‘It’s like teleporting to a different land every time you wake up’

Written by Derek Low

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In the late 19th century, some guy thought it would be a good idea to build a train line from Europe across the whole of Asia. This guy was Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, and this project became the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Some 120 years later, it’s still the longest railway in the world, spanning 9,300 kilometers, 87 cities, eight time zones and two continents. If you take a nap starting at the Gulf of Finland and miss your stop, there’s a chance you’ll wake up at the Sea of Japan.

The Trans-Siberian speeds (or, more often, chugs) through the remotest parts of the Russian homeland and passes through almost every variety of landscape, from snow-capped mountains, to deserts, to forests and lakes.

I rode it in May 2011 as part of a solo back-packing trip from Asia to Europe.

This is what happened:

I arrived at Beijing Railway Station.

I boarded train #3, heading direct to Moscow (duration: 6 days).

Our route would be via the Trans-Mongolian Branch, starting in China and crossing Mongolia before joining the main line through Siberia.

It’s possible to make the 8,000-km journey without getting off, but to preserve my sanity (and my hygiene) I planned to make occasional stops along the way.

Part 1

Beijing to Ulaanbaatar

(30 hours)

For the first leg, to the capital of Mongolia, you choose from three classes of cabin — spalny vagon (first class), kupe (second class), or platskartny (third class).

I had a 4-bed “hard sleeper” compartment in second class, which I shared with one guy from Hong Kong and one from Germany.

There are no showers on board. And the guy from Hong Kong was going non-stop all the way through to Moscow…

It’s an extremely sociable environment, and after the first few hours you’re pretty familiar with your compartment-mates and neighbors. Four-year-old Elena terrorized our carriage. She spoke terrible English and I spoke terrible Chinese; we got along great.

There was a Chinese restaurant car.

And a complimentary lunch, which no-one got too excited about.

We made our way slowly through the mountainous terrain of northern China…

…until the landscape flattened out.

We stopped to make the switch to a lower-powered engine.

Thirteen hours later we arrived at Erlian, on the Chinese-Mongolian border.

Turns out train tracks in Mongolia and Russia are of a narrower gauge than those in China. So… another switchover, this time of undercarriage bogies.

The entire train is lifted up by some amazing hydraulics while you’re stuck inside it for three hours. (And the toilets are all locked to avoid any unfortunate incidents for the engineers working below you.)

You know you’re in a different country when…

You wake up and the Chinese restaurant car has been replaced with a Mongolian one.

And you have to pay $10 for a pretty inedible breakfast…

Landscape change alert: We have now entered the Gobi desert.

Even with the windows shut, the sand find its way in.

And then: The endless desert landscape finally gives away to an urban, mostly concrete sprawl that looks almost as bleak. Welcome to Ulaanbaatar.

Mongolia turned out to be such a fantastic destination, I spent a full week there. But that’s a whole other story…

Part 2

Ulaanbaatar to Ulan-Ude

(25 hrs)

How slow is this leg? An Italian traveler I met at the hostel where I stayed left the morning after me, by bus, and got there ahead of me.

To help locate your position, there are distance markers at every kilometer, displaying the distance from either Moscow or Beijing. I spent a long time just watching them go by. Slowly…

After eight hours clearing immigration at the Russian border, I arrived at Ulan-Ude the following evening…

…to discover that the only thing worth seeing here is the world’s largest Lenin head.

Part 3

Ulan-Ude to Irkutsk

(8 hrs)

Some of the most spectacular scenery of the whole journey can be seen en route to Irkutsk, which skirts the shores of Lake Baikal.

This is the deepest, clearest, oldest lake on earth, containing one-fifth of the planet’s fresh water and countless species of fish, 80 percent of which are unique to this body of water.

I spent several days exploring an island in the lake — Olkhon, which is bigger than my home country of Singapore.

Part 4

Irkutsk to Yekaterinburg

(62 hrs)

This is the longest leg of all: 3,400 kilometers. Please don’t ask me how I came up with the idea of traveling in platskartny, the third class “open carriage.”

I guess I was thinking I’d meet some Russians and spend merry times drinking vodka.

No such luck.

What I got instead was a series of mysterious delays, beginning the next morning. I woke up, looked out the window and calculated that we had stayed far too long in the station and were way behind schedule.

Finally we got rolling again, before another unscheduled three-hour stop in the middle of Siberia.

(I mean, literally in the middle of Siberia.)

I slept.

I woke to the same scenery.

We were now 15 hours behind. This couldn’t be right. People were having heated conversations with the provodnik (carriage attendant) that I couldn’t decipher. Something was up.

What’s the worst that could have happened, I asked myself? I came up with a few scenarios, the most far-fetched being a dramatic accident — an epic scene of explosions, tearing steel and shooting flames.

A few hours later we got moving again and found out that… A cargo train ahead of us had derailed, leaving behind a terrible scene of destruction.

No shit, Derek.

It was definitely a moment to pause for thought…

The delay presented me with a lesser problem of my own—dwindling food supplies. I had to ration my snacks, since the only thing provided on board was hot water:

Most people had come well-prepared with utensils, cups and plates. Not me. But I did impress some Russians by converting my instant noodles container into a tea cup.

Of course, vodka re-supply was available at every major station.

— Time Out —

All Russian trains run on Moscow time, but there are seven time zones in the country and this journey took me through four of them.

It makes for a very confusing situation, since different clocks are set to different zones. People who boarded the train at Irkutsk, like me, had their watches adjusted to Irkutsk time (GMT +9). The train stations use Moscow time (GMT +4), as should the train itself, but our carriage was a full hour slower (GMT +3), possibly due to a failure to correct for Daylight Savings. The provodniks had their watches set to their respective destinations, usually a major city like Yekaterinburg (GMT +6) or Novosibirsk (GMT +7). Plus, because of the derailment, we were delayed by 15 hours from the schedule displayed in every carriage.

So when the train clock shows 03:00, some people are preparing breakfast while others are trying to get to sleep. And asking the attendants for the time of arrival at a town only creates more confusion. Am I getting there at seven or eight, in the morning or evening? Local time or Moscow time? You reach a point where you can’t tell if you’re eating lunch or dinner.

Part 5

Yekaterinburg to Vladimir

(25 hrs)

At some point we cross from Asia into Europe, marked by a white obelisk.

I stopped in Vladimir to visit the fairy-tale town of Suzdal, which crams over thirty 600-year-old churches into an area less than nine square kilometers.

Vladimir to Moscow

(3 hrs)

It doesn’t look far on the map, but arriving in Moscow feels like arriving in an entirely different country. You can immediately tell you’re in a great European capital on a par with Paris, London or Rome.

Moscow to St Petersburg

(8 hrs)

This is technically not part of the Trans-Siberian line, but this trip would not have been complete without taking in the magnificence of St Petersburg. Here’s where the Russian Empire sort of began, and my own journey comes to an end.

Epilogue

It’s exactly one month since I left Beijing and I am so glad to have made it all the way. Siberia, where only three per cent of the population speaks English, is no joke for a solo traveler. Think about it: You can wander the streets asking for help, and only 1 in 33 people will understand you.

Was I bored most of the time? Absolutely. Would I do it again? In a heartbeat.

By this point, I’ve spent over 161 hours on trains. Was I bored most of the time? Absolutely. Would I do it again? In a heartbeat. I’d love to do the Trans-Siberian in winter, from Moscow to Vladivostok.

Traveling continually for this long gives you a special perspective on things. As you gradually head west, you also see cities transform. Monasteries turn into churches. Toilets evolve from holes in the ground to raised seats with flushes. The number of Asians wanes from majority to minority.

It’s like teleporting to a different land every time you wake up.

In the east, cheap left-hand drive cars imported from Japan get mixed in with right-hand ones from Europe. As you head west, the proportion of left-hand drive vehicles decreases, hitting zero by the time you reach Moscow. Somewhere in the middle, it’s a strange — and scary — mix.

Most of all, there’s no other way you could see such a variety of constantly shifting landscapes. It’s like teleporting to a different land every time you wake up.

Finally: How much did it cost me?

Answer: $1175 for one month

The breakdown

$240 — Train from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar
$42 — Train from Ulaanbaatar to Ulan-Ude
$41 — Train from Ulan-Ude to Irkutsk
$88 — Train from Irkutsk to Yekaterinburg
$81 — Train from Yekaterinburg to Vladimir
$11 — Train from Vladimir to Moscow
$30 — Train from Moscow to St Petersburg
$56 — Russian visa
$17 — Moscow policeman bribe
$569 — Food, accommodation, and other expenses

Note that this is the backpacker’s cost — I slept on strangers’ couches, I ate street food, I did everything as cheaply as I could. (That said, I also bought souvenirs, paid for museums, and even watched the Mariinsky ballet.)

Bottom line: I had one hell of an amazing time and, for the same price, there’s no reason you can’t, too.

Derek is an adventure traveler and entrepreneur. He created the Berkeley Ridiculously Automated Dorm (BRAD), a viral YouTube hit which actually has fewer views than10 Cutest Cat Moments. He has been featured in TIME, Forbes, CNN, BBC, The Guardian, and TechCrunch. He knows how stupid writing a third-person bio of himself can be.

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• What It’s like to Fly the $23,000 Singapore Airlines Suites Class

One Month on the World’s Longest Train Ride for $1,000 was originally published in Gone on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The cool thing about being President of the United States is, he gets to make big things happen with the wave of a magic wand (or the stroke of his pen, as the case may be). In February, President Obama did just that when he used his executive authority to declare the Pullman Historic District in Chicago, Hawaii’s Honouliuli Internment Camp and Colorado’s Arkansas River Valley as National Monuments — officially placing them within the country’s National Parks System. All three are worthy of exploration on your next visit to Chicago, Honolulu and Colorado, respectively. Here’s what you need to know about each one:

Pullman Historic District, Chicago:
In the late 19th century, railroad magnate George Pullman purchased a patch of land on Chicago’s far South Side and turned it into a model industrial town where his workers could live and also build his luxury railroad cars.

The town’s population reached a peak of 9,000 and was eventually subsumed by the City of Chicago. But in 1894, strikes ensued and federal troops had to be brought in to end it. In 1907 all residential properties were sold and have been privately owned since. By mid-century much of the surrounding communities had fallen into disrepair, but Pullman residents joined together to fight an intended demolition and the area was given National Landmark Historic status in 1971.

Plus: 7 things you absolutely must do in a National Park — how many have you tried?

Considered integral to the U.S. labor movement, including the formation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (the first all African-American union in the country), Pullman National Monument today is a place where visitors can book a guided tour or just walk around and admire the brick row houses and town structures like the Hotel Florence (pictured), the clock tower and factory, and Greenstone Church.

Honouliuli Internment Camp, Honolulu:

Among the many reasons the Hawaiian islands are blessed is the fact they contain seven national parks and two national monuments — the newest of which is Honouliuli National Monument (www.nps.gov/hono)—a former World War II internment camp.

