.

Despite the warnings about street food—a welcome-to-China note from Meilin asked us not to eat it—we gave in to the smells, buying a doughy, pita-like spinach bread from a woman who cooked on a griddle in a narrow alleyway (though we resisted the grilled squid-on-a-stick we saw in a park). I can’t imagine that the bread made him sick, since I’m not sick—and it’s just bread—though thinking about whether it made him sick is now making me feel kind of sick.

We sit, ten volunteers and the short, stylish Meilin, plus roughly fifteen Chinese teachers and high school students, facing one another at a large open-center table complete with conference room comforts: tall potted plants, red Oriental-themed carpet, kettles of steaming green tea. Most of the volunteers here—seven are over the age of sixty-five—will help teach English, a beneficial service. The students know the language; they just need practice speaking it.

After speeches and introductions from each of the host institutions, the meeting becomes a Chinese variety show. One by one, the female students rise, singing like Broadway sirens. A teenage boy in a faux tan camouflage army uniform performs kung fu as the students sing. He kicks, thrusts his arms, falls to the floor facedown, his longish hair flopping, then rolls onto his back, forming the bridge position. A girl joins him and they do tai chi, in sync, arms gliding.

Performing, apparently, is as common as handshakes here.

“You have to be ready to sing at all times,” Meilin tells us.

The students read speeches.

“My dream is to be a successful person—and I need your help,” reads one girl.

“This is the first time I meet so many foreigners,” says a guy.

“Xi’an is better in the summer,” the kung fu kid says, reading from a sheet of paper. “Summer is very beautiful. The people be proud of the Yellow River. Um … mmmm … I am very sorry. I am very nervous.”

Everyone is a little nervous, though I mainly feel intimidated. At the orientation, Meilin told us about Zhang Tao, the woman who founded La La Shou with her fellow “desperate mothers” in 2002. A year after her son was born, she knew he was different. He never cried, never spoke. “He seemed not to recognize me as his mom,” Zhang Tao later wrote for the Global Volunteers website. The boy—the same big eleven-year-old boy who will greet me with a vigorous handshake in his “Today is a good day” Snoopy shirt—was diagnosed with autism.

Zhang Tao denied his condition. She would cure him, fix him, make him normal. By the time he was three, she had quit her job, traveling from Xi’an to Beijing to meet with experts at medical centers. She had little money, and some nights she slept on the streets. “Six months later, I realized that I was so wrong and selfish. He will be like that in his whole life. I should respect him just the way he is.”

She formed a support group with other mothers. Over time, they went from commiserating about their plight to committing themselves to the children, and ensuring that the kids weren’t institutionalized or bullied. Using their limited resources—scraping up books and desks and toys—they formed La La Shou in 2002. Most of the children are autistic; the rest have developmental issues such as Down syndrome and cerebral palsy. The school is now at its third location, with roughly eighty students and twenty-seven teachers. Although attitudes are changing, the traditional Chinese view is that special-needs children should be kept at home, hidden from view. As for the Global Volunteers program here at La La Shou, it’s still relatively new: “We’re still trying to figure out the best way to help,” says Meilin. Tom and I are not the first volunteers, though few have come before us. Any and all support is welcome, however, even from doofuses like us. The school obtains about 60 percent of its funding through tuition (the rest comes from private donations) and continually operates in the red, says Meilin. Always struggling to survive.

I huddle in a corner with two La La Shou teachers: Wang Xiaoqing, who works with the teenage students, and Zhang Lin, a young second-grade teacher. Meilin translates. I’ll be working with a third-grade class, she says, and Tom will be with Wang Xiaoqing’s fifteen-year-olds.

Meilin hands me a list of my class’s students, with descriptions in English and Chinese. There’s a longer description of the eleven-year-old boy I’ll be working with, Liu Baojian. “Likes singing, listening music, chatting with people,” it says. “Behave well; seldom cry or make troubles; often volunteer answering questions by the teacher in classes. The only thing he needs to improve is his slow movement. He is slower than other students, and needs a lot of encouragement from teachers.”

Meilin asks if I have any questions, thus beginning the pattern of our meeting: I ask something straightforward, and they talk at length in Chinese, which leads to a surprisingly short answer.

“Does anyone at the school speak English?” I ask.

They chat. Finally: “No one at the school speaks English.”

“Well,” I say, “Tom and I don’t speak any Chinese, so it should all even out.”

I laugh. They don’t.

We talk about Liu Baojian. Is my job to watch him? Does he know I’m coming?

Long discussion in Chinese.

“He knows you are coming.”

Wang Xiaoqing speaks with Meilin.

“She says you will need to help him in the bathroom to wash his hands and brush his teeth.”

“Okay. But what if we’re in there and he has to pee? Does he need help?”

More Chinese chatting.

“I’m not sure how to say,” says Meilin, looking embarrassed. “He needs help standing up.”

“Standing up?”

“In front of toilet.”

“Oh. Right. But what if he doesn’t have to just pee? What if he has to—you know—do something more serious?” I scrunch my face and raise my eyebrows, which I hope is a universal signal for turd. “And if he does have to do something more serious”—I add a sheepish smile to my scrunchy raised-eyebrow turd face—“will I need to clean him?”

This causes a really long discussion in Chinese.

“You will need to clean him,” Meilin finally says.

Lovely.

“Does he know when he needs to go?”

They talk.

“He will say he has to go.”

“And then he’ll say, ‘Why is this strange man following me?’”

They chat again. I’d kill for subtitles. As if sensing my cluelessness, Meilin smiles. I smile back, though I hope everything seems this pleasant once we start working. Earlier in the day, Meilin had warned me and Tom that working at La La Shou can be “emotionally overwhelming.” Tim, a sixtysomething volunteer from California who’ll be teaching English, told me how impressed he was that we’re working at the school, saying it in the sober way you’d commend an organ donor for sacrificing a kidney.

“I have a friend whose wife taught special education,” he said in his deep, radio-announcer-like voice. “She finally had to quit because it was destroying her.”

Despite Meilin’s smile I keep thinking of that little morale booster from Tim. The three of them are still talking.

“They are asking questions about you, and I am answering,” Meilin says.

“Great. Are they changing their minds?”

“No,” she says. “They are afraid you will change your mind.”

Meilin was right. My first day at the school, I am emotionally overwhelmed. First comes the shrieking/sobbing/Bà-baaaaa!/holy-shit/what-am-I-doing-here group session between the third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classes, where the language difference alone is a shock. I can fake my way through Spanish, but Chinese?

After the group class—a practice session for a Special Olympics performance later in the month—we return to the third-grade classroom. A poster shows the day’s schedule. I can’t read the Chinese characters, but the pictures at least show lunchtime, nap time, wash time. Desks are pushed against the wall—we sit in small chairs in a circle. The teachers play songs on a small stereo that we will hear several times a day, every day. The first has a catchy “Loo-la-loo” chorus: the teachers perform a series of hand gestures, clapping, and twirling their hands like a football ref signaling illegal motion.

Liu Baojian sits next to me, his expression glazed. The song is happily loo-la-looing when Happy Bear grabs a clump of my hair and screams. I’m calling him Happy Bear because of the “I’m a happy bear!” patches on his shirt. Assigning names to the eleven students (since I can’t pronounce their Chinese names) brings order to my rattled brain. The class’s two girls become Haley and Jenna, after my nieces. Jenna is a happy short-haired little girl, who every day wears a red sweatshirt that says “Britain.” (English on clothes is popular here, regardless of how it’s spelled: one boy’s sweatpants say “Sprots” instead of “Sports.”) Haley has a long braided ponytail, and her left arm rests in a narrow sling, for reasons I never learn. Most of the kids are autistic, but Haley, like Liu Baojian, seems closer to mild mental retardation. Her head is usually tilted a bit to the side, her mouth open, her yellow polo shirt tight against her big belly.

I keep naming. A skinny, mischievous boy becomes Sleeves, because he likes to roll your shirt sleeves up and press his scrunched face against your arm. Giggles is a boy who always giggles: it’s a constant tic. And then there’s the Dancer—the same thin boy who pointed at me and yelled “Bà-baaaaa.” He enjoys dancing, specializing in a spasmodic disco/kung fu/tai chi mix that’s more jerky than funky. His legs kick, arms shoot out, hips poke from side to side. He dances in front of me, then takes my hands, and we swing them side to side. Maybe it’s his penetrating stare, but I feel a kinship with this kid. We’re dance partners.

One of the teachers speaks to him, firmly, and returns him to his seat. I name this woman after my second-grade teacher, Ms. Brown, or Ms. B for short. The other two become Ms. L and Ms. H after other past teachers. All three appear to be in their early twenties, and though the trio runs the class by committee—the matching orange Motorola T-shirts only add to that impression—Ms. B seems to outrank Ms. L and Ms. H. She’s also the only one who knows any English, though her grasp of the language is minimal.

“Toilet,” she tells me after lunch, pointing at Liu Baojian and then at the door. I guide Liu Baojian down a short hall to the bathroom. He walks at the slow, deliberate pace of a small old man, rocking from side to side, his hands clasped behind his back, like a leader contemplating some dark decision.

The school is clean. This bathroom is not. I’m sure it’s clean each morning before the children arrive, but now the floor is wet, a murky puddle around the drain. Behind the stall door is a stand-as-you-go toilet (meaning there’s nowhere to sit, just a big hole and two spots for your feet). I’ll spare you the details, but some of the kids have aiming issues.

Liu Baojian shuffles to the urinal. His pants flop to his knees. We have just violated rule number five from yesterday’s orientation: volunteers cannot be left alone with anyone under the age of eighteen, let alone in a stinky bathroom where said child is draining the ol’ firehose.

“I’m right here,” I say, taking a few steps back to give him his privacy.

My words are gibberish, which is frustrating, though that afternoon, two local university students—one male, one female—arrive to volunteer. I’m thrilled to learn they speak English, though they apologize for its quality.

“No, no! Your English is very good,” I say, eager to squelch their anxieties.

The girl’s tan pants are baggy, loose around her waist; her green baseball cap has a flat rim. Asian hip-hop. The guy is tall with a long nose and short buzzed hair and Elvis Costello glasses. On his white T-shirt is an army helmet that says “Music is my weapon.”

The university students are pleasant and polite, so polite that neither one asks why my shirt is so wet. After the children take their nap, one of my daily jobs, I learn, is to escort them one by one to the bathroom to brush their teeth and wash their faces. Each child has a wide plastic bowl, almost like a cooking bowl, that holds a toothbrush, toothpaste, washcloth, and cup. Ms. B says something—Chinese Chinese Chinese—and Lightswitch rises and strolls to the corner bookshelf where the bowls are stored.

I call him Lightswitch because throughout the day, with great purpose, he’ll turn off the lights in the room. And when the lights are inevitably turned back on, he’ll scan the ceiling, perplexed, like he’s thinking: “What the … c’mon people—I just turned off these lights two minutes ago!”

We enter the bathroom. Lightswitch has powdered toothpaste in what looks like a plastic aspirin bottle. He brushes his teeth—rather efficiently, in fact—then turns on the water full blast, trying to fill the bottle. It sprays me, it sprays him, it sprays the wall (which may explain the puddles around the drain).

“Whoa—let’s not do that,” I say, turning off the faucet. He turns it back on. Off, on. Off, on. I try to interest him in the washcloth. No. He fills the bottle, pours it out, fills the bottle, pours it out.

This isn’t a game. Lightswitch is as serious about filling his aspirin bottle as he is about turning off lights. I finally take the bottle and put it by the window, then hand him his washcloth.

“Okay—wet it,” I say.

I do it by pantomime, pretending to turn on the faucet, pretending to stick the cloth underneath the pretend water, pretending to wipe my arms and my face.

He turns the water on full blast.

When it’s the Dancer’s turn, he carries his bowl with a bland disregard, until he sees himself in the mirror, which causes him to jump up and down, laughing and screeching and squealing, his arms flailing.

“Hey—jeez—let’s settle down,” I say, though for all I know this sounds like Chinese for “Hooray—let’s get crazier!”

My words have zero effect. He acts chimp-like: arms over his head, face close to the mirror, leaping, lips pursed. Somehow he finishes brushing, then blasts the water into his cup and dumps it in the sink. And then he does it again—splash—and again.

Clearly I need to be affectionately forceful. I put one arm around him, pressing him against me, and wash his hands and face with my free hand. Then I push up the sleeves of his sweatsuit jacket and scrub his arms. (Eventually I realize: the wetter I am, the more convinced the teachers are that I’ve done a good job.)

“See?” I tell him. “That wasn’t so bad.” He laughs and tries to run away as we head back to the class; I grab the back of his jacket and drag him to the room.

“Bà-baaaaaa” the now-clean Dancer says, spotting the male “Music is my weapon” college student.