Located on the island of Oahu, Honouliuli National Monument (along with Pearl Harbor) serves as yet another grim reminder of wartime atrocities. The largest and longest-serving of Hawaii’s internment camps, Honouliuli is located at the sugar plantation town of Waipahu and ran from 1943 until 1946. During this three-year period it held a resident population of 400 internees who were Japanese- and European-American, resident aliens, and also more than 4,000 prisoners of war. Conditions were so bad it was referred to as “Hell Valley.”

Abandoned and forgotten since the end of World War II, but rediscovered in 2002 by volunteers from the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii, the 160-acre Honouliuli currently has no facilities and is available to visit by reservation only.

Arkansas River Valley, Colorado (a.k.a. Browns Canyon National Monument):
As if the state of Colorado weren’t already gorgeous enough — a land blessed with towering mountains and deep valleys — its citizens can now sigh a collective relief that the 21,586 acres that comprise Browns Canyon National Monument in Chafee County will be protected for generations to come.

A nature lover’s paradise, Browns Canyon is a mecca for whitewater rafting, fishing and hunting and also is home to the American black bear, bobcats, mountain lions, coyotes, red foxes, bighorn sheep, elk, peregrine falcons and golden eagles. Legislation was introduced in 2005 that would provide protection but failed due to the influence of the National Rifle Association who insisted that protection status would limit hunting in the region.

Visitors to the canyon can expect little in the way of development. There are few roads and camping opportunities limited to those reached by hiking, mountain biking and horseback riding. There are about four miles of non-motorized trails on the San Isabel National Forest portion of the monument that provide access for those activities.

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Meet America’s three newest national monuments was originally published in Gone on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Iceland is the most unique and exciting place on the planet. This article is designed to help maximize your trip to this incredible place.

Table of Contents

This post is divided into two parts: tips and itinerary. Tips covers unique considerations necessary for happy Icelandic travel. It’s applicable for all travelers to Iceland. The itinerary provides and exact 8-day road trip plan, with sites, lodging, pictures, drive times, and routes. Everything you need for the perfect Iceland road trip.

• Getting Started
• The Ring Road
• When to Go: Weather, Road Conditions, Light, Crowds
• What to Bring: Map/GPS, Google Maps, Clothes, Gear, Money, Packing
• Where to Stay: Hotels, Camping, Airbnb, Booking
• Driving in Iceland: Lanes/Passing, F-Roads, Emergencies, 4WD, Rental
• Activities: Helicopters, Hiking, Planes, Horseback, Diving
• Food in Iceland: Hotels, Restaurants, Groceries, Gas Stations
• Itinerary: Complete list of route, sights and places to stay.

As mentioned, a specific itinerary follows later in this article, but in general, what does one do in Iceland? Basically you drive around and gaze upon the endless variety of stunning landscapes. You do not go to Iceland to see Reykjavik, sit on a tourbus, or play it safe.

You go to Iceland to have adventures and see what another planet might look like if a beta version were being tested upon the surface of ours.

You want to design your trip so that you see as much of the island as possible. You should drive the entire Ring Road.

The Ring Road

The Ring Road is designed perfectly for a road trip. According to Google Maps, and under ideal circumstances, the total drive time is around 17 hours. I recommend undertaking this in 8–10 days, which allows for plenty of time to explore (and importantly, venture into the West Fjords).

To tackle the Ring Road, the first question is which direction should you drive? Counter-clockwise is the stronger direction. The reason is because, like any good narrative arc, this direction has some good action early on, a nice slow plot development section, and then some epic climaxes.

While “let’s just see what happens” is certainly an effective strategy in Iceland, it’s very important to plan your days such that you’re able to see everything in the most efficient order. I suggest planning each day’s itinerary before you leave, and then adjusting it each night while you’re there depending on weather, route completion and energy.

When To Go

A few things to consider when deciding when to go: the weather, the light, and the crowds. These factors will dramatically influence how you experience the country. The high season in Iceland is June-August. The “shoulder seasons” are May/September.

Weather

If you go during the high season, the temperature will be cautiously comfortable. There will be moments where a t-shirt suffices, followed quickly by a freezing torrential downpour. It’s very similar to San Francisco on its most capricious day.

If you want snowy landscapes and the Northern Lights, go during the winter; just don’t expect to move around as easily. Many of the side roads become impassable.

Road Conditions

The Ring Road is open all year. Some of the unpaved and side roads, during the winter especially, can be closed to due snowfall (or volcanic activity). During the high season, most all roads are open. If you want full access to all of Iceland, try to go during May-August.

The Light

Iceland is famous for its beautiful light. During the summer months, it’s one long perpetual sunset between 9pm-3am; it can be a very beautiful time to go for a photographer. If you want to see the Northern Lights, you must visit during the winter.

The Crowds

After reading all of the above, it seems like a no brainer to go during the high season of June/July. The downside is the crowd. There is only one two-lane road around the whole island. All of the sites fill up substantially and it can be a mess trying to get a picture without a bus load of tourists plopped in your way.

Given this, I think the best month to go, for a first time visitor, is August — it’s just off the high season, so there are slightly less people, it’s still bright most of the day, and there is no leftover snow (as there would be in May).

What To Bring

Iceland requires a few unique items. Of course bring all the obvious things like clothes, sunglasses, toiletries etc; the items below are helpful augmentations and can make the trip a lot smoother.

Map/GPS

You do not want to rely on GPS in Iceland. A hard copy map is recommended and this is the best one you can buy. It’s got all the relevant roads and off-roads you’ll need for most of your journey. Also it looks cool and makes for a nice souvenir when you return home.

In some cases, GPS coordinates can be very helpful; but it gets confusing if you try to cross-reference place names with Google, as they can be inconsistently worded on the device. For a treat, visit here: 63°27.400´N 19°22.130´W.

Google Maps

Google Maps is extremely helpful for planning your route and getting a sense of how long it takes to drive between destinations. As you decide how quickly you’d like to circle the Ring Road, use Google Maps to drag pins along the route to get a sense of drive times. In my experience, it’s very accurate as long as you are on paved roads.

Weather Planning

The weather in Iceland is extremely unpredictable. The two most important questions to answer are: is it raining and how cold is it. Both of these questions can be answered with this amazing website. It provides a precipitation map of the entire island.

Use this to determine which days you want to prioritize the most visually exciting locations (for example, try not to visit the Fjords when it’s storming — you won’t be able to appreciate the vastness). I recommend checking this every morning and scouting your route for the day.

Clothes and Gear

Clothes are a very personal decision. I won’t give you specifics or repeat the “layers layers layers” trope because you’ve heard it before. Presumably you know how to dress yourself. Assume the weather is very intense: it’s quite windy, generally between 40–60 degrees, and unpredictable. Don’t be stupid. Bring good clothes and have lots of options.

I have a lot of specific recommendations for prosumer camera equipment to bring to Iceland. You can find all of these tips and gear links here. Those videos are specifically targeted at high-end, professional gear–they assume your primary goal is image capture.

Money

All you need in Iceland is your credit card. Every gas station, restaurant, shop, and accepts cards. Even the most isolated spots sometimes prefer cards. It’s possible to spend your entire trip in Iceland without handling money.

That said, it always pays to be versatile when traveling. Carry cash as a backup, but don’t expect to use it very much. Another consideration is foreign transaction fees — ideally, use a card that doesn’t gouge you on these.

Suitcase or Backpack

Decision: backpack or suitcase. Answer: depends on how you’re traveling. If you’re camping, sleeping in your car, or not staying in hotels, then a backpack is probably a good idea. You’ll want to be mobile and versatile.

If you’re staying in hotels or Airbnbs, then you can probably get away with a suitcase. One thing to consider is that every night you will likely be staying in a new location; taking a suitcase in and out of a car can get annoying. Make sure you bring something that can move and pack easily. Personally, a suitcase works far better.

Where to Stay

There are plenty of accommodation options in Iceland around the entire Ring Road. Things book up quickly, especially in the high season, so plan ahead! Now, do you want to camp or do you want to stay in a hotel? This is the first question you need to answer. The benefits of each are below.

Hotels

The benefits of a hotel are obvious: clean bed, shower, roof, blackout curtains (don’t underestimate), food, etc. If you have the means, this is the best way to go.

I have indicated specifically which hotels are my favorite below and in the itinerary section; they are spaced evenly around the Ring Road and are just the right distance apart to maximize activities and limit long drives.

• Vik Myrdal Icelandair Hotel
• Country Hotel Smyrlabjörg
• Icelandair Hotel Herad
• Vogafjós Guesthouse
• Hvammstangi Cottages
• Country Hotel Heydalur
• Ion Adventure Hotel
• CenterHotel Thingholt

Camping/RV

Camping is a great alternative for a few reasons: 1) You are in full control of your schedule and can move around significantly more versatilely than if you’re bound to check-in times. 2) During the summer months, you can invert your schedule so that you sleep during the day and explore during the more beautiful, less crowded, perpetual sunset times. Worth considering if pictures are a priority. And 3) Cost. Hotel in Iceland are expensive. If this is an issue, consider camping or an RV and you will definitely save money.

Airbnb

This exists in Iceland, but I don’t recommend it. It’s highly unlikely that there is availability outside of Reyjakvik, exactly where and when you want to stay. There are plenty of options, sure, but it can be difficult to plan a exact route and expect availability in some of the more remote locations.

Booking

My favorite site to plan travel with is Booking.com. I’m not paid to say that. It’s just a terrific website with all the right tools (specifically the map and free cancelations!). Even tiny little places in Icelandic nether-regions use Booking.com.

Driving in Iceland

To get around Iceland, you need a car. Do not consider bus tours or any group-travel options. You need your own car to maximize your adventure. When deciding which car to get, consider space, performance, 4WD, and visuals.

You want a car that can fit everyone and their stuff (with ideally 1–2 empty seats), go everywhere you want it to without burning millions of dollars of gas, and if you want a prop bonus, some cars look great in photos in Iceland (Landrover Defender).

Lanes and Passing

Driving in Iceland can be really scary. Even on the Ring Road, on a flat straightaway, things can be nerve-racking. The issue is lane-width. Icelandic roads are thin and people drive really fast (think the Golden Gate bridge middle lanes, before they put in the barrier).

There is also quite a bit of high-speed passing necessary (especially around RVs). This coupled with the insane surroundings makes extreme attention necessary at all times.

F-Roads

The Ring Road is well maintained and generally fine to drive on, lane-width aside. You will also encounter plenty of “f-roads”, which come in all shapes and sizes. They are usually gravel and can be anywhere from 2 to zero lanes wide. Many sites are a few minutes drive off the Ring; to get to them, you’ll need to use the mysterious f-road. You will know pretty quickly if your car can handle it or not.

Flat Tires and Emergencies

You need a spare tire in Iceland, end of story. If you don’t have one you have grave unhappiness in your immediate future. You also need assurance from your rental agency that they have some means of getting to you in an emergency (they all say they do, but honestly, how is this possible?).

Assume you are on your own and drive carefully. Worst case, hitchhiking is safe; the main issue is that the places that can actually help you, are few and far between.