Ms. B addresses the class. The college student translates: each child will draw a large strawberry on a piece of paper, a tie-in to a vocabulary lesson from earlier in the morning. Some kids, I’ve noticed, seem weak verbally—they rarely speak, or they say one word over and over—but fine physically. Others are the opposite. The Dancer can dance, but when he writes Chinese characters—or draws a strawberry—he needs someone to guide his hand.

Liu Baojian is the same way. I hover over him, my hand on his, as we draw the worst-looking strawberry in the history of crayon-drawn fruit. Unlike the smooth strokes I see elsewhere, our strawberry has crude bloated edges, like the path of a snake on a drinking binge. The sloppy green leaves on top are a pudding-esque lump.

I can’t help but wonder if this mutant strawberry is symbolic of the troubles I’ll be facing here. As Ms. H tapes the drawings to the wall, the other strawberries look like … strawberries. Poor Liu Baojian, who’s stuck with me, Mr. Can’t Speak the Language, has a sickly berry that looks like it crawled out of a traffic accident. My expectation was that the school would be so desperate for help, and so desperate for bodies, that anyone, even a clueless foreigner, would be a godsend. But I may be just one more complication in their already hectic days. I feel humbled. And stupid.

Liu Baojian sits at the table, his head resting limply against his shoulder. He talks to the university student. I envy their slow-yet-easy conversation. When Liu Baojian speaks to me, I can never tell if he’s saying something or just making noise, as some of the kids do.

He says something to the university student, who then taps me on the arm, translating with a nod.

“He like you,” says the student. “He tell me you his brother.”

As the days pass, Tom and I grow accustomed to stares. Walking through Xi’an, a city of ancient pagodas and yellow construction cranes, we are pale-skinned spectacles; long-legged oddities on streets void of Westerners. We feel the weight of Chinese eyes as we stroll—from men, women, young, old; from commuters on rusty bicycles and dented scooters; from street chefs sizzling vegetables on sidewalk woks. Some folks say “Hello!” showing off their only English. Some ask us to pose for photos. Others watch, warily. We are rock stars or extraterrestrials, I’m never sure which.

On our daily walk to the school we pass storefronts that house prostitutes. The storefronts are always the same: sliding patio glass doors, frosted white from top to bottom, except for a clear horizontal strip across the middle. The women stare through the strip, tapping the glass as we pass. Occasionally they slide open the door and laugh and wave and say something in Chinese, an invitation, I assume, for the world’s oldest form of entertainment at a reasonable price.

These frosted-glass brothels are scattered along a busy street, squeezed between more legitimate businesses: small restaurants, a shop that sells copper tubing and hardware odds and ends, what appears to be an accountant’s office. Next to one brothel is a family photo studio with pictures on the window of happy mommies and daddies and kiddies in red jackets and bow ties. And yet because of the white glass the brothels almost look clean. Like medical offices.

On one rainy morning walk to the school, Tom declares that the street reminds him of Paris.

“Paris,” I say. “Are you kidding me?”

“It’s the sycamore trees,” says Tom.

The trees are leafy and full, in robust green lines on both sides of the street. But really … Paris?

The prostitutes tap the windows as we pass, as if to emphasize that Shiyuan Street is not the Chinese Champs-Elysées.

“I’ve noticed they knock on the window more for us than for locals,” says Tom.

“They probably figure we’re more likely to overpay.”

“We probably would overpay.”

“Actually, as many times as we walk back and forth, they must wonder why we never stop.”

“Maybe they think we’re gay.”

“If they thought we were gay they wouldn’t keep tapping the window.”

“Maybe they need a more targeted marketing strategy.”

“Well, it’s not like they’re doing a whole lot to entice us. A little window tapping, a few smiles—we don’t even know what they’re offering.”

“Would you like a brochure?”

“That would help. I’m sure they don’t want to put up any tacky sales signs, this being so much like Paris.”

“It’s the sycamore trees,” he repeats.

“I’m a little offended they even think we look like the kind of guys who would use prostitutes.”

“What do guys who use prostitutes look like?”

“I dunno. Less clean. Guts. Beards, maybe.”

“So men with beards use Chinese prostitutes.”

“I’m just saying that you don’t look at us and think, ‘Wow, those two guys look like they flew here to hook up with Chinese prostitutes.’ You look at us and you think…”

“Dweebs.”

“Yes. Dweebs.”

“Dweebs need prostitutes, too.”

“Dweebs with beards.”

We make jokes, but the more we pass the prostitutes, the more they depress me: trapped in their glass cages, seeing life without living it. And on a wet, showery day like this, I find I tilt my umbrella: a rainy day blinder to block them from view.

Ms. B hunches over a bookshelf, scribbling on the back of used notepaper. She has a new communication strategy: she’s writing me notes in English. It’s morning break time. The “Loo-la-loo” song bebops at high volume. Ms. L brushes Haley’s hair, Lightswitch turns off the light switch, and Ms. H turns it back on, while the Dancer studies a wooden block, which he will soon attempt to eat. A boy I’ve named Michael Jordan—he frequently wears a shirt with the number 23—twitches his hands in front of his face. It’s a constant tic; he talks to himself when he does it.

Ms. B hands me the note: Go in row five floor. With happy nurses day.

I must look puzzled, because Ms. B giggles. She says something to Ms. H and Ms. L and they laugh, too. Ms. B points at each word with her finger.

“Go … in … row … five … floor. With happy nurses day.”

“Ahhhh,” I say, having no clue what it means.

Ms. B issues a command with Mao-like authority, and Ms. H and Ms. L organize the students in a single-file row. I take Liu Baojian’s hand, and we walk two flights down shadowy steps to the fifth floor, past the school’s offices to a makeshift gym. The floors are covered with thick rubber mats that fit like puzzle pieces. Basketballs and balance beams are shoved to the side, and chairs fill the outside square of the room, leaving an open square within. Students are led in. Milling about are the school’s founder—Zhang Tao—and some school administrators, along with nurses in traditional garb: white hats and white dresses and white stockings.

A school assembly of some sort? Zhang Tao speaks, though it’s hard to hear over the students’ shouts, not that I can understand what she’s saying. One of the teenagers in Tom’s class, a thick kid built like a bouncer, yells his usual yell—“Cheema Cheema!”—while lifting his shirt and slapping his chest and making puckered-up smooching sounds. Another of the older students, tall and thin, smiles and yells “Tweeeeee!”

When Zhang Tao stops speaking the orange-shirt teachers applaud and the nurses grin and wave and nod their heads. I finally get it.

“With happy nurses day” is “Wish ‘Happy Nurses Day.’”

We form three circles, students and teachers alike, holding hands. The first group jumps up and down and shouts a Chinese chant. It’s the same rhythm as “We’re Num-ber One!” but to my English-language ears it sounds like—

See Pa-pa John!
See Pa-pa John!
See Pa-pa John!

The first group quiets, and the second group—Tom’s group—jumps and chants. The student Tom is primarily working with, Wu Feng, beams as they shout. Now it’s our class’s turn: the kids leap and laugh. Liu Baojian can’t get off the ground, but he yells—

UhhhhhUhhhhUhhhhhh

We do this for a few minutes, alternating between groups. Why we’re doing this, I have no idea. Maybe it’s some sort of tribute for the nurses. Maybe it’s a tribute to ultimate victory of communism over democracy. Who knows? I never know what’s happening until it happens, and even then I’m not sure. Later, before lunch, Ms. B looks at me, rubs her hands together, and nods her head toward the bathroom—meaning, I assume, “wash your hands.” So I go to the bathroom, squirt some Purell—I’d rather not use the sink—and gaze out the window at the gray buildings as I wash.

I dry my hands on my jeans as I walk back to class. Liu Baojian stands outside the room, a bit forlorn, waiting.

Oh. I was supposed to wash his hands.

“With Happy Nurses Day” is the first time I notice Buddha Boy. He’s probably five years old. Maybe six. He smiles as if incapable of sadness, as if he doesn’t know what sadness is; his grin so bright he makes the street vendors’ Buddha statues seem melancholic. It’s a smile that could sell cereal or toys on television.

A man is with him. I’m guessing it’s his grandfather, though the man’s hair is black. He reminds me a bit of Dad, actually—the slight belly, the tan sweater and black jeans, the hair that’s thinning yet thick.

The boy has cerebral palsy. He can’t walk without help. He raises his hands above his head, and the grandfather grips them, guiding the boy, his frail legs wobbling, noodlelike, with each step. If the man let go, the boy would fall. But of course he does not let go.

I see them at the health screening that’s part of the nurses’ visit. Most of the third graders cry or resist the tests: Liu Baojian winces and cowers when his eye is covered for a vision exam. The Dancer weeps as the blood pressure strap inflates around his arm. But not the Buddha Boy, who is younger than them all. He keeps smiling. Like he knows his smile will sustain the nurses through a stressful day.

I watch the grandfather; the subtle grin that hints at his affection for the boy. I will never see one without the other. I can’t fathom one without the other. They don’t seem to talk—maybe the boy can’t talk—though sometimes the grandfather, while holding the boy’s raised hands, will lean down and whisper in his ear. I wonder what he tells him. I wonder what secrets they share.

That afternoon we saunter into sunshine for a class outing, walking to Ren Ren Le, the department store/supermarket hybrid near the east gate of Xi’an’s 640-year-old wall. The Ren Ren Le is crammed between a ground-floor KFC and the Agricultural Bank of China, with floors of offices above. It’s like the Super Target of China: clothes, furniture, electronics, toys, appliances, plus a large bottom-floor grocery, complete with a butcher, bakery, fresh produce, and seafood. (Near the Bell Tower, one of the city’s signature fourteenth-century landmarks, is a new Wal-Mart. As Tom notes, since everything at Wal-Mart is made in China, the stuff at this Wal-Mart must be really cheap.)

We’re at Ren Ren Le as part of a class project, buying fruit to support our continuing produce-based vocabulary lessons. We’re also here to support the school’s larger mission: to expose the world to the children, and expose the children to the world. During our orientation, Meilin told us that attitudes about special-needs kids are changing, but prejudices remain. Other kids taunt special-needs children at parks. Parents sneer at mothers, telling them to keep their kids at home. So while attitudes may be improving, we are still an unusual sight: ten special-needs kids, three teachers, one lanky foreigner. Shoppers discreetly and not so discreetly watch as we wander past the shoe department and women’s underwear, past refrigerators about half the width of the ones back home; as we ride the escalator down to the grocery. We all hold hands, shuffling through the market like a grade-school chain gang. I tower Lurch-like over the students, a foot taller than even the teachers, the only Westerner in the store. One slightly bent-over, white-haired old woman walks to our group near the checkout lanes, hands clasped behind her back, studying us like we’re an art exhibit she finds distasteful.

The kids are quieter here than at the school, though their occasional twitches and squeals—Haley’s tilted head and open mouth—signal their conditions as we file past bins of pigs’ ears, peanuts, and shrink-wrapped cookie boxes. Sleeves attempts to grab a man’s cane. Each of the kids has a notepad-sized piece of paper: on it, the teachers have drawn a piece of fruit. Liu Baojian has a strawberry. We identify it in the bins, but don’t buy: strawberries are too expensive. Ms. B fills a basket with plum tomatoes and crackers and cookies instead.

Our hand-holding posse shuffles outside while Ms. H pays the bill. We wait, conspicuously, on the bright, busy sidewalk. As I watch the passing buses and taxis—the cell phone pedestrians talking and walking, glancing at our little group—I turn to see that Happy Bear has lowered his sweatpants and underpants to his knees, his pecker dangling in the breeze. Since I don’t know the Chinese word for “pecker,” I’m not sure how to communicate this unexpected event to the teachers. I’m about to simply yell “Yo!” to Ms. L—I’m holding hands with Liu Baojian, which means I’m tethered to a three-and-a-half-foot anchor—when I hear above the voices and cars and honks a sound curiously like a splattering stream.

Happy Bear is peeing amid the passing pedestrians on the sidewalk.

By the time Ms. L notices, he’s finished relieving himself. She lifts up his drawers and snaps at him, telling him, presumably, “Listen—it’s okay to pee on side streets”—we’ve seen men pee against walls—“but you do not do it in the middle of the sidewalk!”

Walkers pass by with even more befuddled faces, and I feel myself tensing up. Not because Happy Bear was peeing. Because I’m wondering about the response his puddle will get from passersby. I’m a mellow guy—I’m the kind of guy you occasionally need to check for a pulse—but if anyone confronts one of these teachers, if anyone dares to say anything about these kids, he will have one very angry foreigner in his face.