4WD and Transmission

At the very least, get a 4WD SUV. You don’t want to be concerned about where you can drive. You should be prepared for rough roads. You do NOT want to worry about your car when you’re six hours deep in the Fjords, on a gravel road, worried about potential flat tires.

Get the best car you can afford. If you know how to drive manual, consider the Landrover Defender. Such a cool car, unfortunately all of the Icelandic ones are manual transmission. I think the best option is a new Toyota RAV4.

Storage

I advocate for at least 1–2 empty seats in your vehicle. You can probably get away with suitcases etc in the trunk, but you also want plenty of space for quick-grab items like camera gear, rain jackets, hiking boots, food, etc. This type of miscellany needs space to float freely in the car and allow for quick access.

Car Rental

We used Blue Car Rental both times and it worked great. It’s next to the airport and has good service and new cars. They also provide roadside assistance (though I don’t know the details–thankfully never needed it). The one time I got a flat tire I was able to hobble to a service shop in Vik.

Activities

There is a ton to do in Iceland. Most of your time will be spent stumbling on amazing things by accident, but do allow some time for coordinated activities. Some highlights are below (though there are plenty more).

Helicopter Tour

If you have any plans to take a helicopter tour in your life, take it in Iceland. It’s expensive, but it’s worth it.

The best company is Norduflug and the best pilot is Gisli Gislason. I recommend the Essential Iceland tour where you fly over the Golden Circle, Pinglivir National Park, the glacial regions, and land on a glacier for a picnic. It’s an incredible journey.

Weather is a huge factor so ideally leave 1–3 days window to take your trip. I suggest doing it on your last day, and leaving out of Reykjavik.

Aerial Photos

If you want to shoot photos/video from a helicopter, here are some things to keep in mind. For photo, you’ll want to shoot at the highest shutter speed you can to reduce blur (around 1/1200 is fine), at a aperture of around f8, and adjust your ISO accordingly depending on the lighting conditions.

For video I recommend lenses with IS stabilization, a camera with autofocus, and ideally, built-in ND filters. I suggest bringing two bodies, one for photo one for video, with variance between wide/telephoto lenses.

Hiking

Every time you step out of your car in Iceland, you’re hiking. But there are a few places where a preplanned hike make a lot of sense. One such place is the glacial region of Skatfell. There are a number of interesting hikes in this area. I won’t go into too much detail, but this is a great place to start.

If you’re particularly adventurous, the hike to Hornstrandir looks to be one of the most amazing hikes in the world. I’ve never done it, but it’s on the bucket list for sure.

There are countless other activities in Iceland (plane rides, horseback riding, diving, ATVing). A lot of these depend on your personal preferences so I won’t delve into all the various options. In my experience, 30% of your trip should be dedicated to planned activities while the rest is reserved for exploration and adventures.

Food in Iceland

The food in Iceland is amazing. Truly, very good. So why do you often hear people lament how bad it is and that it’s “all about hot dogs”. This is true IF you restrict your food sourcing to gas stations; so yeah, no shit the food isn’t good at gas stations, just like everywhere else in the world.

If you branch out and try local restaurants, cafes and hotel eateries, then it’s very good. I get it, gas stations are cheaper; just don’t judge the cuisine of a country based on rest stop food.

One thing to keep in mind is, you will not find food spaced evenly along your route. It’s entirely possible to drive for hours without finding a single piece of food. Keep this in mind when planning you day.

Hotel Restaurants

This is probably the most reliable place to find 1) food, period, and 2) good food. In most of the towns there is at least one hotel. Usually this hotel has one place to eat, open at the normal times. Try and coordinate when you pass through such a town, with meal times. If that isn’t possible, plan ahead and take an extra meal to go in the morning.

Grocery Stores

You’ll find varying sizes of Icelandic grocery stores depending where you are. Grocery store size and quality is typically correlated with proximity to Reykjavik and Akueryi. They’re usually closer to what Americans know as gas station travel marts: more like a rest stop mart than a full-blown Whole Foods.

Gas Stations

As mentioned, a cheap way to eat in Iceland is to buy meals at gas stations. Hotdogs are popular items in this case, and they are actually quite good. Try it, why not, but please don’t base your food intake on them unless you absolutely must. Again, anyone who tells you the food in Iceland is bad, was aggressively optimizing for cost, not food quality.

The tips in the last section should get you pretty far on your Icelandic journey. No matter how you decide to traverse the island, you’ll see some incredible things and have joyful, reckless adventures.

This next section is all about specifics. In it, I will outline a perfect 8–10 day journey around the entire Ring Road. I will do my best to list all the sights you can see along the way. Consider it a strong initial outline! You will still need to do some homework to line it up with your own preferences.

Hey, before you continue, follow me on Twitter.

Day 1: Keflavík→Vik

You will likely land early in the morning; it’s best to start driving right away. You will eventually end up in Vik for the night; the drive from KEF is only about 3 hours, but there are some terrific stops along the way. It’s a great route to get acclimated to Iceland and the pace of things.

Stay the night: Icelandair Hotel Vik
Lunch Recommendation: Eldstó Art Cafe

*Note, avoid the Blue Lagoon until the very end, it’s better as a final stop. It’s too crowded and touristy to be your first Icelandic experience.

Sights
The drive along the southern coast is one of my absolute favorites. Some of Iceland’s most iconic sights are just off the Ring Road. There is also great opportunity for serious adventures.

Skogafoss Waterfall
Seljalandsfoss Waterfall
Sólheimasandur Plane Crash
Black Beach
Reynishverfi Rocks
Dyrhólaey Arch
Seljavallalaug Pool

Day 2: Vik→Hofn

The drive up to Hofn is about the same length as Day 1, three hours total. This leaves you plenty of time to explore and go on at least one longer adventure. This part of Iceland is still relatively tourist-heavy, as you’re still within striking distance of Reykjavik.

Stay the Night: Country Hotel Smyrlabjörg or Hotel Hofn
I prefer Smyrlabjörg because it’s got a quainter vibe. Hofn is a good place to resupply (it’s a harbor town), but if you’re deciding between the two spots, my vote is Smyrlabjörg.

Sights
There is a ton to do on the way to Hofn. Some of the best day activities are along this route, so plan accordingly. There is terrific hiking in Skaftafell; there are also a number of more extreme options available if you want to try something different. You won’t need more than an hour at places like Jokulsarlon orFjaðrárgljúfur — consider those spots really amazing, but quick photo ops.

Fjaðrárgljúfur Canyon
Mossy Lava Rocks
Jokulsarlon Lagoon
Skaftafell National Park
Svartifoss Waterfall
Landmannalaugar
Ice Caves

Day 3: Hofn→Egilsstaðir

On this day, it’s possible to drive all the way to the Lake Myvatn region if you want. That would take about six hours and you risk shortchanging some of the great stops along the way. It depends how much time you plan to stay in Myvatn — if you’d like two nights there, then it’s probably best to mash it from Hofn straight to Myvatn in one day. If you prefer a more leisurely pace, you can stop in Egilsstaoir for one night, which opens up some interesting detours.

Stay the night: Hotel Icelandair
Eat Lunch: Djúpivogur

Sights
The route along the southeastern coast, through the East Fjords, is probably one of the most underrated parts of Iceland. The West Fjords get all the attention; I would say the East Fjords have just as good vistas, better, more consistent weather, and solid roads throughout. There are numerous opportunities to take a longer route along the coast, off the Ring Road; deviate onto these according to your whim.

Town of Seydisfjordur
Dyrfjoll
Laekjavik coast
Djúpivogur
Random coastal views

Day 4: Egilsstaoir→Myvatn

Getting to Myvatn, especially if you stayed the night in Egilsstaoir, is a quick drive. It’s about two hours from Egilsstaoir. This gives you plenty of time to explore the region.

Stay the Night: Vogafjós Guesthouse
This is my favorite place to stay in Iceland. It’s basically a little farm. The food is amazing and the vibe is aggressively pleasant. Bucolic, serene, perfect.

Sights
The Lake Myvatn region is one of the most interesting and unusual parts of Iceland. Extreme geothermal activity makes it look as though the Earth is slowly trying to turn itself inside-out. Make sure to copiously explore this region as it holds some of the most exciting surprises.

This region is also very susceptible to snow closures; if you’re visiting near the winter months, you may not be able to access places like Dettifoss (where the filmed Prometheus) or the Horse City (where they filmed Oblivion).

I highly recommend all visitors to Iceland experience this region. If you don’t have time to do the full Ring, it’s possible to fly from Reykjavik to Myvatn.

Dettifoss Waterfall
Lake Myvatn
Krafla Power Station
Viti Crater
Myvatn Nature Baths
Hverarönd/Namafjall Geothermal
Hrossaborg Horse City
Hverfjall Cone

Day 5: Myvatn→Fjords Base

On this day, you are basically crushing it all the way from North Iceland, to the edge of the West Fjords. It’s one of the longer drives you’ll have. The Fjords are their own beast, and require a night’s rest and full day to tackle. As such, you want to lay up somewhere at the base of the Fjords. The two hotels listed below are good options. You’ll also pass through Akureyri, which is Iceland’s second largest urban center. Worth a stop for food and supplies.

Stay the Night: Hvammstangi Cottages or Hotel Bjarkalundur
Both of these options have their quirks. The Cottages, my preference, are isolated little cabins with no central authority. You show up and code into your assigned unit. It’s very spacious and comfortable.

Sights
There are only a few listed sights on this route. Otherwise, it’s typical Iceland: gorgeous open roads and unexpected scenery. It’s a long drive, but be prepared to stop often as some really amazing photography is to be had along this route.

If you stay in Hvammstangi, you absolutely must have dinner at Geitafell. It’s a sketchy drive — you’ll frequently be left wondering how much farther it could possibly be — but it’s absolutely worth it. Magical little place (and one of your only options!).

Akureyri
Aldeyjarfoss
Godafoss
Geitafell Restaurant

Day 6: Fjord Base→West Fjords

Where you go in the West Fjords is entirely up to you. Know that the road conditions change dramatically out there — make sure you’re measuring drive-times on you map as everything takes about 1.5x as long. Your goal should be to get as much coverage as you can; I recommend finding a hotel on the interior to allow this.

Stay the Night Option 1: Country Hotel Heydalur
This is great option for staying in the middle of the West Fjords. Getting here is a journey in its own right. The hotel is a pleasant little guesthouse, nestled tightly at the base of a river valley.

Stay the Night Option 2: Hotel Hellnar
If you’d like to see the puffin cliffs at Latrabjarg, there is another route, that involves a ferry to the Snæfellsnes Peninsula. You’ll see less of the Fjords this way, but you’ll be able to check off some pretty interesting sights along the way. It’s a long day of driving (you’ll end up at your hotel late night). Basically drive to the cliffs, and then catch the Ferry Baldur to the peninsula where you’ll stay that night.

Sights
The Fjords themselves are the main attraction here. Much like Big Sur in California, it’s a beautiful drive along a very epic coast line. How much you end up seeing is very dependent on the weather. Make sure you’re monitoring the weather website before venturing too deep into the Fjords. If you’re really adventurous, look up hiking in Hornstrandir — a part of Iceland inaccessible by car (you’ll need to ferry or hike in).

Latrabjarg Cliffs
Hornstrandir
Holmavik Museum of Witchcraft and Wizardry
Gardar Ba 64 Shipwreck
Kirkjufell Church Mountain
Ísafjörður
Ferry Baldur

Day 7: West Fjords→Thingvellir

You’re almost home! This next drive takes you to Thingvellir National Park, which is very close to the Golden Circle attractions. Depending where you’re leaving from (Hellnar, or Heydalur), the drive is 2 or 5 hours respectively. This drive is relatively uneventful.

Stay the Night: ION Hotel
The ION Hotel is amazing — easily one of the best hotels in Iceland. Compared to everything else, it’s quite luxorious; allot some time to lounge around and take it all in. Nearby are some cool hikes that take you nearby a photogenic power plant.

Sights
From the ION, you can reach all of the Golden Circle attractions. This is an option, but do consider skipping these on the ground, and instead taking them in by helicopter out of Reykjavik. I say this because the Golden Circle is notoriously packed with tourists, and while beautiful, by this point you may have seen your fill of waterfalls; to switch things up, it’s more interesting to see it from the air.

Hotel ION
Geysir
Gullfoss
Thingvellir

Day 7: Thingvellir→Reykjavik

Getting to Reykjavik from the ION is very quick, no more than an hour. The drive is very straightforward, especially compared to what you’ve experienced so far.

Stay the Night: Center Hotel Thingholt
Eat Dinner: Grillmarket
Nightclubs: Dolly, Harlem, b5
The Centerhotel has a great location and has just enough creature comforts to make it a good final stop. It’s right in the mix of the nightlife (which gets started around 12). If you’re up for it, have a late dinner at Grillmarket and then bounce around to at least 4–5 bars and nightclubs.

This itinerary allots only one night in Reykjavik. I think this is all you need though others may disagree. It’s just not a very big city; it’s easy to take it all in in one day/night. I do suggest taking a helicopter tour, and if you do this, it can eat up about half a day depending on the tour you choose. The city itself can be taken in pretty quickly on foot.

Helicopter Tour
Hallgrimskirkja Chruch
Harpa Concert Hall
Bankastraeti Main street
Grillmarket
Blue Lagoon

The last thing a lot of people do in Iceland is visit the Blue Lagoon (about 45min from Reykjavik, near the airport). If you’ve never been, go check it out. But personally, I think you can skip it. It’s very crowded and feels too much like w waterpark to me. Other lagoons on the island are much better (Myvatn Nature Baths) and provide the same experience without the hassle.

End

Hopefully this was helpful! Please share it with your friends and convince more people to visit this perfect country!

My goal with this page was to provide you a one-stop resource for your Iceland trip. If there is something you’re still curious about, or if you have any follow up questions, please feel free to reach out on email.

For more articles like this, follow me here: @alexcornell.

Iceland Travel Guide: Tips and Road Trip Itinerary was originally published in Gone on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We reported back to school for the beginning of the fall semester on the last day of August. It would remain hot, and we would continue to use our mosquito net, through October. Even though it was the fall semester, the good first half of it felt like summer. We wore our frozen hand towels on our heads and sat below the AC unit while sunlight flooded through our yellow curtains.

Our time on the road had taught us two things about Nanhu Street. One was that much better places were to be found in China. Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Urumqi, Kashgar, and Yili were all more attractive and exciting locations. The second was that much of China is just like Nanhu Street. By living here, we had learned about the entire country. One might think of it as Rochester as opposed to New York City, and like Rochester, it was much more like the rest of the country. Nanhu Street was real China.

The Chinese themselves were not in love with Nanhu Street. Most of them called it a “small place” (xiao difang), which meant it was backward. Those who could would leave it, and what we discovered on the road that summer was that the people who could leave it held positions in the Communist Party. On airplanes and in good hotels, we crossed paths with groups of men in white shirts and black suits, carrying zippered men’s purses. Sometimes we saw them loaded into air-conditioned buses, a conveyance we rarely took. They went to tourist locations like Heaven Lake outside Urumqi, and we saw them on the way to Yili taking pictures of the Kazaks and their lovely horses in a dark-green valley. Membership in the Communist Party provided opportunities for travel and luxury.

After returning to school, I resumed my friendship with Mrs. Pan, who seemed not to bear us any ill will over our having left for the summer without saying goodbye. Of course she hadn’t gone anywhere attractive or exciting. She’d been here with the pigs that ate from the trash piles and the aggressive mosquitoes, living on the edge of the steaming irrigation ponds.

That fall, she asked if I would tutor her daughter in English. It was the only thing she ever asked me for, and I was quick to say yes. But it shocked me to learn that Song Lin was a student at our school. This seemed impossible given Mrs. Pan’s impoverishment, and she had to assure me it was true. My wife, who since her return to the United States has worked in student financial aid, says that Asian parents are champion savers. I don’t know how Mrs. Pan was able to send her daughter to school. I never found out whether Song Lin received financial aid.

We held her lesson in my apartment during the hour-and-a-half midday rest period, when there were no classes scheduled. She would enter the Foreign Affairs Building and come upstairs on her own and ring our doorbell. This was something her mother had never done and would never do, despite my repeated invitation. I couldn’t prevail upon Mrs. Pan to enter our building under any circumstances. I wondered if this was because she would have had to pass by the office downstairs. Was she afraid of people like David? Or was she afraid of what other people would say if they saw her? Or was she uncomfortable with us?

Whatever the case, Song Lin showed no qualms about calling on us.

I looked for any sign that she was undernourished and saw none. She brought a friend, who attended her lessons with her. They both spoke more normative Mandarin than Mrs. Pan, and I had few problems communicating with either of them. I learned that Song Lin was studying civil engineering and that her classes met on the other side of campus.

I wondered if there was a connection between this and the fact that I tended to see her mother on this side of the campus. Did her mother try to avoid her, to avoid embarrassing her in front of her friends? I never learned how hard things might have been for Song Lin because of who her mother was. This was a Communist campus, and, in theory, at least, there should have been no shame attached to one’s being poor. But in the group photos on the school’s website, I had seen on many of the children’s faces the rigid expressions of poor people who expect to be insulted and are already preparing to defend their self-respect.

During the fall, I increased my efforts to control my classes. I told Beth, I’m not going to let them get away with anything. I recalled that in Boston, before leaving for China, a Chinese grad student with whom I’d discussed our upcoming trip had told me, “The Chinese are not ready for democracy.” This, I concluded, was true. The disorder of Chinese life swept everything else away except martial law. My students and I worked at unrelenting cross-purposes. Every class felt like an uphill march against a steady gale.

They had trouble with everything but “Howyadoin?” I noticed that instead of pronouncing it the way we do, how-yuh-doin, they looked at how the word was written and hit the ya as hard as they could: how-yaaa-doin! When I listened carefully, I realized they had turned the entire expression into a Chinese word. How was hao, the Chinese word for “good”; ya they were transliterating using the character Ya (亚), meaning “Asia”; and doin’ was turning into dun, a character with several disparate meanings, including “a brief pause” and “to arrange.”

They were much less willing to learn the other expressions, such as “What’s crackin’?” which didn’t employ sounds from the Chinese palette of sounds.

Beth reported that she was getting along very well with her class. She did things they wanted to do.

One day, she took 30 kids to the cafeteria to make dumplings. I went along to take pictures. I took a tour of the kitchen and saw the walk-in cold room. Nothing was there except some potatoes on the floor. I photographed a kitchen worker wearing a white smock and hat, holding an empty pot. I took several snaps of Beth and all the kids at a stainless-steel food service table, rolling out a sheet of dough, their hands caked in flour. In the pictures, you can see what the event meant to them. A starved-looking boy who looks imploded by a lifetime of hunger is having a mock cleaver-fight with Beth. She is physically bigger than he is. Happiness is glowing through the thin bones of his skull.

Another girl in the photographs appears to be the princess of the class. She is wearing a white jacket and, for some reason, a tiara, and the photos show her gazing at her own dumplings as she is molding them. Her focus creates a center of attention to which other kids are drawn. Another Mystical, she doesn’t look at anyone else, including Beth.

There are no pictures of the dumpling banquet that followed. I left before that and went back to our apartment and watched TV.

Beth came home an hour later and closed the door behind her. When I told her she was sweating, she tried to answer and made a noise and covered her mouth and went into the bathroom and threw up dumplings. It turned out that she had felt obliged to show her enthusiasm by eating a lot of them.

She threw up again, filling the toilet bowl with shredded pork and yellow gastric juice and bits of green that looked black. I was aghast for her.

“No, I’m fine,” she said. She got up and washed her face and flushed the toilet. She told me that she had had to do it, there was no other way, it had been expected of her, and that she was fine.

When we left China, we arranged that we would stay in touch with Mrs. Pan and her family through her daughter Song Lin, the only member of the family who, I think, had the literacy and familiarity with digital technology to be comfortable using email.

This wasn’t the ideal solution for me since Mrs. Pan was the one I wanted to know, the person I felt true affection for. But I imagine that this arrangement was what Mrs. Pan wanted — that she wanted to transfer her friendship with me and whatever advantage might come from it to her daughter.

Compelled to be Song Lin’s pen pal, I learned about her. She addressed me and Beth as “uncle” and “aunt.” Life remained hard for both her and her parents. In the earliest email, in 2007, she said her parents talked about us every day. Later that year, she was living alone in the megalopolis of Wuhan, making between 600 and 1,000 RMB (roughly $80 to $120) per month “collecting information for a company” (unclear what “information” or what kind of company). She rented living quarters for 120 RMB (roughly $15) a month.

Meanwhile, she said her parents had started working for the school as sanitation workers. They were now, I gathered, the official smock-wearing workers who collected refuse using wheelbarrows instead of the freelancing “grannypickers” who sorted through it, collecting recyclables with baskets and shoulder poles. Though it presumably represented a more secure income source, their new job involved long hours; they got up very early and returned home very late (qizao tanhei).

In future emails, Song Lin would indicate that her parents were overworked and underpaid in this new position, and that the school was a stingy (ou’men) and essentially exploitative employer. It forced her parents to take on an area of responsibility — the entire north campus — that was too big for them. The two of them were exhausted. Her parents eventually decided they couldn’t take the pace of work, so they quit one of their jobs and held a single job, which they took turns doing, thus claiming only a single salary.

Song Lin touchingly expressed concern for her parents and her desire to help them, declaring that she wished she were “a magician” so she could “create money” for them so that they wouldn’t have to work so hard. Her concern for them was a steady theme in every email, and she spoke in idealistic terms about working hard for the sake of changing her parents’ lives: “This can be done, and it will be done … I must learn to find comfort in hard work.”

She was not the only one worried for her mom and dad. I was too. I sent money a few times — a total of at least $600. Song Lin was my point of contact for these wire transfers. She sent me the bank details and was the one who confirmed receipt of the funds.