Being in Xi’an reminds me not so much of Dad’s trip to China as of his periodic business trips to Japan. He was forever smitten by Tokyo, marveling at the city’s mobbed yet clean, safe streets; reminiscing about the nights he ate kodako (baby octopus), unagi (freshwater eel), odori ebi (raw prawns, their antennae waving). The night at a bathhouse when he climbed out of the tub and slipped on the wet floor, knocking him unconscious. When he opened his eyes, his naked Japanese friends were huddled over him, dripping, saying, “Bob-san! Bob-san!”

“I felt such spirit of modesty [seijitu] and sincerity [majime] when I first met Bob,” his boss and close friend, Mr. Tanaka, told me by e-mail. “I can believe it is a real reason why Bob made so many Japanese friends.”

In the months after I returned from China, I contacted Mr. Tanaka and some of Dad’s old colleagues. In some ways, they knew him better than I did. Parts of Dad remain elusive to me, as undecipherable as the classroom banter at La La Shou. His satisfactions, his disappointments, his affections—he expressed them mainly on paper, in letters he never mentioned. He internalized, as I do.

When Dad worked at the MRI facility in South San Francisco, he decided who stayed and who lost their jobs during layoffs. It weighed on him, because he’d seen his father desperate to find work, and he’d experienced joblessness himself. For a man defined by his work ethic, applying for unemployment was a low point in his life, though I never heard him discuss it. I know it pained him to put good people in that same frightening, humiliating position.

“It seemed like there was always a financial crisis,” said Kevin, the manager I’d spoken with at Dad’s retirement party. “It was cut back, cut back—do more—cut back—do more, cut back. Bob was a calming influence. He always stepped back, looked at every angle. And no matter how difficult things got, he never showed his anger.”

I e-mailed Dad’s friend Will, who worked in HR.

“Bob exhorted me to fight for the best exit packages possible. He told me, on multiple occasions, ‘Will, no company has ever gone broke from treating its employees too well. It’s the organization that ruthlessly economizes at the expense of its workers that ends up broken.’”

Will refers to that time as “repetitive downsizing.”

“We experienced plenty of going-away parties—more like wakes, really. And Bob would inevitably say a few good words about the persons being honored, and his eyes would get misty, and he’d close by saying, ‘I better quit talking before I get too choked up.’ Bob had a strong bond with nearly everyone he worked with. It broke his heart every time he needed to show someone out the door—he cared so much about the plight of others. He had a knack for recognizing employees who knew their time was going to end with a layoff—and who didn’t want to be ‘paraded’ through the HR process. Bob would conspire with me so that the individual could resign preemptively. Then we’d collaborate to get the same benefits that person would have received if he or she had stuck around long enough to be formally laid off. Because of Bob, we were able to secure much better severance packages, and keep the remaining workforce relatively stable.”

Mr. Tanaka remembers one particularly difficult layoff: close to thirty employees lost their jobs during the recession in 1991.

“It was very difficult and painful for your father to decide who to keep and who to lay off,” he says. And then he adds, quite simply, “We cried together.”

Each day at La La Shou I sit in a language class that’s a mix of third and fourth graders. It’s a small room, probably an office from the building’s tea distributor days, with a lone discarded teacher’s desk, a clock on the chipped gray wall. We drag in wooden chairs. I’m here to help Liu Baojian and the Dancer write Chinese characters—they need someone to help guide their pencils—and to drag students back to their seats when they walk to the window or whack another kid. The words are presented in such a clear, enunciated way that I learn a few. I manage to say “yellow” (huáng sè de). One day I tap Ms. H on the arm, point at the numbers on the clock, and count from one to six. She smiles and cheers. A bespectacled fourth-grade teacher applauds.

They ask me the English words for the same objects: strawberry, red, yellow, pineapple. After one of the classes, a student teacher approaches me. She wears a red Motorola shirt instead of orange—red seems to be the color for student teachers—she’s here for the week, and she speaks pretty good English.

“Parable,” she says to me.

“Excuse me?”

“Parable.”

“Parable?”

“Yes—parable.”

I look at her with the dumb expression that has become my hallmark.

“I’m sorry—”

“That not right?”

“Well, ‘parable’ is a word…”

“You say this morning for fruit.”

She thinks she’s saying pineapple.

I can empathize with this woman, who in my mental names roster is now Ms. Parable. Aside from my recent success with “yellow” and the numbers one to six, I’m struggling big-time with Chinese. I’m usually decent about picking up words when I travel, but not here. Tom has told me the word for beer multiple times now—pí jiŭ—and if you’re going to learn a word, this is a good one to know. But I still mispronounce it.

“I always have a hard time saying the ‘r’ sound at the beginning of Chinese words,” says Brenda, a volunteer from North Carolina who’s working at a center for abused children, and who speaks a little Chinese. “Their ‘r’ sounds the same as ours in the middle or at the end of words, but not if ‘r’ is the first letter. They also don’t tend to have clusters of consonants, like ‘str.’ I remember the translation of Michael Jackson’s name sounded like: ‘Mi-kul Jak-uh-sun.’ I don’t think they can make the ‘s’ sound of son right after the ‘k’ sound of Jack.”

Chinese words can also have entirely different meanings depending on the emphasis and inflection. “The inflection has everything to do with the meaning,” says Brenda. “Mandarin has four tones. That means that the same set of letters, such as ‘ma,’ could have four different meanings. Sometimes I’ve said a word over and over—such as ma—and a Chinese person will struggle to understand and then finally say: ‘Oh, you mean ma.’”

So you can see why I’m mangling the language. One day I ask the teachers to write their names for me on a piece of paper. I point at Ms. H’s name and she pronounces it: Huang Hua.

I nod and say it with confidence. Huang Hua.

She explodes with laughter. She’s laughing so hard she can barely keep her tiny Huang Hua frame upright, holding on to a chair for support. Ms. B and Ms. L laugh as well. To my ears I said exactly what she said, but I’ve clearly just called Huang Hua a cattle prod or a potted plant.

My main language legacy is that some of the teachers, thanks to an English-language phrase book I brought, are learning profanities. Tom observes this: I’ve let him carry the book in his pocket, since he’s more frustrated by the language barriers.

“To fuck,” says one of the orange-shirt teachers, looking at the phrase book.

“To fuck,” repeats her colleague.

They must know what they’re saying, because beneath “to fuck” in the book is Chinese characters. They also sample the word ass, but they particularly like jerk.

“You jerk,” says one teacher to the other.

“No—you jerk.”

And then they laugh.

Now that the rains have stopped, Tom and I walk through Xing Qing Park most evenings on our way back to the hotel. Xing Qing is the Central Park of Xi’an: more than one 120 acres of greenery, with a lake, Ferris wheel, walking paths, tulips, and the city’s rapidly blooming skyscrapers above the trees. Once the site of an eighth-century Tang Dynasty palace, it’s a popular spot for morning tai chi, wedding photos, badminton, and casual strolls with your government-mandated one child; a bucolic respite for anyone, like us, who craves a break from people and cars.

“Listen,” says Tom, stopping as we walk. “You can actually hear birds.”

We wander toward a small dian—like a one-story pagoda—with red doors and columns, decorative blue borders separating layered green roofs. It sits on a concrete pavilion, and we walk up wide stairs to reach it, looking out over trees and paddleboaters churning across the lake. It’s a lovely spot, except for the perky pop music drowning out the birds with the unexpected sounds of:

Oh Mickey you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind
Hey Mickey! [Clap clap-clap] Hey Mickey!

We lean against a concrete rail, watching the rippling reflections of the trees.

“I wonder if you’d go insane if you worked for a long time in an insane asylum,” Tom says.

“Is this something you think about often?”

“It just occurred to me today.”

Tom is struggling at the school. While I find the language barrier frustrating, Tom finds it maddening, because he can’t be clear with the teachers about what they need or expect. I’ve tried telling him to think big picture. That was a lesson from Costa Rica. Yes, we could contribute more if we spoke the language, but we’re a welcome diversion for the teachers. If we do a few things that simplify their lives—each day I haul a heavy pot of rice up two flights of steps—well, that’s something, right?

The bigger problem for Tom is a sense of futility. Part of Tom’s job is to guide Wu Feng through a variety of mind-numbing school assignments, such as writing the same number fifty times—a slow task given his microsecond attention span.

“It’s torture,” Tom says, looking out at the lake.

He shares his difficulties in a journal entry. Each member of Global Volunteers team 173 has to write an entry in a spiral notebook. We’re asked to include a quote—a thought of the day—and read the entry aloud in the morning as we eat breakfast. Tom’s turn comes at the end of week one. He reads it as we drink our coffee and tea and eat our Western-style buffet breakfast (French toast) with its Eastern-style touches (noodles):

May 14

Thought for the day:

“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.”

—HENRY DAVID THOREAU

The student slid two chairs to the table at the apartment’s large window, which overlooked the building’s courtyard. It was raining outside and cool fresh air poured across the tabletop. I sat down and opened the practice book. I was familiar with the exercise.

“Oh, seven today,” I said. The teacher had drawn a grid—six rows, nine columns. In the left-hand column were six neatly drawn sevens. The student was to copy the example into each of the boxes of the grid.

“Right here,” I said, tapping my finger on the first blank box to try and draw his attention.

“Bah.”

He half shouted this and thrust his hand up to point to something outside the window. He turned to me, smiling broadly.

I tapped my finger a few more times and looked down at the sheet.

He reached for his pencil box, opened one side, pulled out one of the pencils and examined the tip.

A few more finger taps.

He held the paper flat with his left hand and drew a seven with the right. He drew a second. He began a third but then, dissatisfied, he reached for his pencil box and retrieved his eraser.

He closed the box and paused to look at one of the stickers on it.

I tapped my finger on the page a few more times.

He turned to look out the window.

And so the exercise goes, for over an hour. A few sevens that start to look like ones. Stopping at the sounds of other students, stopping to pull a new pencil from his pencil box, stopping to sharpen his new pencil. The pencil tip breaking. Tom handing him the original pencil and refocusing him on the assignment, followed by more distractions.

“I tapped my finger,” Tom wrote. “He looked down, drew another seven, then flipped forward to the next page in the practice book. Another page of sevens was waiting. He flipped again. More sevens. He flipped again. There were the eights.”

My days are less tedious than Tom’s, though I share his sense of uselessness. One of my more effective duties is to take Liu Baojian each day to an apartment across the street for his nap. The nap follows lunch. The kids eat in the classroom; Tom and I eat together near the offices, in front of the trampoline, on the fifth floor. Before the week began, Meilin told us we’d eat lunch at the school, which I found about as enticing as undergoing surgery at the school. I expected the Chinese equivalent of the food from my high school—wrinkled green soybean hot dogs on soggy buns. But eat it we must, I decided, as a courtesy, though Meilin suggested we be honest if we dislike the choices.

“Tell them, I don’t like spicy food, I don’t like pig organs,” she said.

The orange-shirted teachers dished it up. We received a small bowl of lo mein–style noodles, and a bowl of rice with chicken, tofu, sprouts, peas, and stewed tomatoes.

It’s spectacular. The school food is the best food we eat in China. We rave about it to Meilin, who looks at us like, yeah, okay, it’s fine, but it’s school food. The ingredients are fresh, probably bought that morning. The cook does her steaming and stirring magic in the school kitchen right before the meal is served.

Our dinners are almost exclusively in the hotel. The food is fine—our group sits in a private room with Meilin, sharing food from a lazy Susan the size of a satellite dish—but it seems a shame to travel eighteen hours to Xi’an and eat in a hotel each night. Tom and I consider playing mealtime hooky, but dinners tend to include a discussion of volunteer-related business. Ralph later finds a more exotic menu that includes a variety of penis dishes. I’d be willing to try the assorted phallic entrées, but as part of her arrangement with the hotel, Meilin must order our meals off the nonpenis menu.

One theory for our dinnertime quarantine is that Global Volunteers doesn’t want us to catch the H1N1 virus, which seems silly since Tom and I are immersed in germs at the school. Kids cough without covering their mouths. Kids sneeze. Kids go to the bathroom and never wash their hands. One afternoon, during a classroom tea party (minus the tea), Jenna sticks her hands down her pants, then hands me a cookie. I thank her and discreetly slip it in my back pocket, a strategy I’ve used on several occasions: my back pocket has been filled with everything from plum tomatoes to an oddly spiced cracker from Liu Baojian’s wet hand. Despite my caution, I’m having some “D” issues, if you know what I mean. Nothing severe, though one day I felt gross enough that I skipped lunch and walked to Ren Ren Le for the blandest-looking bread I could find. This leads to the misconception that I won’t eat spicy foods.

Ralph, bless him, shares some Pepto tablets he brought. He’s teaching English at the Xi’an Biomedical Technical College. The goal is to chat with the students—they need practice speaking—though Ralph employs a clever tactic he used on a Global Volunteers trip in Vietnam. “The first time I went to Hanoi I asked the students what they wanted to learn about the U.S.A. One student wanted to learn about baseball. So on my second trip I brought ten baseball gloves, three bats, twelve balls, and a hitting tee, and I taught a baseball clinic. It was pandemonium. There were twenty-four hundred kids in the school and I think I played with two thousand over two weeks.”