My impression was that she dutifully informed her parents about the donations. She did not seem likely to do anything underhanded. Often, she conveyed her mother’s statements of gratitude and concern: “This is awkward for us. This is hard for you too. We’re grateful….” However, at the same time, knowing how stoic, frugal, and self-sacrificing Mrs. Pan was, I imagined she didn’t allow any of my donations to be spent on herself. She must have saved or invested them in her daughter in some way. On some level, this was unsatisfactory, for childish, irrational reasons. You give someone something, and they have a right to use the gift as they choose. But Mrs. Pan was the one I felt the greatest desire to assist, not Song Lin.

Eventually, in 2009, Song Lin reported that she was back in Huanggang working at a construction company, doing design work, using her degree from the school. She had gotten engaged to Liu Degang, who was from a nearby city, Huangshi. In April 2009, she got married, and in May she reported that she was pregnant. She would have to start calling Beth and me “great-aunt” and “great-uncle” (jiulaolao and jiulaoye).

I took this as the excuse that I had probably been looking for from the start to break contact. There were too many unknown players involved to keep sending donations. The situation had migrated too far from the one that had initially engaged my sympathy — the vision of Mrs. Pan going through our waste looking for recycling.

By breaking off with Song Lin, I’ve broken contact with her family. The last I heard, in 2009, Mrs. Pan was 60 and “fatter” since she had been resting from her job. It’s been nearly six years since then; she’d be 66 now. It’s been a decade since I saw Mrs. Pan in person.

Late in the year, when the weather had turned cold again, we were summoned without warning to a banquet. We were sitting in our apartment after class and heard David calling us from the stairwell. He was angry that we were not ready. I didn’t know what we were supposed to be ready for. It turned out there was a banquet, which we had to attend, and it was beginning immediately. David had told the New Zealanders, who had been tasked with telling us. They never gave us the message; I suspected they withheld it deliberately, as relations were not good between us. (The primary medium of exchange between the New Zealanders and us consisted of petty slights.)

We started scrambling to get ready. The leaders could not be kept waiting, due to issues of face. The order of arrival was important, as I’ve explained. David could not wait for us. He was in a state of agitation and ran ahead through the courtyard to catch up with the New Zealander and his wife, who had cologned themselves hours ago and were sauntering in the orange light of sundown toward the cafeteria right on cue to pay homage to the party secretary and his cronies, this minute pulling up in their black car. We were to follow as fast as we were able. David would apologize for us. Beth was saying, “Jesus Christ, I’m so stressed out,” pulling up her stockings.

We ran downstairs and found a man waiting for us. I vaguely recognized him. He worked for the party men as a driver or a kind of minion, perhaps. I believe he was married to one of the history teachers. Evidently, David had instructed him to bring us to the banquet. He was six feet tall and wore a belted KGB-style leather coat.

When he saw us, he flicked his hand at us, ordering us to follow him, and strode toward the cafeteria. Beth broke into a jog behind him. It distressed me to see this man compelling my wife to run. I controlled my pace, trying to establish that we would not be forced to run.

“Hey!” she waved, “Mr. Guo!”

The instant she spoke to me, the man turned on her. He raised his arm as if he were going to strike an animal. Mrs. Pan jumped away from him. He hissed, “Scat! Scat! Scat!” I was positive he was going to hit her.

“That’s my friend!” I shouted.

He glared over his shoulder at me, his hand still raised. A look of intense contempt took over his face, as if he had finally seen what I truly was and found me stupid and repellant. He turned on his heel and stalked off.

I stopped to speak with Mrs. Pan. “I’m sorry about that asshole.” I was angry and wanted to figure out what had happened here. “We have to go to this banquet,” I said. The wrongness of my complaining to her about a banquet hit me, and I stopped talking. I looked back, and the man was almost to the cafeteria. Mrs. Pan told me to go on. She appeared to understand. Beth was standing alone in the courtyard, waiting for me on tenterhooks. We could have stopped right there and boycotted the affair, but we followed him to the banquet.

I complained about how Mrs. Pan was being treated to someone I thought would be sympathetic — an ordinary guy, I thought — not a party member, but a gym teacher at the school named Mr. Liu. He was smoking a cigarette, wearing a tracksuit, standing outside while his male students played basketball on the two adjoining concrete courts.

“Can you believe someone treating another human being this way?” I asked him.

I didn’t know who I was talking to at the time, and I remember being surprised by the answer he gave me. But it all made sense later when David instructed me that, on Liu’s behalf, I would draft an English abstract for a paper he had written on the subject of coaching theory. The paper would be published in the school’s academic journal, a standard careerist logrolling exercise. In other words, Liu was just as much invested in the way things worked as anyone else.

“Well,” he had told me, squinting at the November sun, “you’ve got to understand, ren shi you jibiede — people have levels.”

We taped plastic bags on our boots and went out to where Mrs. Pan lived in the Farms. The paddy fields are squares of water, like windowpanes, and extended as far as I could see. We walked on a mud ridge out to her shack — a maopifang. The shack was divided in two, one half for people, the other a chicken coop. Through holes in the walls, you could see the chickens pecking around.

Her daughter led us out there. Along the way, she called to her dad, Song, who climbed out of a pond where he had been struggling with other men to haul up fish that were being farmed there. He slogged after us in his rubber boots and met us at the shack. It was another gray day.

In the doorway, we found Mrs. Pan squatting by her coal fire, boiling a soup for us. She jumped up when we came along. She lived in conditions that were reminiscent of a hobo camp in America. She was wearing a mackinaw-patterned jacket over a pink sweater and slacks — the same way homeless people sometimes wear formal clothes that they have found. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail like Willie Nelson. Beth gave her a hug.

We took pictures of our surroundings. Lines were rigged all around the house, tent poles, cut lumber leaned against the bricks. Sheets of plastic hung up, drying. The powerline traveled by the roof. A skiff sat in the water, which reflected the white-gray sky. Beams and pipes stuck out of the brick walls. Damp smoke rose up out of somewhere and drifted. Contraptions were rigged up from driftwood and plastic and clothes.

There’s a picture of Beth wearing a gray double-breasted jacket, pink fingerless gloves, a white scarf, jeans with the cuffs rolled up, and muddy leather clogs, standing on the mud pathway edged by brown weeds, smiling, making the peace sign, and another of her leaning down to put her arm around Song Lin. Song Lin, who also wears a knitted scarf and jeans and a knee-length yellow ocher coat, stands with her feet apart, keeping her balance in the mud. There are cabbages extending down into the water.

Another picture shows the house and a small cultivated plot that must belong to them. The plot is partly surrounded by plastic sheeting secured to bamboo poles stuck in the ground. I have my arm around Song Lin in the foreground. Her head comes up to my jaw. Song, her father, was a short man. He stood with me in the doorway of his house, and Beth photographed us. He’s wearing a black watch cap and fisherman’s boots. The sparse black hair of his mustache and his tan skin makes him look Mexican. His lip is scabbed.

We took a group photo: Mrs. Pan, Song Lin, me, and Song, who seems to be leaning away from me as I try to embrace him, though this could have been because of the Ironman bag, which is still hitched over my shoulder, for no reason I can recall. (Maybe it was for transporting presents, bringing books or clothes for Song Lin. I’m not sure.) Song Lin appears very cold. She is wearing wire-rimmed glasses and has changed into a silver coat. Her mother stands at her side, one hand on her daughter’s arm.

We sat in little chairs by the fire while mother and daughter tended the soup. Song ate by himself, then disappeared. We found out he had gone back to work. Mrs. Pan’s daughter tore the top off a plastic package of little cured anchovy-like fish, which we chewed on. She played with the dog, a small black mutt with a curly tail. The coal burned in a brazier, a kind of shallow bowl, like an upside-down hat with a brim, resting in a crude wooden frame, and we warmed our hands over it. A pile of oranges rested on a chair nearby. A 2006 calendar was open on the wall. It was January; our contracts were up, and we were soon to leave.

When the soup was ready, we drank it out of Styrofoam cups. It was a milky broth that tasted like fish. Red dates floated in it. No one ate but Beth and me. In a photograph of the table, there are two paper cups of soup — one in my hand, one left unattended by the photographer, Beth — and two bottles of Nutri Express, a dairy-based beverage. These bottles were full, not empties for recycling, and I was drinking from one of them. In the center of the table is an aluminum pot full of the chicken Mrs. Pan had promised us. In another view are four new dishes on the table in addition to the chicken and our soup cups. The short, battered table would be too small to accommodate another dish.

I took a picture of Beth standing between Mrs. Pan and her daughter. Now Mrs. Pan has her hand on Beth’s arm in the same way she held her daughter’s arm earlier. Song Lin appears to be clinching her fist in distress, but maybe it’s the cold. Beth, the adopted girl, is smiling, but I wonder if she was attempting to restrain some other emotion. In the pictures of her and them, they seem physically connected — same facial structure, height, hair, body plan. High foreheads, full cheeks. Her clothing fits with theirs: the scarf, fingerless gloves, jeans. It is the end of Beth’s time in China. This image of the three Asian women together seems to say that tribe is everything, that economic and linguistic differences don’t matter next to blood.

Mrs. Pan appears to stare into the distance or the future. She appears disconnected from the present. She doesn’t try to gaze into the camera lens the way we all learn to do. This gaze, as if she is looking on something of historic magnitude that is coming for her, reminds me of icons of the revolution.

The next morning, Beth and I woke up while it was still dark. We dressed, collected our bags, passports, and plane tickets, and went downstairs. David was in the cement hall under the bare bulb, wearing his dark suit and a black down vest. He took back our apartment key from us. The car that was going to take us to Wuhan was waiting in the courtyard. He didn’t try to carry our bags this time. I packed our bags in the trunk, and the driver shut the lid. David had some last-minute paperwork to do in the office. Dawn wasn’t coming for another 10 minutes, and there was no one out except us.

It was night-black, and everything was silent. Though the school was out of session and the students were gone, the campus wasn’t deserted. Faculty members were asleep behind some of the windows that overlooked the courtyard. But they were a small detachment left behind after the main force had left.

I saw three figures coming across the athletic field. Mrs. Pan appeared, followed by Song Lin and Song, in his fishing boots. He was carrying an armload of red cartridges connected by fuses, like bandoliers of linked machine gun bullets.

Beth and I said goodbye to them. We hadn’t known to expect them. They must have gotten up at four. “Have a safe trip!” Song Lin cried. I shook Song’s callused hand. Mrs. Pan waved us back toward the car, and Song started unrolling his munitions. The driver said, “What’s this?” Song Lin put her fingers in her ears. David was just coming outside with his forms.

Song dragged on his cigarette and made it glow and bent over a fuse. He lit the firecrackers, and they started exploding. Flashes of flame went off. The explosions banged one on top of the other in the concrete enclosure. They were deafening. They went right through the walls and into the rooms where people were sleeping. And the volleying never ceased. He had brought an armory with him. The earsplitting cannonade kept on without letting up, and the smoke it generated rose in a white curtain between us. In the jumping flashes, I’d see the shadows of Mrs. Pan and her husband.