He brought baseball gear to Xi’an as well. “I see it as another way to initiate a conversation—and get us out of the classroom,” he says, laughing his boisterous heh-heh-heh laugh. I wonder if his students will develop his Brooklyn accent. Park is pawk. March is mawch. Large is lawge.

After Tom and I finish the day’s delicious lunch, I walk back up to my own classroom, the floor now covered with noodles and rice. Ms. B and Ms. H take the other students for their nap at a building across the street, while Ms. L cleans up. We’re joined by an older woman who speaks to a few children and leads them to the stairs. As far as I can tell, this is her part-time job: nap coordinator.

Since Liu Baojian moves more slowly than the other kids, he needs his own individual walk-mate. I take his hand. We walk down the seven flights of stairs. He does the both-feet-per-step method. Right foot down, left foot down. Stand. Right foot down, left foot down. Stand. I’m tempted to pick him up, but he needs to do this himself.

Ms. H and Ms. B are chugging down the stairs with three children each.

Right foot down, left foot down. Stand…

Once outside we cross the street—all gray apartments, no shops, still prone to speeding scooters and too-fast cars—and stroll about twenty yards on the sidewalk to the nap building. I push open the dented metal door. We walk through a narrow covered alley. It’s dark—shadowy—quiet except for mysterious drips hitting pavement and a television’s tinny talk show conversations.

I steer Liu Baojian around puddles. We climb up another three flights of steps. We’re still holding hands. Mine is warm. His must be, too. A motion sensor provides a feeble light on the stairs, but we’re so slow it turns off before we finish the first flight. The darkness further diminishes our speed.

We reach a stale-smelling apartment that’s loaded with bunk beds. The nap coordinator lets me in. She smiles, bows slightly a few times, motions at me to enter. I take Liu Baojian to his bed in the back corner. He takes off his shoes. I’m not sure where he’s supposed to go. Upper bunk? Lower bunk? Must be the lower bunk, because that’s where he goes. He pulls my arm. He wants me to stay and sleep. “I have to go, buddy,” I say. The nap coordinator says something and he lets go. I wave and head out. They will all sleep, teachers and children, for almost two hours.

As I leave, I see Sleeves crawl into a lower bed with Ms. H for their nap, and I remember when I was little, when a nightmare would stir me awake in the night. It didn’t happen often, but I would cower under the covers before building up the courage to yell, “Daaddddd-eeeee…”

After another holler or two, his shadowy figure would trudge into the room.

“I had a bad dream,” I’d say.

He’d crawl into bed with me. One time I told him I was sorry.

“That’s okay,” he told me. “Someday you’ll have a son of your own.”

I never felt as guilty about calling him after that.

While the kids sleep, I walk back to the Empress Hotel and e-mail Julie. Tom is still at the school: his students are teenagers, so they aren’t napping. Which means I get a break and Tom doesn’t. Did I mention my concern that this trip might destroy the friendship?

“Nah, nah,” he says one night when I broach the subject. “It’s not that bad.”

If Tom and I are an unusual, aliens-have-landed sight, me solo is even stranger. The expressions seem more intense: the wary gaze of merchants as I stroll up a shop-filled street; idle hairdressers peering over magazines at small salons; customers whispering at dumpy takeout restaurants, clouds of steam and grease rising above the sidewalk. The word for foreigner is wàiguórén—wàiguó means “outside land,” rén means “person”—though the slang is lăowài. I’ve heard conflicting views on whether it’s negative, though I believe it depends on the context. Meaning, you might say lăowài because it’s so danged unexpected. Like seeing Santa Claus in June.

Some schoolkids run down the sidewalk. Whenever I see children here, running or yelling or playing, I assume they’re autistic. Because all the kids sound exactly the same to me. In my head, I hear the Dancer say “Bà-baaaa…”

I’m sweating when I arrive at the Empress. The hotel computer isn’t speedy, but it works. I sit in a small glass office that’s also used to book tours. A woman in a blue jacket and blue skirt sits at a desk, full ashtray on top, spacing out. It’s quiet enough that I can hear the bubbling of the fish tank near the office’s open glass doors.

I tell Julie about Liu Baojian and the other children. I tell her about the wounds I’m collecting from the unpredictability of the children’s conditions. Liu Baojian has bitten me twice on the arm while slumped against me. Not hard, not painful, but enough to leave marks. “I’ve got a bite mark on my left hand, scratch marks on my right arm,” I write. “I’ve had my hair pulled, ear pulled, nose pulled, and I’ve been pinched more times than I can remember.”

But the same day I was bit, I tell her, a boy ran into the class, sat on my lap, hugged me, and kissed me on the cheek, as the teachers laughed. “The work is intense, and the language barrier is difficult, but I like the kids a lot, and in some ways it’s easier than Costa Rica because we don’t have to plan. Just show up. And the teachers are amazing. They’re in their early twenties—enthusiastic, energetic, incredibly patient women.”

“Excellent—no planning!” she writes back. “You are right about the teachers of disabled and handicapped kids having the patience of Job. There’s a reason that is not my chosen profession.”

“It sounds cornball,” I write, “but there’s a lot of love in this school. And it’s not easy love. It’s the kind of love that tests your patience; the kind of love that tests your limits.”

It’s so strange to travel without her. Ten years earlier, Julie and I took a road trip in Arizona, from Flagstaff to Phoenix, including three days at the Grand Canyon. We mainly hiked, but one morning we toured the south rim by helicopter. Julie rode in front with the pilot; I sat in back with an elderly couple who looked like they’d posed for American Gothic.

We wore headphones. “How’s everyone doing?” the pilot said. “I know you’re really going to enjoy this—you’ll see the canyon in a totally different way.”

The propellers whirred. As soon as we took off, the woman in back with me started sweating. We sped toward the canyon, flying low over the trees. Music boomed through the headphones: Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries”—like the famous helicopter scene from Apocalypse Now. The orchestra hits its peak as the earth opened up before us, the canyon infinite in jagged reds below.

The woman reached for an airsick bag.

“How about that,” said the pilot through the headphones. Wagner thundered—

Dum dum-dum-dum-dum, DUM dum-dum-dum-dum, DUM dum-dum DUM!, dum-dum dum-dum-dum DUMMMM…

The woman barfed.

Up front the pilot pointed out some noteworthy scenery to Julie, who wore a big isn’t-this-amazing smile on her face.

The man reached for a barf bag. Then he started barfing.

The woman’s glasses fogged up. The helicopter began to smell like sausage.

Twenty-five minutes later, when we finally landed, the couple wobbled off the helicopter across the hot pavement, weak-kneed, hair damp. I wasn’t feeling so great myself. Julie, meanwhile, trotted from the copter wearing her jaunty tourist smile.

“Do you have any idea what was going on back there?” I said.

“No—why?”

“They were throwing up! She started throwing up as soon as we took off!”

“Really?”

“You didn’t smell it?”

“No—I had no idea.”

That’s how I feel now. I’m experiencing things she’ll never know.

A boy I’ve named Robby is sobbing, stomping his feet, and bouncing up and down on a wooden chair. As his butt lands the chair rocks against the floor—

Bonk! Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!

Robby wants bread. Happy Bear’s bread. Each morning, Happy Bear arrives late, shuffling into the room with a plastic bag of store-bought rolls. Once Happy Bear starts eating, Robby pouts and cries and bonks.

A few days ago, Robby snatched one of Happy Bear’s rolls, then fled to the window, eating the pilfered bread, wiping his tears with the curtain. It was a daring theft. Robby is a big kid—I named him after Roberto at Escuela Cuestillas—but he’s soft: round baby cheeks and a plump tummy under a yellow Winnie the Pooh shirt. Happy Bear is more like a bouncer: big, solid, strong. One afternoon Happy Bear freaked out—he wanted a glass of water and became hysterical when Ms. B stopped him to tie his shoelaces—and it took three of us to restrain him as he screamed and fought, struggling to march from the room.

On this morning, Robby won’t be stealing bread: Ms. B speaks to him, saying, I assume—“Sorry, pal, but that ain’t your food.” When Robby ignores her, rushing from his chair to repeat his theft, Ms. L grabs him and guides him back to his seat, lecturing him along the way. Now the sobbing is more intense, as is the violent bouncing in his chair.

BONK! BONK! BONK! BONK!

Robby eventually crawls under Happy Bear’s chair, still whimpering, picking up crumbs from the floor, eating them one by one.

Perhaps thinking some entertainment will ease the tension, Ms. B shows me the dictionary and points to the word “performance.” She motions for me to stand in front of the class.

“You sing song,” Ms. Parable tells me since I looked confused.

I’m surprised I haven’t sung sooner: Tom has been a human jukebox for his class. As a Frank Zappa fan, he thought about singing “Galoot Up-Date” from Thing-Fish, but instead dredged up memories of simple children’s songs: “This Old Man,” “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” By the end of our stint he’s like a lounge act, performing two or three times a day, often making up the words as he goes: “I haven’t sung these in thirty years,” he says.

I choose a kiddie song, though I regret not singing some Elvis. I was surprised, when talking with Meilin one day, to learn she’d never heard of Elvis, who I assumed was among America’s best-known dead Caucasians. But instead of “Mystery Train” I go with “Old McDonald.” Seems safe: oinks, moos, meows—real crowd-pleasin’ stuff. When I’m done mooing, Ms. B says Chinese Chinese Chinese to Ms. Parable, and amid the indecipherable dialogue I pick up two familiar words, which transport me back to Costa Rica, back to San Carlos, back to Escuela Cuestillas.

“You know Hokey Pokey?” asks Ms. Parable.

Do I know Hokey Pokey? Do I know Hokey Pokey? Are you kidding? Does China know chopsticks? Hell yes I know Hokey Pokey. I hokey-pokeyed to rave reviews among five-year-olds in Central America.

I organize a small circle: Ms. B, Ms. H, Jenna, Lightswitch, and me. We put our right hand in and take our right hand out. We shake them all about. Huge success.

Ms. B digs out a sheet with some of the words in English. “Hokey Pokey,” she says, pointing at the paper. It’s like we’ve just solved the riddle of some ancient, confounding text.

My most memorable performance comes later in the week when I spin a volleyball on my finger. The teachers are amazed. Ms. B makes me stand before the class and perform. She and Ms. L both try it, without success, the ball bouncing against desks and shelves. I hold the volleyball on Jenna’s finger and rotate it, and she giggles, a giggle so genuine and sweet it makes me giggle, too.

Later that morning, Ms. B asks me a question.

Uncle or brother?

She’s asking what the children should call me. I’m tempted to go with brother, but I tell her uncle, which seems more realistic.

“Shūshu,” she says, translating.

It sounds like “shoo shoo,” and it’s more helpful for me than for the students. Now when I hear shūshu amid the unintelligible Chinese, I know I’m being discussed. And now that I’m an uncle, I feel just a wee bit like part of the family.

I’m holding another man’s underpants. I tell Tom this when we return to our hotel room.

“That blue pair isn’t mine,” I say, peering at a shrink-wrapped bag of recently returned laundry. “Neither is the black pair.”

The hotel laundry service is simple: leave your dirty clothes in burlap sacks on the beds and check off a form showing the number and types of items. The next day, your clothes are returned. Or, in this case, someone else’s clothes are returned.

My first clue that something’s amiss is that the shrink-wrapped underpants look so nice and new. No rips! No holes! And the elastic is attached! Wow! My own boxers and briefs are a bit … tattered. Still functional, which is why I continue to wear them, but threadbare. The kind of underwear Lee’s army wore by the time of Appomattox.

Tom is now in the bathroom brushing his teeth, which is—no exaggeration—a twenty-five-minute exercise. Precision brushing, meticulous flossing, Waterpik. He has perfect teeth, but he loses, by my calculations, six days a year to oral care.

He walks by my bed, still brushing, as I rip open the shrink-wrapped package and inspect the unidentified underwear. I consider going to the front desk and pointing out the error, but usually only one of the blue-suited staffers speaks English, and that English is severely limited. So showing up in the lobby and saying “I have another man’s underpants” may create more confusion than solutions.

Then it occurs to me: why not wear these mystery underpants? Seems logical enough. They’re clean. They’re in better shape than the undies I’m now missing. And they’re black and blue, so they have this pristine, never-been-touched quality (meaning, you know … any stains won’t be visible).

I tell Tom my plan. He’s now boiling water, his toothbrush hanging from his mouth like a cigar (all the rooms include a Mr. Coffee–type machine for boiling water—even the locals don’t drink from the tap). I thought he’d back me up on the underpants decision given his gloves-at-the-beach practicality, but he seems grossed out.

“I don’t know,” he says. “You’re wearing a stranger’s underwear.”