David had gotten into the car and shut his door, and through the body of the car the firecrackers were so loud it was still impossible to hear anything. The driver must have gotten David’s attention by shouting, and David must have told him to go. The car started moving while the bombardment went on.

The cloud of smoke had risen as high as the top of the Foreign Affairs Building. Red paper and ash were snowing down on our windshield. The flashes and reports kept popping behind us. We heard them as we drove away. They went ripping and booming, exploded red paper and ash floating down, flashes of flame, reports caroming off the concrete courtyard. The exploding went on a long time. It was the last thing we heard before we left that place.

Photography by Beth Lish
Read Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV

The Benefactor was originally published in Gone on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I began to look out for Mrs. Pan whenever she came around to get at our trash. This was usually in the early morning, at noon during my break from class, or in the evening around dinnertime. She would call up to me, “Mr. Guo,” and when I heard her, I’d go out on the deck where the laundry was drying and tell her I was coming down, and then I’d go down and chew the fat with her.

Because I spoke only standard Mandarin, the so-called common language (putonghua), and she spoke a rural dialect (I’m not sure which one; dialect can differ from village to village, and she hailed from another province), we faced a communication barrier, which we did our best to overcome. She tried to use the most standardized pronunciation and phrasing she could. If I didn’t understand her, I’d try to guess what she meant and ask her to confirm or deny my guess: “Are you saying…?” She never showed the slightest impatience with my repeated questions and may have been gratified that someone was taking the time to find out what she meant.

We communicated well enough when we were just saying hi and asking after each other’s well-being, but as her revelations grew more personal and startling, they also became more unclear to me, like battlefield transmissions at a moment of crisis. As a result, with some of her more remarkable stories, I lost or confused the details and have just held onto a general picture.

Mrs. Pan was not from Hubei Province. She might have been from the neighboring province of Henan. I know she had several sisters and that they were all peasants and had grown up farming. She said she was in her late 50s, or nearly as old as the People’s Republic of China, whose historic upheavals she had experienced firsthand. As is common with people who have suffered trauma, she talked around the subject of the Great Leap Forward, a period during which she would have been starved and lost loved ones to famine. At one point, she wiped her eyes, and I realized she had been weeping. She was usually so plucky and cheerful that I hadn’t noticed her distress.

She had been married in the past. Her previous husband had been crazy and violent. He had imprisoned her, tying her up with ropes and wire, but she had escaped. I didn’t trust my ears when she told me this and asked, “Did you say he tied you up with rope (shengzi) and wire (tiesheng)?”

“Yes.”

“And you escaped?”

She told me a further story of a family drama, the details of which I couldn’t quite follow, that somehow involved her sisters, who lived in another province. They had either failed to help protect her from her husband, or he had harassed and threatened them after her escape.

This husband had since died, I learned. “Good,” I said.

“Yes,” she agreed. Thereafter, I learned, she had come to this area. She was now married to another man, surnamed Song, who was younger than she was, and she had a daughter with him, named Song Lin.

The word she used to describe herself was shoupolande, or “trash collector.”

“How do people treat you around here?” I asked.

“Some are good, some are very bad.”

“Tell me about that,” I said.

Out on the street, when people found out which Western nation we were from, they said, “Oh, America! Fuyu guojia — wealthy country!” Then they looked at us in a sharp-eyed way, as if they knew more about us than we knew about ourselves. Moto-taxi guys lounging on their motorcycles would say to me, “The women are very open in America, aren’t they? Aren’t they?” They’d lift up their chins, trying to get me to admit it, using the same word, kaifang, for “open,” that brings to mind Deng Xiaoping’s policy of economic reforms and political opening, which has led to the current economic boom and its disparities in wealth. One of them, a guy with a dead nerve in his eyelid, drove his motorcycle at me, swerving at the last moment.

The manager of a fast food restaurant where I enjoyed the deep-fried chicken sandwich engaged me in a grandstanding public debate, which attracted an audience.

“Tell me why,” he demanded, “does the United States interfere in the internal affairs of other countries?”

I had no ready answer to this double question. I hadn’t even known I was in the middle of a debate.

“America,” somebody tsked behind me. “World cop.”

While they were quick to attack the United States, the Chinese were careful to avoid criticizing their own government. Once I asked a class what they thought about the forced relocation of their fellow citizens due to the Three Gorges Dam Project. A student told me that all those who had been relocated had been well compensated. “Are you sure about that?” I asked. I began speculating aloud that not all politicians were honest. The young man cut me off.

“I think our leaders are doing a good job,” he stated.

It was an unsettling moment, and even more unsettling when I thought about it later. I realized I had done something stupid by bringing up politics in a Chinese classroom. In China, it is against the law to do anything that “undermines” the power of the Communist Party — a vague prohibition that can be interpreted broadly.

It is also illegal for a Chinese citizen to “give away state secrets.” This could refer to simply talking to a foreigner about something the government finds embarrassing, such as the existence of extremely poor people who have no social safety net. Chinese who reveal unflattering aspects of their society to foreigners are taking a risk. Exchanges with foreigners may attract attention because citizens are monitoring each other to make sure no one reveals anything too negative. In talking to me, Mrs. Pan was showing the kind of defiance that you see from disenfranchised people in the United States, the ones who wise off to the judge because they know they’re going to jail anyway.

English Corner was held along the concourse midway between the cafeteria and our apartment, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Dusk would turn to full night, and the green lights would come on inside the classrooms in Building 51 while we were talking. The sessions were open to anyone. Students in other classes came to talk with us. Once a man showed up who had followed me there. He said he had seen me on the street, and I realized he was crazy.

The point of English Corner was to create a deliberately informal situation where Chinese students would feel more comfortable speaking up than they did in the classroom. The Chinese designed it to circumvent the reticence that beset them in groups. The darkness and the fact that not everyone knew each other helped.

Another approach they were trying was called Crazy English, a study program that involved shouting, yelling out English phrases at top volume as fast as you could in an effort to get the words out of your mouth before your internal censor called them back in. One morning, we witnessed a thin young man pacing back and forth in front of the Foreign Affairs Building, yelling over and over, “It’s not a matter of time. It’s a matter of money!” This was Crazy English in action.

At English Corner, a crowd would gather around us. Someone asked me what was my secret, how had I learned Chinese so well? I said I had spent five hours every night in the language lab during my first year of study. My first teacher was an American named Ronald Speirs, who told me that the secret to learning the language was mastering the tones; you had to be able to hear them and reproduce them. After going to the language lab religiously on his orders, I found I could talk with Chinese people, which opened up the language for me; I started talking to everyone.

I didn’t explain that I’d had difficulty bonding with my peers as a young man and that the Chinese language had been a path into an alternate universe, one where I could be more successful at making contact with people.

The mention of martial arts brought on a brief debate about our favorite movie stars. I liked — actually idolized — Jackie Chan, because he was funny, creative, and did his own stunts at great personal risk. They preferred Jet Li, on the grounds that he knew “real traditional Chinese wushu.” Chan’s kung fu they dismissed as “made up.” I’d heard this objection before and suspected that nationalism was behind it. Jet Li is a mainland Chinese performer, while Jackie Chan is from Hong Kong.

“What about your wife?”

“What about her?”

“Who does she like?”

“Neither. She doesn’t like martial arts movies.”

“Is she Chinese?”

“No, she’s Korean.”

“Do you speak Korean too?”

“No. I don’t speak Korean. She doesn’t speak Korean either. She was adopted by an American family when she was six months old. She was raised American. She speaks English. She’s every bit as American as me.”

“She looks like Chinese.”

“She is very beautiful.”

“Thank you. She is.”

“Chinese and Korean looks alike.”

“They’re not exactly the same,” I said.

“You cannot tell apart.”

“Anyone from East Asia all looks like Chinese.”

“A lot of Korean people actually is the Chinese people.”

“That’s what they say in Texas,” I quipped, referring to the clichéd tendency of bigoted Americans to assume that all East Asians are indistinguishably Chinese. I may have been unfairly picking on Texans. What struck me as remarkable was that the Chinese themselves, out of a sense of their historical and cultural importance in East Asia, held the same distinction-blurring view.

“Pardon?”

“Never mind.” But if I’d wanted to get more personal — if I’d thought there was any hope of my being understood — I might have added, “There are differences between people, and sometimes they matter, especially when you’re the minority. One of the reasons I know Beth is here is because she grew up in an all-white town. I think it means something to her to be around Asian people for the first time in her life. To turn on the TV and see people who look like her.”

Yangnu means “adopted girl,” and I heard someone say it in the crowd. Yang means “to raise, foster, give shelter to, or keep.” I now think that this was the sense in which David had spoken of keeping the girl.

Beth tells me that foreign adoption of abandoned girls has caused national embarrassment in Korea.

Since the episode of the girl, I had grown resentful of our hosts and was eager to learn something unfavorable about them. Eventually, Mrs. Pan satisfied this desire.

She told me her husband Song had a che, or “cart,” which, after she described it more fully, I understood was the type of toolbox that cobblers use, containing a sewing machine and other tools for fixing shoes, belts, bags, and bicycle tires and sharpening knives. These kinds of rigs can be seen all over China and in American Chinatowns as well. Song used to work out on Nanhu Street, and when the day was done, he’d leave his cart there at night.

Then, Mrs. Pan said, someone warned him not to do this.

“Who warned him?”

“Young people.”

“What young people?”

“From the school.”

“Students?”

Maybe. I couldn’t follow her answer. She pointed to the gate of the school, near the statue of a leaping horse. The young people threatened Song, said they would punish him if he continued. He would have to pay a fine or maybe get beaten up. But the cart was heavy and awkward to take back to the fields where the road was bad. Song left it out again one night, and they destroyed it.

“Was it the weixiaodui (the school security detachment)?”

“There,” she nodded — I thought she was saying yes. She pointed in the direction of their barracks.

The cart cost 250 yuan. Mrs. Pan said she had gone to the school administration building, where the leaders were waiting for their chauffeured rides, and appealed for help. The leaders — David’s cronies, the people we dined with — gave her 30 yuan and told her to get lost.

Each month, Beth and I received a combined salary of 7,000 yuan, or roughly $875. In the beginning, we saved most of it out of caution, but after we saw how far it went, we began to relax and spend it. We started taking bus trips into Wuhan to go to a Carrefour to buy groceries. I loaded up the Ironman bag with 30 pounds of butter, cheese, spaghetti, peanut butter, red wine, boxes of Petite Ecolier cookies. I began to feel the unique power that money has in China.

In July, when we had our summer break, we traveled 2,000 miles to Xinjiang Province and rode a zip line down from the Great Wall. I paid for everything in cash. We rented an apartment in Beijing. The real estate office gave us a two-week lease, tailored to fit our vacation schedule. The transaction took an hour. There was no red tape; all I needed was money, and I had it. The Chinese would sell us whatever we wanted. We walked into a deluxe clinic on the upper floors of a Beijing high-rise without an appointment or prescription and bought birth control pills for Beth as if they were a pack of chewing gum.