“Yeah, but they’re clean.”

“Okay, you’re wearing a stranger’s clean underwear. You don’t know where that underwear has been.”

I mention this to Julie in one of our e-mail exchanges.

“That has so many eewww possibilities that I don’t know where to start,” she says.

I wear them the next morning. They fit nicely. And I’ll keep wearing them when I return home. It occurs to me there are two kinds of people in the world: those who will wear freshly laundered mystery Chinese underpants, and those who won’t. Though I do feel bad that somewhere in the hotel, some bewildered guest is saying, “Why did I receive these hole-filled undies?”

The grandfather carries Buddha Boy on his back up the stairs. The boy’s butt rests on the grandfather’s clasped hands, which also hold his backpack. The boy is smiling, of course, his arms around his grandfather’s neck.

By the time they reach the fifth floor the grandfather is breathing hard. He probably smokes, as do roughly 60 percent of men in China (most women do not). Between the cigarettes and the polluted air—the city of Benxi once disappeared from satellite images because the pollution was so thick—and the sands that drift from the Gobi Desert, a male emphysema epidemic seems inevitable.

It’s hard to imagine what would happen to Buddha Boy if the grandfather gets sick. Does the boy have other family? Could anyone else give him constant care?

I don’t see the grandfather every day, and when I do it’s for seconds at a time. And yet I admire him. I admire his devotion. I envy it. I envy his dedication, his commitment; his determined, unyielding love.

I wonder about Julie and me—if we’ll feel empty when we’re older. I wonder how my mom would have survived Dad’s death without me and my sister, without Julie and my brother-in-law, my nephew and nieces—a support network that we won’t have. Who will care for us if our minds deteriorate? Who will be there for Julie when I’m dead and she’s alone in a nursing home? Who will want Julie’s photographs when we’re gone? Who’s gonna give a shit?

The grandfather stops, catches his breath. Buddha Boy smiles from his back. And then the grandfather exhales and continues climbing the steps.

Ms. B is laboring over another note, consulting a Chinese-English dictionary as she writes. I’m guessing she bought the paperback book, because it looks brand-new. I’m not sure if I should feel flattered or guilty.

She checks words with her finger. Ms. L and Ms. H occasionally peek over her shoulder and comment and check the dictionary as well. They seem to enjoy it. Ms. B hands me the note:

have lunch eat flax feed and steamed bun. all of us make of flour. are you American eat?

She’s asking if my American taste buds will enjoy lunch: a quasi-hamburger bun you fill with là jiāo jiàng, a chili sauce from a jar. Her notes help me learn more about the day’s activities and the students themselves, such as the chubby Robby, who has plopped himself in my lap. Given that I’m sitting on a less-than-comfortable wood chair, his weight is a bit hard on the butt. But how can I boot him off? He’s rubbing his head against my arm like a cat.

Ms. B grins her happy grin, points at him, and says, “America.”

I’m not sure what this means. She pokes through her dictionary, grabs her pen, and hands me another note.

Mix blood, it says.

“So you must have an American daddy,” I tell Robby. “Or an American mommy.”

Robby holds my hand, rests his head on my shoulder. The Dancer approaches, awkwardly dancing. He stops, abruptly, and stares into my eyes, as he frequently does, his face without expression.

“He mother father not married—like men,” Ms. B tells me.

That afternoon we move to the big room so the kids can stare instead at cartoons, combining classes with the fourth graders. This is the first time we’ve plopped the kids in front of a TV, so I assume it’s a Friday afternoon treat: a chance for the teachers to unwind at the end of another exhausting week—though from their laughter they seem more perky than pooped—and a chance to grill Mr. Big American Foreigner with questions. They write queries with the help of Ms. Parable, and I write answers, since that seems easier for us all to decipher. They want to know what I do for a living. Do I have wife. Do I have children. “Photo about environment,” a teacher writes, which I assume means do I have pictures of my home.

I’m sitting on a tiny blue plastic chair, which is too small for some of the children, let alone a six-foot-two, two-hundred-pound man, and as I ponder my answers, the legs bend and the chair collapses: it shoots out behind me. The kids are oblivious to the thud of my butt on the tile, but the teachers laugh, almost like children themselves. A fourth-grade teacher races to bring me a bigger chair.

“Who sent to Xi’an,” writes Ms. Parable, as if I hadn’t just crashed to the floor.

I show them my Global Volunteers name tag, but that’s not what they mean.

“No—who sent.”

“Me. I decide to come here.”

She circles “who” on the paper.

“Who send,” she asks.

“No one send me here. I send me here.”

“You send?”

“I send,” I say, pointing at my chest.

It takes about ten minutes to convince them I wasn’t sent to Xi’an by the United States government. Volunteerism, from what Meilin told us at the orientation, is not yet a huge concept in China, though benevolence is a guiding principle of Confucianism. “For many years in the ancient times, due to the feudal system, people were exploited and very poor, they did not have enough to share,” Meilin said. In modern times, Mao’s brutal Cultural Revolution didn’t exactly create a groovy let’s-help-our-neighbors vibe, though the 2008 Olympics and the Sichuan earthquake helped spur a greater spirit of service throughout the country.

“You like Xi’an?” asks Ms. Parable.

“I like Xi’an very much.”

“Xi’an good food?

“Yes—food very good.”

“You come back?”

“Yes—I like to come back.”

“When?”

Ms. Parable clasps her hands and sets them in her lap. I think she’s waiting for me to flip through a calendar and pinpoint a date.

“Don’t know when,” I say. “I’m still here.”

One of the teachers, through Ms. Parable, asks: “Your wife beautiful?”

“Oh yes,” I say. And then, because I’m a báichī, which is roughly the Chinese word for dunderhead, I add: “But really—what answer could I possibly give?”

When there’s a significant language barrier, one should never make a joke. Because this innocent-yet-misguided aside leads to roughly fifteen minutes of my explaining that the only way to answer the question “Your wife beautiful?” is with a “yes,” because to say “no” would make me an insensitive creep. Though from the puzzled expressions it’s like I’ve said my wife has a mustache and floppy beagle ears.

“Your wife not beautiful?” says Ms. Parable.

“No, no—wife beautiful. But can’t say no. Must say yes.”

Blank stares. I write it: “I can’t say no. Must say yes!”

“Why wife not beautiful?”

“Wife is beautiful. I make joke. Be funny. You know: ha ha.”

This leads to a discussion about the word funny, and what funny means, and what funny is, and how one defines funny. And there’s nothing less funny, of course, than describing why something is funny, particularly when describing it to people who have only a minimal grasp of the language (which, actually, is kind of funny).

“Funny is joke,” she says.

“Joke—yes. But also physical.”

“I sorry—not understand.”

“Okay … someone fall. Me! I fall in chair. Remember? That’s funny!”

I grab the tiny blue chair and re-create my fall.

“Remember? Everyone laugh?”

“Ahhh …,” says Ms. Parable with a nod. “Wife funny.”

“No, no—wife beautiful.”

“Wife beautiful?”

“Right. But if I say ‘no,’ wife not beautiful, I get in trouble.”

Ms. Parable looks at me. Her face becomes sad. She cocks her head, slightly.

“Your wife troubled?” she says.

I wave my hands and shake my head.

“My wife beautiful,” I say. “My wife very beautiful.”

For Friday, Meilin has arranged an optional evening of dumplings and a Tang Dynasty costumed theater show that, she says, “is something tourists like.” I’m all for dumplings. Love dumplings. But that “something tourists like” theater line concerns me. After an intense week at the school, I figured Tom and I would join the gorging-on-dumplings part of the proceedings, skip the show, and down a much-needed beer. So I was surprised to hear Tom say, “Yeah, sure,” when Meilin asked during breakfast who’d like to attend the show.

Not my first choice. But given that Tom’s had a lousy first week, and that I’m the one who convinced him to come, I’d have donned bright silk Tang robes and performed the show myself if I thought it’d make him happy.

The next morning, when more Friday night arrangements are discussed over breakfast, Tom leans to me and says, “Maybe we should just have a beer that night.”

Now that’s the mind-reading Tom I know and love.

The dumplings and show are at a local dinner theater. After surviving the ten-minute cab ride—I counted eight white-knuckle instances when we nearly collided with cars, bikes, buses, pedestrians, or dogs—we arrive to find the tables packed with Germans, Russians, Swedes, Americans, Brits. All the tour bus Westerners we haven’t seen until now.

Tom and I revel in the dumplings and the multitude of fillings—vegetables, beef, fish (which are shaped like fish with peas for eyes)—and once the lights dim, we escape the theater. We head to the Xi’an City Wall, the ancient, nearly forty-foot-high square wall built in 1370 to protect the city. It’s about nine miles in circumference, and the outer portion is now surrounded by paved walking trails, part of a narrow park lined with trees and occasional diversions, from a small roller skating rink to public bathrooms. You can buy tickets to walk or bike on top of the wall; the “Notice to Visitors” includes such warnings as “Prohibit from carrying inflammable and explosive dangerous good into scenic spot.”

A large group of singers stands in a boomerang-shaped row. I count roughly sixty of them, men and women in a dark sidewalk plaza thick with trees. Four musicians accompany them on traditional stringed instruments: the twanging èrhú and bănhú. The song is beautiful yet mournful, a melodic chant, the kind of song laborers might sing to pass time. I learn later it’s qíng-qiāng, the local opera of Shanxi Province; the singers are retirees who were sent for reeducation during the Cultural Revolution. “That is when they worked hard during the day and sing to let go the inside pain,” explains Hu Hongxia, who oversees Global Volunteers’ China program and joins us one night for our group dinner.

“Older people don’t really talk about the Cultural Revolution, unless it is brought up or reminded by something shown on TV or as an education course to their grandchildren,” says Hu Hongxia. “When people talk about the Cultural Revolution—even those who suffered from it—they are very calm. It almost looks like they are telling someone else’s story. Even my grandfather does that, although two of his good friends died during the persecution. He always tells it with a slight smile and with a tone saying, ‘It’s all history. Who doesn’t make mistakes?’ But it also reflects how passive and obedient Chinese people are, compared to Americans.”

We walk further and stop at a smaller performance: six women singing, operatically, beneath an arch in the wall, accompanied by an accordion player on a folding chair. A smaller crowd watches—maybe fifteen people.

A chipper middle-aged gentleman approaches and chats with Tom in very good English. They cover a variety of topics: the man asks why Americans aren’t more concerned about the H1N1 virus. He asks if it’s true that street musicians in the United States expect money, and is shocked to learn the answer is yes. They talk for a while, and then he asks Tom if he plays a musical instrument.

“I took piano lessons as a kid,” says Tom.

The gentleman nods, then talks with the accordion player, who gets up and lifts the instrument over his head, the strap slipping off his shoulder.

“You play,” the gentleman says to Tom, pointing at the seat.

Tom hesitates—he has never played the accordion (and I’ve heard his clunky piano skills)—then gets that look that says, “Eh, why the hell not.”

He sits. The bulky instrument rests on his lap. Tom carefully sets his fingers on the keys and plays one chord, then another.

Bwwwaaannkkk.

Brrrrreeeeennkkk.

It sounds like the accordion has a sinus infection. Tom’s new friend tries to help. He sings “Jingle Bells,” clapping his hands and tapping his foot—“Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-DAH-da-da-da …” As if Tom will hear the melody and go “Ohhhh …” and instantly master the accordion.

Bwwwaaannkkk.

Brrrrreeeeennkkk.

Tom laughs. The crowd laughs. People travel for many reasons, but no matter where or why you go, you hope for something like this. A serendipitous moment. A one-of-a-kind story you’ll tell the rest of your life at work, at parties, at bars. As Tom mangles each off-kilter chord, as the crowd’s jolly spirit grows, it confirms my personal rule of travel: always choose the streets over tourist shows.

After the China trip, I call Dad’s friend Kevin one day at work during my lunch hour. Kevin and Dad were more than just work buddies. “I really thought of him as my older brother,” says Kevin. Not long after Dad retired and my folks moved back to Virginia, Kevin’s younger brother died.

“I didn’t know how to handle it,” he said. “And Bob could obviously tell on the phone, because I’m all upset. And he just said, ‘You know what—I’ll be there tomorrow.’ And boom—he was there. He stayed for a few days. He came to the service. And before he left, he looked me in the eye, and he said, ‘You ever need anything, I’m there for you. I’m just a phone call away.’ And it meant so darned much to me. I can’t say how much it meant to me.”

“Was that the last time you saw him?” I ask.

“That was the last time I saw him. We talked every week, but that was the last time I saw him. I go to the cemetery, and there’s a little corner there where Bob stood during the service. So every time I’m there, I look over at that spot.”

I remind Kevin that the five-year anniversary of Dad’s death is rapidly approaching. “I think it’s the thing that we’ll never get over in our lifetimes,” he says.

The weekend is free time, and Tom and I walk to a cash machine near the hotel for Chinese yuans. I like foreign money: red bills, blue bills, yellow bills—it’s like paper candy. And in China, the higher the denomination, the bigger the bill, which means the bigger the image of a somewhat-smirking Mao. I expected to see ubiquitous Mao images across the city, but I see him only twice, in paintings hanging in restaurant lobbies. His portrait is more common in rural homes, I’m told, and some taxi drivers hang a mini-Mao on their rearview mirror for good luck and safety (which they need, given their driving skills). The main place we see the Communist dictator, however, is on the capitalist cash.

It’s reasonably sunny out for Xi’an, and Tom wears what I affectionately call his safari outfit: sun hat, wide sunglasses, long-sleeved button-up shirt, hiking pants, and hiking boots. What little skin that shows is slathered with sunscreen; he also carries a tube in his big blue backpack. As we leave the ATM, we walk down the sidewalk, cars and bikes and scooters racing past. A father lifts up a little boy, probably age three or four. The boy points at us and says something to the dad.

“Even four-year-olds know we’re foreigners,” I say to Tom.

“Well, c’mon,” he says. “Could I stand out any more? I’ve got a hat, backpack, hiking boots … The only thing I’m missing is clown makeup.”

“People probably think this is the hot new fashion in America. A year from now everyone’ll be dressed like you.”

“At least they won’t get sunburned.”

We take a cab to the Dayan Ta, known in English as the Great Goose Pagoda. Tom sits up front with the driver. When he reaches for his seat belt, the driver says “No, no,” shaking his head and waving his hand. We’re not clear if he’s saying dude, relax, you’re not required to wear a seat belt, or if wearing a safety restraint is an insult to his driving skills, which are in fine display as he makes a screeching U-turn in two lanes of oncoming traffic. Tom wisely ignores him. I have no choice: the backseat is seat belt–free. Fortunately, the metal bars that separate front seat from back will absorb the impact of my face if we crash.

The pagoda area is a mix of ancient yin and modern yang. Built in 652 A.D. to house Buddhist scriptures, the pagoda looms over a recently built square, where a series of massive fountains offer Asia’s biggest water show. Along both sides of the square are strip mallish food joints, including McDonald’s, Baskin-Robbins, and KFC (by far the most prominent U.S. fast food chain in Xi’an). Day or night, the area is packed with locals, perhaps because open space is such a rarity. But once you leave the square and enter the pagoda’s walled grounds, the scene is far more serene. Tom and I wander through gardens, past a main hall with three statues of the Buddha. Monks light candles in a quiet courtyard. Away from the throngs and cabs and cars, the tranquility here is magnified. As we walk, Tom says something that surprises me.

“I never knew you wanted kids until I read your article about Costa Rica.”

I had written, quite unexpectedly, about the Costa Rica trip. I know I can tell Tom anything, and I hope he feels the same about me, though we rarely talk with any deep honesty about our lives. As soon as he says this I feel like an ass: one of my best friends learned about one of my darkest issues by reading it in a magazine.

“Yeah, well, it’s hard,” I say.

“Do you and Julie ever talk about it?”

“Not really. I mean, you know how we are.”

“That’s not healthy.”

“I know.”

I tell him how angry I got when our nephew was born. How I haven’t come to terms with the finality of it, the sense of loss. If I had come to terms with it, Tom and I wouldn’t be discussing it in the gardens of a Buddhist temple fourteen thousand miles from home.

Tom had mentioned to Ralph one night that of his two sisters and three cousins, only Sarah, his younger sister, had wanted, or had, a child.

“I’ve never entirely understood that—you and Julie are both so good with kids,” I say.

“I like being with kids. I like playing with them. I like the way they think. But … I want to be able to paint when I want. Or go hiking.”

“I always thought Teresa really wanted a baby. That if you had said, ‘Hey, I want kids,’ she’d be like, ‘Okay!’”

“I don’t think so. We both feel the same way.”

“Well, it takes Julie and me forever to do anything, so who knows: maybe by the time we’re sixty we’ll adopt. But I just don’t get it, you know? She’s my soul mate, or whatever you want to call it. Clearly we’re supposed to be together. So why this void? Why did this never happen? I just … I don’t get it.”

The next day, for the weekend’s main event, we hop in a van with a guide and three other volunteers to see the famous terracotta warriors. The thousands of carved figures—chariots, horses, archers, soldiers—were the afterlife army of Qin Shihuangdi, China’s first emperor. Qin brutalized hundreds of thousands of laborers to create the warriors, a project that began in 246 B.C. when he was thirteen, thus proving it’s never too early to obsess about death.

What’s most striking about the warriors isn’t the statues themselves—and they’re impressive, each soldier with his own unique face—but the scale of the collection: three massive pits the size of football fields, covered by arched ceilings, the buildings wide and open like hangars. We loop around each pit, peering down at the figures, the crowd’s murmur bouncing loudly through the massive chamber. The warriors we see today were carefully reconstructed, their paint long faded. Archaeologists suspect that still more pits lie in surrounding fields.

Tom and I go to dinner that evening with Brenda. At thirty-five, she’s the youngest volunteer on the trip. Blessed with a soft North Carolina accent and a runner’s trim build, she lives with her husband in the Bay Area, where she graduated from Stanford with a doctorate in psychology and treats substance-abusing vets. This is her third trip to China: she taught English the previous two times. Now she’s volunteering at a child abuse prevention center. The assignment was created just for her, so she’s grateful, but frustrated: the center’s staff has little or no background in social work or psychology. When they visited a seven-year-old rape victim in a hospital, one of the center’s staff workers said the girl was too young to be traumatized by her experience. The center cannot take children from abusive families and place them in foster care unless the families agree. Brenda made clear before the trip that she wasn’t an expert in child abuse; once she arrived, the staff asked her to give expert lectures. “I pretty much pulled information off the Internet,” she tells us. “I have the sense no one knows what to do with me. Maybe I should have stuck to teaching English.”

We go to a restaurant near the city wall: the Laosunjia Restaurant of Sliced Pancake in Mutton Soup. Ms. B recommended it while looking at my map. We tink our beer glasses and Brenda teaches us one of the few Chinese words I easily remember: gānbēi!—“Bottoms up!” Her language skills come in handy when ordering our meal, because there’s a procedure to eating sliced pancake in mutton soup. You take the pancake, which is a hard, saucer-sized biscuit—a collection sit in a basket on the table—and you rip it into pieces, which you drop in your bowl. The waiters take the bowl to the kitchen and pour the soup over the torn-up pancakes, which softens them. The soup is hot and hearty and salty, a nice complement to the Tsingtao beer.

Afterward, we walk along the city wall, and she asks about La La Shou. I tell her about my class. I tell her about the Dancer, and how his parents are divorced; how he gravitates toward men.

“Hey, you speak Chinese,” I say. “He says bàba a lot. Any idea what that means?”

We stop on a street corner, waiting for the lights to change.

Bàba, she says, means “father.”

I don’t look at the Dancer the same way after that. I’d always felt some connection with him—the way he stares with those sad, penetrating eyes—but it was something I couldn’t define. Now I see we are kindred spirits. The boy who longs for his father. The man who longed to be a dad. Each of us lucky to have amazing women in our lives. I will never meet the Dancer’s mother, but she’s a single mom raising an autistic child, who has managed to send her son to a school that best serves his need.

I’d like to find the father. I’d like to hurt the father. This isn’t like me, but I feel anger. Aggressive anger. Outrage that some self-centered prick would leave his son; would abandon this sweet, bright, sensitive kid. Okay, I don’t know for certain that the Dancer’s autism led his parents to divorce. But I’ve heard multiple stories of fathers who walked out on their families after learning a child was not “normal.”

I watch the Dancer when we’re back on Monday morning. He sits with his legs crossed. Quiet. Like he’s in deep thought. And I think—

Who the hell am I to judge. In four more days, I’ll be just another man who has entered the Dancer’s life and left him behind.

And then there’s little Liu Baojian, who’s pissing me off.

On Tuesday, like every afternoon, I pick him up at the apartment after his nap. The kids are usually a little groggy, though Jenna smiles from the top bunk and says “Good morning!” in English. I help her climb down the ladder since her socks look slippery. Ms. B is in the bottom bunk with Giggles, the two of them still asleep.

I wait for Liu Baojian. Sometimes he wakes up early, but waits for me to arrive. Our routine is to repeat what each other says.

“Nĭhăo,” he says—“Hello,” pronounced “Nee how,” as we clamber down the dark stairwell.

“Nĭhăo,” I reply.

“Nĭhăo.”

“Nĭhăo.”

We do the same with “good morning,” which the teachers now say at the start of each class, and we take turns laughing. I laugh, he laughs, I laugh, he laughs…

The week before, he scratched my right forearm. Not intentionally—I think he was pinching me—but it broke the skin, and I have a nice collection of scabs below my wrist. Now, as we walk hand in hand down the dank apartment building steps, he does it again. His nails need clipping, so it hurts, like being scratched by a cat.

“Búshì,” I tell him. No. We trudge down the stairs. Again his nails dig into my arms. I stop at the end of the first flight of steps.

“Hey,” I say, leaning down and looking into his hazy eyes. “No. Uh-uh. Búshì.”

We walk down the steps. He digs into my skin again.

“Shit,” I say, stopping a second time. “Listen. That hurts. You gotta stop doing that.” Of course, I might as well be speaking Klingon since he doesn’t speak English.

Later, in class, he takes a slight, clumsy swing at my face. Wang Xue, a college student who’ll spend most of week two with us, corrects him, and Ms. B orders him to stand outside the class. She walks by the chair, then stops hard when she sees my arm—or, more specifically, my Liu Baojian–related scratches and scabs. He broke the skin in several places, and my arm is redder and more gouged than I’d realized. She asks through Wang Xue if Liu Baojian did this.

“It’s not a big deal,” I say.

Ms. B scurries to where Liu Baojian stands outside the class. I hear a long and pointed lecture: “Chinese Chinese Chinese! Chinese Shoo Shoo Chinese Chinese!”

Ms. B marches back in and chatters to Ms. H and Ms. L. I don’t need a translator: she’s mortified. “Really—it’s not a problem,” I say to Wang Xue. But it is a big deal to the teachers, because part of their mission is to show these children what’s acceptable behavior and what’s not.

Liu Baojian cries outside the door. Ms. B finally talks to him again while I play blocks with Jenna, and Haley pushes buttons on my digital watch to make it beep, and Sleeves pushes up my sleeves.

The lecture continues. Finally Liu Baojian shuffles back into the room, whimpering, chin against his chest. He stands behind me and pets me on the shoulder.

“He say sorry,” says Ms. B.

I put my hand on his. “It’s all right,” I say. “We’re still buddies.”

He keeps petting me, sniffling, tears drying on his cheeks. Ms. B rifles through a desk drawer and pulls out a pair of scissors, then straddles Liu Baojian and clips his nails. As would be expected of a kid who doesn’t like having his face washed, he clearly dislikes having his nails clipped, but his whines and squirms are minimal. He knows he’s in trouble: the teachers send home a daily report to parents. When she’s done, Liu Baojian returns, petting my shoulder with his newly sheared fingers, and Ms. B inspects every nail on every child. At least half the class gets a trim. Michael Jordan is so twitchy and uncooperative that Ms. L practically sits on him while Ms. B snips.

At end of the day, Ms. B apologizes. When I meet Tom at the lockers where we store our stuff, two female administrators apologize through Wang Xue. “She say they are sorry. They hope you understand the children sometime have emotional issues.”

“It’s fine,” I insist with a smile.

I’ll receive apologies the rest of the week. A few days later Ms. B will see a birthmark on my arm and think I’ve been mauled.

“You know,” I tell Tom as we leave the building, “I should come in tomorrow with my arm all bandaged up. Just as a joke.” Though something tells me it would get lost in translation.

Wang Xue speaks excellent English, which makes her indispensable. She’s on summer break from a university in Xi’an, where she’s studying to be a packaging engineer. I had no idea that packaging engineer was a profession, but given the colossal growth of manufacturing in China over the past twenty years, experts on consumer goods are surely in demand. Xi’an itself produces a slew of engineers—the city has more than twenty public universities—though Wang Xue, a native of Linfen, about 235 miles northeast of Xi’an, is not terribly fond of her adopted home.

“I have been stolen three times in Xi’an,” she says—twice by pickpockets, once by a girl in her dorm selling phony beauty products. “One time was on my birthday, which hurt me a lot. I was supposed to buy some medicine for my aunt with the money.”

With her above-average English skills, Wang Xue provides insights I missed the week before. When Jenna says something to me in Chinese, and everyone laughs an embarrassed laugh, Wang Xue fills me in. “She call you ‘foreigner.’ They all say, ‘No, no! Uncle!’”