Strange women called our hotel rooms, asking if I wanted company. I said, “Don’t you know my wife is here? What’s the meaning of this?” But they kept calling, with dogged persistence: “Ni xuyao you ren zuo pei ma?” Literally, they were asking if I needed someone to accompany me.

I needed no such thing. We had far more than we needed in every respect.

I drew our pay in cash each month at the school’s administration building, which had a row of columns in front. Men associated with the running of the school hung around on the front steps, shouting on their cellphones and spitting in the street. They shouted at their drivers, Wai!, summoning them with a palm-down wave, as if calling a dog to heel. I walked past them into the white interior, which resembled the lobby of a theater, and upstairs to the finance office. The clerk knew why I was there without my having to say anything. I started to talk, but she told me, “You’re here for your pay. There it is.” She opened the green metal lunchbox and started pulling out cash.

People in China take money-counting classes, I had learned. They hold competitions. Some can count extremely fast. Once, David took us to the bank in Wuhan to change money, and I tried to count what the teller gave me. He took it out of my hands and counted it for me in seconds flat. In the school’s finance office, the clerk counted my pay in the same manner, and then told me to count it. I was embarrassed because there was another customer getting service, and the money was proof of our wealth, but so be it, I thought, and I counted it and signed the receipt the woman gave me. She took the money and put it in a brown envelope that opened at one end instead of along the top as envelopes do in America and gave it back to me. I put it in my pocket and tucked my shirt over it and walked outside. An older man in a dark suit who knew me by sight smiled at me as we passed each other on the building’s grand steps. I walked back to our apartment and put the money in a drawer next to our bed.

I regret that I didn’t find out more about the concrete economic details of Mrs. Pan’s life. It was clear enough that she lived a life of constant toil and deprivation. She was the type of person who has done nothing but work since early childhood; you could not imagine her relaxing. But how did she get by?

I learned she kept chickens, which were a source of both food and income. Since his shoe-repair cart had been destroyed, Song had been picking up work as a laborer, occasionally going out in the schistosomiasis-infected ponds to haul out fish. But this was day labor, a form of seasonal work, and he was underemployed, I gathered. Did their daughter, Song Lin, work? Possibly. This leaves Mrs. Pan’s recycling collection as the only other source of income that I know about.

As in the United States, in China, one can recycle paper, plastic, glass, and metal, all of which were present in our trash. Mrs. Pan probably sold the recyclables she collected to a redemption center located at the end of Nanhu Street. I believe (but don’t know) that payment was given by weight rather than piece/bottle/can.

The most plentiful, and least valuable, materials were paper and plastic. Paper occurred in various forms as wrappers, packaging, and labels. The most common form in which plastic occurred was the beverage container. The campus and the street were littered in plastic beverage containers, especially after May, when the weather turned stultifyingly hot. Common beverage types were water, soft drinks, and iced tea, in either red or green tea flavors. For instance, I drank a lot of the Kang Shifu (“Master Kong”) brand of iced red tea. On average, a standard 500-milliliter beverage probably cost about two yuan, or 25 cents, in 2005. What was the empty plastic bottle worth?

The redemption center was itself a business, I gathered. After it acquired materials from collectors like Mrs. Pan, it shipped them out to be sold downstream, so it wouldn’t have given her the full value for recyclables. So what fraction of the empty plastic bottle’s worth did she receive? How many bottles did she have to collect a day to make one yuan, the amount it was said that our poorest students lived on?

The redemption center was an unsigned horizontal cement warehouse set back from the street. Its doors were generally closed. I didn’t recognize it for what it was until one day when I saw it in operation as I was getting off the bus at the end of our street. This time, there was a five-ton truck parked out front being loaded in a tumult of activity. Men with rags tied over their mouths crawled over the load, lashing it down with a tarp. I stopped to watch. The load consisted of bales of paper, thousands of pounds of it. The engine was already running, and the driver was shouting, and the men were shouting, and someone came out of the warehouse and shouted at the driver. In the street, I saw masses of peasants running with bags of recyclables toward the warehouse to have their materials weighed. I thought of Mrs. Pan and looked for her. I didn’t see her. The load was hastily lashed down. The truck began moving while men were still jumping off it amid much shouting. The engine roared, and the truck started picking up speed and bouncing as it turned onto the river road and gunned away, trailing bits of trash like chicken feathers off a poultry truck. The warehouse doors were open, and in the sunlight and shadow I could see a mountain of paper up to the ceiling and paper dust, the material Mrs. Pan lived on, swirling up in the air like flour.

Mrs. Pan began bringing me gifts of eggs in a reused two-handled shopping bag. The eggs came straight from her chickens; mud and hay were stuck to them. She would not let me refuse them. To my horror, she brought me a lot of them — the parcels were heavy, containing 30 or 40 brown eggs — and she started doing this every week.

“You’ve got to stop,” I said.

“You and your wife don’t have anyone looking out for you,” she said and kept bringing them.

I tried eating one, but it was yolky and blood-flecked and fishy-smelling, and I didn’t want it. I ate none of the others. I continued to buy eggs at the Wushang in town. I put her gift bags in the refrigerator, and when I got around to it, I disposed of them — thousands of calories of fat and protein.

I took them into the city and dumped them. I found a hole somewhere and dropped them down it. Once, I had a cabdriver pull over and shoved the eggs into a sewer drain.

Over time, this level of diplomacy seemed excessive. I started taking the eggs no farther than the trash pile at the intersection of Nanhu Street and the river road, a 15-minute walk from our apartment. There was a chance that this might be one of the trash piles on her route, in which case she might find the eggs.

“Aren’t you worried about that?” Beth asked.

“No,” I said. “She’s got to be a tough lady after everything she’s been through. I don’t think she’ll mind. She’ll get over it. I’ll pay her.”

I tried to give Mrs. Pan 100 yuan — a pink bill with Chairman Mao’s face on it — the equivalent of a little over $12. I had to fight to make her take it. She threw it on the ground and ran away. I picked it up and chased after her on the playing field. I had to try this repeatedly. Weeks later, she finally relented. It was almost a model of a courtship. Once the gift was consummated, she took to calling us enren, her benefactors.

“I owe you for the eggs.”

“You’ve overpaid me,” she insisted. Now she had to give me more eggs. More than that, she said, she’d give me a chicken.

The next time she came with eggs, she had another bag for me as well. It turned out to be a live hen in a shopping bag. I was so caught up in my moment of cross-cultural exchange that my responses were slowed. I took the bag and walked upstairs and into the apartment.

“Is it?” Beth said.

I went into kitchen and opened the bag. The hen was in there trembling.

“Yeah, it’s alive. Is she still out there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Let me see if I can catch her.”

I ran outside and caught Mrs. Pan as she was going across the courtyard. When I told her I had to give her the chicken back, she didn’t protest. Was this because it represented a bigger sacrifice for her than the eggs? She was living below the global poverty line. She should not have been giving away food to me. At any rate, she accepted my excuse that we didn’t know how to kill and gut it.

In that case, she said, she would invite us to her house and cook a chicken for us.

School remained in session through the end of June. Then the students left, and the campus changed its character again, from teeming with people to desolate. We stayed on for another 10 days, teaching a short course for teachers. David began the sessions by introducing us formally: “Now, the foreign experts will give the lecture.” No one minded this except me.

“How’s everybody doing?” I searched the room, looking for somebody to engage. The teachers weren’t expecting an interactive class any more than the students were. They were looking down at digital pocket dictionaries. A few stared at me, waiting for me to go on talking. A woman plucked at her floral-print rayon top and fanned herself with a sheaf of papers she was grading. You could see the leaves of trees and facing classrooms through the open window. The sun was turning this scene into a blur of green and white. The heat seemed to be acquiring mass. The class continued into the afternoon.

After we had been released, the teachers went off as fast as they could. Beth and I went home. Beth took hand towels that she had soaked in water and frozen in the icebox and put them on our heads in our apartment. There was no one playing basketball outside our window, because the kids were gone. I climbed a chair and made sure the air conditioner was turned up all the way. It was early afternoon, the building was silent, and we could do anything now that our contractual obligations had been fulfilled. Beth brought in our stiffened laundry, which was hot from drying outside, and began to pack our bags. I took the empty bus into the quiet city and bought train tickets from a woman who got up from her siesta to help me.

The next day, I stuck a note under David’s door. We didn’t see Mrs. Pan, so we didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to her. We took a taxi to Wuhan, this time traveling a different route, over the bridge to the Ezhou side. We were the only vehicle on the highway, which made everything seem even freer and more of an adventure. When we got to the train station, I found I’d forgotten our train tickets. We ran back to the taxi and told the driver of our emergency. We had a little over an hour and a half before the train left. Get in, he said. The open road allowed him to drive very fast, and when we saw the bridge again, I checked the time and thought we were going to make it. I directed him through the campus, down the pathways, into the courtyard, jumped out and ran upstairs and found the tickets in the drawer where I kept our money. I ran back down, jumped in the idling car, told Beth, “We’re good,” and the driver took off. “We’ve got 40 minutes,” I said. He acted determined to help us make our train.

At the bridge where the highway began, he floored it, and the scenery ahead of us started bending around our heads like wraparound sunglasses. It wasn’t a good idea to distract him at this speed, so I just watched the highway, but I almost thanked him. A figure of a woman in a straw hat appeared, standing in a tuft of tall grass. She looked at us and began stepping onto the blacktop. Suddenly he was swerving and the horn was blowing. We didn’t hit her, but it was close. He cursed her in an ugly way — fuck your mother, and so on — though nothing she would have heard at that speed, and it was nothing next to getting hit. I think we were doing 90, enough to knock her straw hat off. We made our train thanks to him.

Photography by Beth Lish

Read Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part V

English Corner was originally published in Gone on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The day I realized we’d made a mistake by coming here occurred fairly soon. It was a Saturday morning, still cold and gray, and we hadn’t yet learned what to do to keep our morale up besides watching television in our apartment. I went out past the dormitories, the outhouses, the basketball court, and the administration building with its garden and stood at the gate of the school, looking out at our street. I don’t remember what I was doing there. Then it began to rain. It was one of those storms where something trips a trigger in the sky and all the water comes down. The rain instantly obliterated the boundary between the street and the flat, wide land. The few people I could see ran under the roofs of their stores and disappeared. I moved under a roof, a screen of water splattering down six inches from my face.

Fifty feet away, there was a statue of a leaping horse, which symbolized the school’s excellence, and I caught sight of a lone figure out in the downpour, standing under its hooves. Something was not normal. The rain bucketed down on the figure’s head, and he or she stood there and absorbed it. I thought of a patient who has been pushed into a shower in a sanatorium.

A seamstress ran out on her black-plastic high heels and gave the person a comforter.

“Are they okay?” I asked.

The seamstress looked at me and loped back to the shelter of her store.

I left the overhang and went out to the figure in the rain. They were shivering, the comforter dragging in the mud. Their gender was impossible to tell, but I thought the person was a she. She was holding a piece of cake that the rain was taking apart, and it was falling out of her fingers in little wet bits.