“I’ve heard worse,” I tell Wang Xue.

Meilin joined us one morning last week and I realized then how much I’m missing; the daily dramas and comedy. When Happy Bear arrived late, sauntering in with his bag of rolls, Ms. B spoke to the students as he ate. Meilin translated: “She says, since you all stare at his food, maybe we should get some.”

Ms. B pulled out a bag of candy from the previous day’s tea party. The Dancer started bawling. “He wants candy,” said Meilin.

Ms. B used it as a reward. Liu Baojian got candy for correctly pointing at the day’s date on the schedule. He did such a good job that he got what I call the Pesto-Shah cheer. The three teachers do it, clapping and chanting. It sounds like:

Pesto Pesto Shah!
Pesto Pesto Shah!
Pesto Pesto Shah!

And then they raise their hands and wiggle their fingers and yell WOOOOO!

“Their fingers are fireworks,” said Meilin.

The students prepped for their march at the opening ceremonies of next month’s Special Olympics. Ms. B led the group in a single-file line with red and green flags; martial music blared from the stereo. They paraded around the room in a messy circle.

“You are all athletes and we are marching into the stadium!” Ms. B declared.

She pointed at Happy Bear, who was in his customary position: tipped back in a chair, leaning against the wall.

“There’s a general!” she said, saluting.

Lightswitch turned off the lights.

“It’s cloudy!” said Jenna.

Afterward, Meilin left the room with Ms. B, which was kind of like your mother talking with your teacher: you know they’re discussing you, and you hope it’s good, but you suspect it’s bad, and you’re preparing excuses. I had expressed concerns to Meilin that perhaps I was a burden. Ms. B came back, and then Meilin signaled me to join her outside the room. The language difference makes subtlety difficult. “She say the first day you have no clue,” said Meilin. “But since then you do much better.”

It’s not quite 11 p.m. when Tom turns off his light and rolls on his stomach, his blankets shoved to the side of his bed. He covers his face with a red T-shirt. I tend to stay up later than him, reading, so each night he uses the shirt to block my light.

“You sure that isn’t bothering you?” I ask.

“It’s fine.”

It’s weird talking to a headless, motionless man in boxer shorts sprawled chest-down on a hotel bed. He looks like a just-discovered corpse on CSI.

“That T-shirt isn’t distracting?”

“Having soft cotton across your head is not that distracting.”

Lately I’ve found myself thinking of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called “The Inner Light,” in which a probe approaches the Enterprise and zaps Captain Picard in the head with—to use the geek term—a nucleonic particle stream. Picard wakes up, groggy, no longer on the bridge, but in an unknown home, on an unknown planet—Kataan—gazing at an unknown woman, Eline, who says she’s his wife. As the years pass, slowly convinced that his Starfleet career was an illness-induced dream, Picard settles into a long life, becoming a scientist, father, grandfather, widower; a hunched, crusty old man. “I never thought I would need children to complete my life,” he says after the birth of his second child. “But now I can’t imagine life without them.” When the probe shuts down—it was sent by the people of Kataan, to tell their story, after their sun went nova—he learns he’s been unconscious a mere twenty-five minutes.

I feel like Picard, like I’m living a long and separate life, though I’ve been in Xi’an for an instant. Tom and I have a routine. We eat breakfast every morning with the other volunteers. We shave and brush our teeth and walk to the school. We work. At night, we walk through the city on blinking sidewalks, the concrete orange and red from Vegas-like neon on hotels and rooftop karaoke bars. We exercise in the hotel gym, then watch the surprisingly absorbing world badminton championships on TV, the Chinese play-by-play as much of a blur as the shuttlecock zipping over the net. We sleep, Tom with a T-shirt over his face. We start over.

I miss home, of course. I miss Julie. We e-mail almost daily. (“The dog is laying next to me kind of half snoring and letting out little stinky poots,” she writes. “Don’t you wish you were here?”) I e-mail my sister and mom and Adam and Terry (“That would be a deal breaker,” Adam writes, when I say that Tom and I have to sing). I read the Washington Post online. I would love a gooey chocolate dessert. (Brownies. I keep thinking about brownies.) But part of me would be content to stay at this school, to stay with these kids, to continue my routine that is real and yet not real. As piercing as the shouts can be, as unpredictable the behavior, as limited as I am by the language—I feel at home here. It’s like finding solace in a thunderstorm. What scared you becomes familiar. The thunder becomes a comfort.

On a recent afternoon, a group of art teachers arrived to show the kids paintings from children at their schools. The paintings were mounted on black poster board and set on a row of desks along the wall. As the art teachers spoke, the Dancer pointed and shouted, repeating a word that Wang Xue believed was “That! That!” Giggles rocked and repeated gibberish, saying a word and giggling, saying a word and giggling. Happy Bear tried to pinch one of the art teachers. The teacher fended him off, but he persisted. Before that he pinched Ms. H so hard she yelped, still rubbing her arm an hour later.

The art teachers look stunned, the same look I’m sure I wore my first day. Part of me is smug, because I’m a La La Shou vet. And yet part of me is embarrassed, because I’ve grown terribly fond of these kids.

Late in the afternoon we watch a Chinese cartoon starring a mouse who battles a pack of marauding cats by emitting gas from his little rodent butt. (Despite the rich fart material it’s a pretty boring cartoon, though I’m sure I was missing subtleties in the plot.) As we watch, Jenna nestles against me and holds my hand. She speaks and the teachers chuckle.

“She no want you go Washington,” says Ms. B.

I’ll miss Jenna. I’ll miss the teachers: Ms. H cuddling Sleeves, Ms. L brushing Haley’s hair. I’ll miss watching the Buddha Boy and his grandfather. Yesterday the kids practiced a Special Olympics activity: each one stands in the center square of two intersected rectangles; like the middle of a plus sign. The child jumps in a square to the left. Then back to the center. And then to the right. The grandfather lifted Buddha Boy into each square, the boy’s legs dangling. The teachers cheered.

I’ll miss being close to people so committed to their work, so committed to finding joy.

“I feel like we’ve been here forever,” I say to Tom. “In a weird way, I feel like this is my life.”

On one of our after-school walks to the park, we pass a food cart selling the appropriately named stinky tofu. It smells, Tom says, “like a gym shoe filled with feces and set on fire.” For Tom, week two has been far more rewarding than week one. Dry weather has meant more outside activities. On Monday his class went for a long, invigorating walk at the park. On Tuesday they shopped for groceries at Ren Ren Le, then made dumplings. Tom was amazed at how quickly the teachers scooped the filling on a spoon—celery and ground pork with ginger and garlic and red pepper—dumped it in a square of dough, squeezed it, and just like that: done. It took him a minute to do what took them seconds. “Delicious,” he told me months later. “I can still taste it.”

Near the end of the week, before lunch, I spied him in the small room where my group has language classes. He was sketching his students, profiling them one by one with pencil and pad. The resemblances were spot on, but he captured something more: the vulnerability that’s easy to miss beneath the seemingly brazen squawks.

The students watched him draw, mesmerized. Their teacher, Wang Xiaoqing, who I can tell has developed a friendly affection for Tom, stood behind him, a firm and glowing pride in his work. She has transformed Tom’s perception of the school. Through her limited English, she told him about the thick, strong teen who slaps his chest and yells “Cheema Cheema!” He used to be abusive. He would strike his parents. He would strike teachers. Because of this, he was booted out of other schools. Wang Xiaoqing believed no one had ever shown him why his behavior was wrong. So the two of them went to a room. In private. He tried to strike her. She struck back. No one had ever done this before. It’s unfathomable that this sort of eye-for-an-eye teaching technique could happen back home, but here, well, it somehow makes sense.

“I was amazed because overall he’s a pretty gentle kid,” said Tom. “I couldn’t believe he’d undergone such a transformation.”

Another boy in Tom’s class has cerebral palsy. He’s accompanied everywhere by his aunt. Before coming to La La Shou, he couldn’t walk.

On our second-to-last day at the school, Tom and I are invited to the main office to talk with Zhang Tao, La La Shou’s founder. We settle in at a table; Wang Xue translates. Zhang Tao’s ebullient son sings a song that he appears to make up with each note. We’ve noticed bandages around his back and legs. Wang Xue tells us he burned himself in the school kitchen after knocking over a pot of boiling water. He was in the hospital for two months.

“Her son like foreigners,” says Wang Xue. “He has more English vocabulary than she does.” Zhang Tao talks about learning to accept her son’s autism, how she met with other mothers; how they morphed from a support group into an action team.

“There come a time when you must do more than complain,” she says through Wang Xue.

She thanks me and Tom for our work. “You may not feel like you help much, but it makes a big difference. We tell parents, ‘Look—these people came all the way from America because they love your children. You need to love your children more.’”

I ask if the goal is to help the students live independently. For some it’s not realistic, says Zhang Tao. Even if they’re capable of working and living by themselves, finding jobs is difficult, though La La Shou tries to help.

“You know that man doing the cleaning job?” says Wang Xue.

I nod. “Tall guy, right? We’ve seen him around.”

“He have some problems,” says Wang Xue.

Tom and I thought he was a teacher. He’s actually a former student. “They train him for three years,” says Wang Xue. “Now he can do almost all the cleaning jobs. At first, he don’t even know how to take a bath. Now he can go home by himself and come here by himself. They train him to ride on bus. They taught him how to use his salary—how much you keep for food and how much you need for other things.”

He still struggles with numbers. Recently he asked a shopkeeper the price of a video. “Eight yuan,” said the shopkeeper.

“I’ll give you ten,” our janitor countered.

Zhang Tao laughs softly, telling the story. She says nearby shopkeepers don’t take advantage of him; they actually help. “There is more understanding,” says Wang Xue.

For the school, raising money is a persistent problem. She shows us photographs from last year’s Special Olympics: a picture of a boy and his father. The family can no longer afford to send the boy to La La Shou, and the school lacks the resources to help.

“Sometimes she feels helpless,” says Wang Xue.

Zhang Tao talks in a serious voice. “The teachers here are really under burden,” Wang Xue tells us. “They take care of these kids from eight thirty to four thirty and they cannot relax even for a minute because the kids must be watched always.”

“It’s daunting work,” says Tom.

“And during the weekend sometimes the teachers will go out with the kids. Not have their free time. That is a big challenge for the teachers here. She worry that the teachers become frustrated. The teachers may teach the children that one plus one is two, several times, and the children couldn’t remember. And the teacher may feel really bad. They may look for other jobs.”

I nod. Tom nods. And then he says something that surprises me.

“Can you tell her,” he says to Wang Xue, “that we both admire her courage and her dedication. And we think she’s made a big improvement in life for a lot of people.”

Wang Xue translates. Zhang Tao nods, and wipes away a tear. She says thank you. I know Tom has felt frustrated by the language barriers, I know he’s felt useless, but kind words have force. As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said—

Kindness in words creates confidence.
Kindness in thinking creates profoundness.
Kindness in giving creates love.

I smile at Tom. I hope he no longer doubts that he’s done something good here.

It’s our last day at the school. In the morning, at Ms. H’s instruction, each student shakes my hand. Robby hugs me. Ms. B talks to the children, who sit against the wall behind their desks. Wang Xue translates. They have a gift. Ms. B holds a white paper bag and removes a laminated photo. It’s a group shot of me and the class, a shot we posed for a few days earlier. I sit in the center of the first row, my arm around a pensive Liu Baojian. To my left are Giggles, Sleeves, and a big-smiling Haley, who loves to be photographed. (One day Tom came in the room and snapped her picture; she practically hyperventilated until she could see it. “Am I pretty?” she asked through Wang Xue.)

Above the photo is Chinese script that says, “La La Shou, Third-Grade Class, 2009.” The Dancer reaches for it. “Sorry, buddy,” I say. “I’ve seen you mangle too many things to give you this.” Indeed, a few minutes later he rips fish decals off an ocean-themed puzzle.

Now Ms. B pulls a Chinese knot from the bag. She slips the top loop over her index finger and turns the moment into a teaching exercise, asking the children to identify the colors. The top of the knot is red and gold. Below are two knit objects that look like strawberries: one is yellow with a purple bottom, the other is red with a yellow bottom.

“She tells the children, ‘These are two fruits,’” says Wang Xue. “One is them, and one is you, because they love you and they will miss you.” Ms. B hands it to Liu Baojian. He walks to me in his slow, measured way. I thank him.

As we wait to leave for another health screening, Ms. B and I talk through Wang Xue. Other volunteers, she says, have not seemed as comfortable with the children. “She says you have a warm heart,” says Wang Xue. “If you speak Chinese, you be perfect.” These are good children, Ms. B tells her. They just need more attention and care.

“She say next time you come to Xi’an, you stay in her home.”

Wang Xue asks if I’d like to say anything to Mss. B, H, and L. “Yes,” I say. “Please tell them that they are my heroes. It was clear my first day how much affection they have for the children. And tell them that when I think of this school, and when I think of Xi’an, I will think of their laughter.”

Upon hearing the translation, an embarrassed Ms. B laughs. Once we finish our mutual admiration lovefest, I ask a question through Wang Xue.

“There’s a little boy here. He’s always accompanied by an older gentleman, probably in his late fifties, early sixties. The boy is small—he smiles a lot. The two of them are always together. Do you know—is that the boy’s grandfather?”

Wang Xue relays my question. Ms. B has her arm around the smirking, mischievous Sleeves.

“He is the grandfather,” says Wang Xue. “The father left the mother when the son was born and they see the son have problems. The mother has to work, so the grandfather take care of him.”

I see Buddha Boy and his devoted grandfather one final time, on the street that afternoon. They’re riding a bicycle. The grandfather pedals. They pass parked cars and smokers perusing newsstands; a group of men on small sidewalk chairs, practically squatting, playing Chinese chess on a low square table. Buddha Boy is strapped into a seat behind the grandfather. He smiles, of course.

In his book Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychology professor, determined that most parents aren’t happy when dealing with their kids. Mothers are happier doing almost any other task: shopping, exercising, watching TV. That’s because parenting is difficult. It’s work. Tiring, stressful, frequently irritating work. For most parents, happiness doesn’t return to pre-kid levels until the children are grown and gone. But while parents may be less happy on a day-to-day basis, many say their most profoundly happy moments involve their kids. It’s a transcendental happiness that goes way beyond the day-to-day.

For all the burdens the grandfather must suffer—the caregiver’s exhaustion, the scramble for tuition funds, the worries about his grandson’s future—I know he has experienced transcendental happiness. In his own mellow, mild way, he exudes it.

The grandfather pedals slowly up the street. They pull from view, the boy disappearing, blending into the grandfather’s back.

After a lunch of noodles and red bean porridge, I walk Liu Baojian to the nap apartment for the last time. Tom and I are only working a half day: there’ll be a goodbye ceremony this afternoon for all the volunteers and representatives of their various schools.

Like always, Liu Baojian and I receive curious stares as we cross the street: the tall Westerner and the small boy who’s not quite like the other boys. As we tend to do, we trade laughs.

“Ah-hahahaha,” he chuckles.

“Ah-hahahaha,” I reply.

“Ah-hahahaha.”

“Ah-hahahaha.”

We plod up the steps in the apartment building. I want to tell him he’s a good boy. I want to tell him he is my brother. That I wonder what his life will be like; what lives await all of these children. Some, like the Dancer and Sleeves, may someday live on their own. But I worry about Liu Baojian: his lack of motor skills, his small frame, the mind that seems adept at language yet works at a slower speed. I want to tell him I believe in him, but there’s no one here to translate. I say it anyway.

“Nĭhăo,” he says.

“Nĭhăo,” I reply.

I let go of his hand and he walks into the apartment. The nap coordinator bends over and tells him to wave, in the exaggerated way that she does. I wave as well, and then the brown metal door clangs shut.

So here is my final memory of the Dancer. After he repeatedly runs around the room, shouting, arms flailing—knocking down books from the bookshelf—Ms. L rearranges the desks to confine him. I sit outside of his desk-cage. Making the best of his detention, the Dancer contemplates a puzzle: a simple wooden one where you fit various shapes—circle, square, star, triangle—into corresponding slots. It’s the kind of puzzle my three-year-old nephew can manage in minutes, but the Dancer, a third grader, can’t do it. He puts the square against the circle. The circle against the triangle. He taps the circle against the desk. Then, either aggravated or bored, he chews it.

Next we play with plastic blocks: kind of like Legos, but flatter and curved, connecting at their ends like jigsaw pieces. We connect them in a long squiggle across the desk, which the Dancer carefully lifts, grabbing it from each end. He stands up, shouting the same word, over and over.

Yaaaag! Yaaaag!

Or at least that’s how it sounds to me. I have no idea what he’s saying—nor does Wang Xue—but the tone and the urgency seem like—

Look at this amazing feat of engineering! Look! For the love of God—LOOK!

There’s equal excitement and anguish in his face as he holds it aloft, as if overwhelmed by the beauty of our snaking plastic creation.

He sits back down. We’ve been connecting the puzzle pieces flat against the table, but now he connects a piece vertically. And he adds more, building up instead of out.

I’m shocked. It never occurred to me build up: your first instinct is to connect them flat. Moments ago the Dancer failed a puzzle a two-year-old could handle, but now he’s thinking in an original, inventive way.

“That’s excellent!” I tell him. “Really smart thinking.”

I scan the room, wanting to share his accomplishment. All the teachers are busy, not that I can communicate with them anyway. Wang Xue is out of the room.

“That’s great,” I tell the Dancer. “That’s really great.”

I hope in some way that despite his blank expression he can see how happy I am, and see me applauding, and somehow understand.

Adam had asked Tom and me to bring back some Chinese cigarettes and booze. We buy a pack of smokes from a sidewalk tobacco vendor near the hotel. The stand looks like a booth for a carnival game: glass cases with shelves of cigarette boxes, just enough room behind for the seller to walk. We settle on Pride cigarettes, mainly because of the cute cartoon panda on the front. If Disney sold cigarettes, this is what they’d look like. (Disney rip-offs abound here. My favorite is a “Walt Dasney” shirt with Minnie looking like a ferret in drag.)

We buy the booze at Ren Ren Le. We want something Chinese looking, so we settle on two small flask-sized bottles of … well, we don’t know what we’ve bought, but it looks like whiskey. One bottle we’ll take home, one bottle is for us. We can’t find shot glasses, so we buy tiny teacups.

Tom screws off the cap. This is our Friday night, end-of-our-volunteering-stint treat. We’d spent the afternoon at the final ceremony, held in the same hotel conference room as the opening ceremony two weeks earlier. All the volunteers attended, plus the students and teachers from the schools where they taught. Wang Xiaoqing again represented La La Shou, along with one of the administrators, Tom’s entire class of five students, and Wang Xue. We sat around the same open square table.

As everyone from volunteers to students made earnest speeches, the La La Shou students emitted a series of uncontrollable chirps and burps and fart sounds; a few screeching parrot-like echoes of speechmakers’ phrases.

Meilin held a microphone and started the speechifying.

“This experience is about making connections—”

Ooo-Ooo-Ooo-Ooo!

“—and making friendships.”

Urrrrrp!

“Only by doing this—”

Fgggghhhhtttt!

“—can we achieve world peace.”

A university student sang in an operatic style, her performance spiced with—

Bppplllpppphhhh!

Bah! Bah!

Cheema Cheema!

Tom and I found this hilarious. These were our buddies. We knew how happy they were to be here. But the funny part was how everyone pretended it wasn’t happening: they plowed on with noble speeches as if the room weren’t echoing with—

Sttweeeeee!

Thfffgggtttt!

Tom leaned over and whispered: “This is the kind of thing you dream about doing in a meeting.”

The La La Shou administrator spoke, with Wang Xue as translator.

“The students do not mean to be rude,” she said. “Sometimes they cannot control themselves. They are very excited.”

And then it was showtime. The La La Shou students and teachers rose to perform and asked Tom and me to join them. We sang “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” which Tom had taught them. One of the students is a tall boy with a strong grip, as I discovered last week when he happily grabbed my arm and nearly caused nerve damage. He wrapped his arm around my shoulder and held my hand. We sang a traditional Chinese song with a variety of flowing hand motions, which Tom and I mimicked with minimal success.

The teachers and students performed their final tune alone. It’s called “Grateful Heart,” written for a Japanese TV show about a girl who succeeds despite many difficulties. The La La Shou teens were nearly as graceful as their two female teachers, arms and hands swimming and swaying. The English-language students spontaneously rushed alongside them, joining them in song.

To close, we the volunteers performed a medley of show tunes about America: chestnuts such as “Deep in the Heart of Texas” and “California Here I Come,” a clear sign that most of our group was born before World War II. The highlight was Ralph singing “New York, New York,” with Brenda and the female volunteers kicking like Rockettes, soon joined by the young Chinese students.

That evening, a handful of us go with Ralph and Brenda to see the nighttime water show at the Great Goose Pagoda—though Tom and I first open our bottle of Chinese hooch for a pre-departure shot in our room.

He sniffs, then hands me the bottle.

“Kind of smells like whiskey,” I say.

“Mixed with fish oil,” he adds.

We pour.

“A toast,” I say.

We hold up our tiny teacups.

“To China,” says Tom.

“To China.”

We clink cups and drink.

“Not bad,” I say of the slight burn on my throat.

“I think I taste soy sauce.”

We pour another.

“Thank you for coming,” I say.

“My pleasure.”

We clink glasses and pound number two.

“One more?” I say.

“Why not.”

We raise our cups.

“Here’s hoping this doesn’t make us go blind,” says Tom.

A worthy toast. The bottle empty, we walk to the elevator. Brenda says our departure time has been delayed: we’ll meet in the lobby in fifteen minutes.

“We can buy Adam another bottle,” I say, digging in my pocket for the room key. One more shot. We hold our tiny teacups aloft.

“To China again,” says Tom. “It’s a big country.”

We call it the square of clarity: a clear spot Tom and I made on the grimy glass window of our tenth-floor hotel room. I’d unlocked a small bottom panel of the window; Tom stuck his arm through, reached up, and cleaned a roughly twelve-inch-square area with wet toilet paper. Suddenly the city came into focus, the rooftops extending to the horizon.

“I really like that term ‘square of clarity,’” I tell Tom as I look out. “I want a square of clarity for life.”

As we drag our bags from our fourteen-day home, I don’t feel clear about anything. I want to see Julie, but I hate to leave the kids. I’ve come to realize, more so than in Costa Rica, both the importance and the irrelevance of language. I felt close to Liu Baojian, to the Dancer—to all the kids—even though we never conversed or exchanged a meaningful word. Ms. B and I communicated on a simplistic level, and yet if I return ten years from now, twenty years from now, she’ll welcome me as an old friend. At the risk of sounding like Mr. Kumbaya, our humanity runs deeper than our differences.

Tom and I catch a cab to the airport, leaving apartments and offices and crowds behind. The highway extends through untouched land that will surely be swallowed by sprawl. On the flight to Beijing, I flip through my notepad, the one where I wrote “culture shock overload,” and find a draft of my entry for the group journal.

May 21

Thought for the day:

“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

—GROUCHO MARX

I’m a fan of old Marx Brothers movies from the 1930s. This past week at La La Shou, I’ve often felt like a straight man in one of those films, swept up by the school’s frenetic energy. Like silent Harpo, I communicate by pantomime. Because of the language barrier, I feel as though I’m experiencing the school in black and white, much as these children must live their lives.

But the teachers at La La Shou, through humor and patience and unflagging energy, are determined to give the kids lives that are rich in color. I work with three teachers in a class of 10 students. One teacher is 22, the other two are 25. They are caregivers, wrestlers, therapists. The room is filled with twitches and shouts, with hopping and stomping and moans. They never lose their temper. The teachers will correct kids—they will be firm. This morning, a boy I’ve taken to calling “Sleeves” (because he likes to lift your sleeves up to your shoulders) punched the boy sitting next to him in the back. And then he did it again—despite being corrected. After a third shot, a teacher smacked his hand, not hard, but enough to get his attention. And then she said something that sounded to me like, “Not so much fun when it happens to you, huh.” And then she kissed him.

La La Shou is not a sad place. The students are usually smiling, the teachers seem always to laugh. The affection they have for the kids is obvious: the way they cup a hand around a child’s cheek, the way they giggle when a child says something cute. My biggest regret is that I’m missing out on so much of the comedy, though I find myself laughing too.

I don’t think I’m helping much here. The language barriers are too great. I often feel like the 11th student. But I think the teachers like having me around. I’m an English-speaking novelty; a break from their exhausting routine. So I smile, more than I ever have before, and I do whatever I can to ease their load rather than add to it. I consider it a privilege to know these strong, spirited women, who help these children to experience life outside of the dog, away from the dark.

Once I return home, Ms. B e-mails me an MP3 of the “Loo-la-loo” song. I listen and I’m instantly in the classroom again, hearing the grunts, the yelps, Sleeves yelling Eh! Eh! Eh! I see the Dancer dancing. I see Liu Baojian, head tilted, a blue fog in his eyes.

I’m trying to live up to my father’s life while not being a father myself, and yet it’s the women in China who most impressed me. Ms. B, Ms. L, Ms. H, Zhang Tao—they want only for you to love the children as much as they do. To bring a little brightness to the school. “We seem to laugh more when volunteers are here,” a teacher said to Meilin after we left. These women are my new standard as I seek my square of clarity.