When I asked, “Are you okay?” she made a moaning sound, as if she were trying to talk but couldn’t get her lips apart. It sounded like a cry for help. I looked around. There was no one else in sight, so I led her back to the Foreign Affairs Building and up to our apartment. Beth and I sat her down and started putting food in front of her. I threw the filthy comforter downstairs in the trash pile. The girl ate everything we gave her: bananas, milk, oatmeal, sugar. Her dirty hands and face got covered in food. Gray rainwater was running out of her clothes and puddling on the tiled floor. Her short hair was plastered to her oddly shaped skull. We still didn’t know if she was a girl or not. I went into our bathroom and turned on the electric water heater so she could wash. Her clothes were blackened and filthy. She left milk and mashed banana on the tabletop when she got up.

The bathroom door came open when she was getting undressed, and I saw she was female. She had adult breasts and a heavily curved spine. I left Beth in charge and went downstairs and knocked on David’s door.

No one answered. I went back outside and looked for someone to ask for advice. It was close to 9:00. A few kids were walking around the campus now that the rain had tapered off. A young man in a white short-sleeve button-down shirt and steel-rimmed glasses told me to contact the director of foreign affairs. When I told him David wasn’t in, he said my other option was to ask school security for help.

The term he used, weixiaodui, can be translated as “school security detachment.” I went over to where the young man told me to go, a combination office-living quarters near the main gate. I could see inside and saw their hot plate and tea thermos and bunk beds in a compartment the size of a ship’s wheelhouse. Kids in uniforms rushed around inside, making their racks and sweeping with a whisk broom — a big bundle of branches like something a witch might beat you with in a fairy tale. These were the first uniformed personnel I’d seen in the countryside. They appeared to be students from the college. At least one was a female. I think security was an elective activity, something like joining the Communist Youth League.

They had a commander, an older man with nicotine-stained teeth, wearing a greatcoat. He was balding, and there was something depraved about him. When I approached, he didn’t want to talk to me. He gave a look, and one of his guards intercepted me. The guard was obviously the kid who was in charge of the other kids. He had rocky cheekbones, a lean, heavily acne-scarred face, and a crewcut. He didn’t ask me what I wanted; he just put himself in front of me.

I thought about what I was trying to say. I realized I didn’t know how to convey “social services” in the sense that I meant. If I used the only word I knew, fuli, it would sound as if I were talking about a welfare check. I couldn’t think of how to say shelter.

“I don’t know how anything works,” I said.

The corporal, as I thought of him, said he would come shortly. In the meantime, I went back. I found the girl dressed in clean clothes my wife had given her.

Something was nagging me. In the time we still had, I tried again to communicate with the girl. By now, I could tell she was speaking a rural dialect on top of a mental handicap that affected her speech. It was very hard to make sense of her. I asked her yes-or-no questions in putonghua (Mandarin, literally the “common language,” China’s lingua franca) and tried to decipher her answers.

“Did you run away from somewhere?” I asked. “Did someone hurt you?”

The more I questioned her, the more it sounded as if she was saying yes, that she had run away from some sort of abuse.

“This is bad,” I said.

We heard voices in the stairway. The doorbell rang, a jarring two-tone bell. I opened the door, and the commander in his greatcoat and four uniformed student-guards entered our apartment and saw the girl sitting in our chair.

The commander lit a cigarette and looked around our house, at the large TV, the refrigerator.

“I’m worried about her,” I said. “She was hungry and cold. I’d like to know what we can do to help her. I’m not asking her to leave. I just want your advice.”

One guard listened to me as I talked. The others fanned out around the apartment. Beth closed herself in the bedroom. The corporal came in last and slid by me. “Do not worry,” said the guard who was humoring me. He spoke with a kind of theatrical sympathy. I noticed someone trying the bedroom door.

“My wife’s in there.”

The corporal had picked the girl up on his back like a knapsack, and she was holding him around his neck, and now he and the others were moving out of the apartment. Someone noticed the pile of wet discarded clothes and reported them to the commander. “Are those hers?”

“Yes,” I said.

The commander pointed, “Take them.” Someone picked them up off the floor and took them away. Before they left, I wanted to take a picture of the girl. We would want to stay in touch.

“Can you tell us what happens with her?” I asked as they left.

The door banged shut.

It was around 9:30. We spent an hour or so doing nothing. The cigarette smell lingered. Beth straightened the apartment and put on makeup. I do not think we talked. Around midday, we ventured out, took the bus down the river road, got off halfway, and hiked up on the mile-long suspension bridge that went across the Yangtze. The water was far below us. It was gray and in some areas brown where the mud showed in the water. The rain began again, the wind whipping it in our faces. There was no point in going on, and we went back. We waited a long time on the roadside for a bus. The bus finally came, struggling along in the mud, weaving around mudholes filled with water. We got on and found seats in the back. Everyone looked at us as always, and we both stared out the window. When we got back to the apartment, Beth dried her hair and hung up her denim jacket, and we argued.

The argument wasn’t over anything in particular. It was just one of those bad days between two people who are isolated together. We finally sat down and talked about it at the table where the girl had been eating earlier. “I think we’re both doing our best,” Beth said. “That’s all I’ll say.” It was around two in the afternoon.

We heard voices on the stairs again. We stopped talking and looked at the door, and then the doorbell rang.

“What the hell?” Beth asked. “Who is that?”

“I don’t know.”

We heard David call, “Atticus? Beth? Can you open the door?”

“What’s he want?”

“I don’t know. I’m not answering it.”

“Did he hear us?”

“No, he didn’t. We’re being quiet.”

We heard David conferring with someone in Chinese. I recognized the corporal’s voice. A fist pounded the door, then we heard them talking. I heard them going down the stairs.

“What was that about?”

“I don’t know. I really have no idea.”

A little while later, the phone rang. We didn’t answer it.

That night, we made pork and rice for dinner and watched HBO Asia in our sweaters. We had made up, as we always do, and had almost forgotten the foreign nation outside our apartment. We were watching Corrina, Corrina with Ray Liotta and Whoopi Goldberg.

At 10:00, the doorbell rang again. I hadn’t heard anyone coming. I muted the TV and asked who it was. It was David. I let him in, and he took the chair that I had been sitting in.

“I came to see you today, but you were not here.”

“We were out. We got caught in the rain.”

“Yes. I know. One of the students saw you. I left a message on your phone.”

“We didn’t check it yet.”

“I think you should be more attentive.”

“Okay.”

“The person in your house today, I think maybe when she goes, she is like another person.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It’s like she change another person after you help her.”

“I still don’t get what you’re saying.”

“She change another person. Change a face, looks totally different. Like night and day.”

“You mean, did she look different after she got cleaned up?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, I guess she did.”

“And you take her picture.”

We had taken her picture, I admitted. David asked me why I had done this, and I started making an effort to explain my actions.

“You know,” he said, “the law is different in China. You cannot take this person and keep her by yourself.”

“Keep her?”

“The girl. You cannot keep her in your apartment.”

“I am telling you the law of China.”

“We weren’t going to keep anybody.”

“Why did you take her picture?”

“Do you believe this?” I asked Beth. “This doesn’t make sense.”

He said that it was believed that we had taken before-and-after pictures of the girl and put them on the Internet. He did not say who believed this, simply that it was believed. We had done this or were planning to do this in order to generate negative propaganda, to discredit the school, the city, our leaders, the nation of China.

I denied that we had done such a thing.

After I denied it, he said we could finish eating our dinner. He got up and left.

The movie had ended, and I turned the TV off and tried to engage Beth in listening while I got my anger off my chest. She went into the bedroom and lay down on the red Chinese quilt and said her night was over. “He insulted us,” I said. I stared out a window at the cavernous nightscape, the blacked-out campus, mud fields invisible in the blackness. The enormous soft noise of water dripping. A tang of coal smoke seeped in through the sash.

The next day, I got our contracts out and read them for the first time, both the Chinese and the English versions. “We should break these and just leave,” I argued. “I don’t want to be here. These people are not our friends.”

“No,” Beth said. “I don’t want to quit. I want us to stick out the full year.”

I waited for some kind of follow-up to this event, but there never was any. No one ever told us we were in trouble, no one ever absolved us, nor did anyone ever thank us for trying to do something decent or apologize to us for any misunderstanding. We never heard what happened to the girl. The whole thing faded into a mist like a Taoist painting.

The classroom buildings were numbered concrete rectangles. Building 51 sat directly across the courtyard from us, and we both had classes there. When you walked inside, you heard the echoing and smelled the sourness from the latrines that flanked the entrance. There was a turn in the wall to protect privacy, but, without wanting to, you could see past the angle as you went by. Kids came out tightening their jeans — males on one side, females on the other — and joined the flow of young people moving into the building, shuffling up the stairs. The thick, chalky two-tone white-over-green plaster walls damped and distorted sound. On some floors, you heard a tumult of voices echoing in the high ceilings, but the floor would be deserted. Just past the first-floor entrance was a stadium-style lecture hall fitted with antique wooden flip-down seats. You’d enter your classroom to find kids running back from the bathrooms with wet towels and wiping down their desks while a classmate pushed open the tall, double-leaved windows to let the air in so the wood would dry. You’d see this as an encouraging show of discipline and order, but it was deceptive. Our classes, which accommodated 40 or 50 students, could be difficult to control.

Part of the problem was that the students didn’t think they had to be quiet. They and I had different notions of how they should be acting. They expected to talk with each other, eat, read unrelated books, draw pictures, and sleep in class. This was consistent with the social behavior of people other than students in China. At school assemblies, audience members of all ages, many of them faculty members, would come and go, talk, eat, and take phone calls during the performance. In general, in Chinese group behavior, there seemed to be an accepted level of disorder. One might speculate that this pervasive disorder is fundamentally related to the sheer number of Chinese people and is an unchanging fact of Chinese life. However, it has also been argued that recent historical events, especially the Cultural Revolution, have created a society-wide climate of disrespect for authority, the impact of which can be seen in the classroom.

In turn, they taught in a manner that the students recognized and expected; both sides played along with each other, and the chaos, while never going away, didn’t prevent the class from functioning. (The strikingly well-behaved political dogma classes, as I mentioned, seemed to be an exception to this rule.) Chinese students, I found, were used to being asked to do certain things in class, such as sounding off as a group or silently writing in their books. If the teacher tried to instruct differently, especially by demanding a higher degree of individual student participation, he or she risked losing control.

I was trying to teach in a way that the Chinese did not like. I was teaching Yingyu Kouyu, “Oral English,” and I had fixed ideas, based on how I’d learned Chinese, about how things should run: I thought the teacher should call on students and engage them individually while the rest of the class maintained total silence, allowing the student’s performance to be judged cleanly and mistakes held up to scrutiny. Over the course of the hour, the teacher would work around the entire room like a nightclub performer, eventually getting to everyone, even the kids hiding in the back. I felt it was essential that the language learner speak for him- or herself.

But the students refused to play along with this. When called on individually, they clammed up. “You’ve got to talk if you want to learn,” I said, but they wouldn’t.

As we found out on online message boards, other foreign teachers working in China complained about the same unwillingness to be singled out. Once, at a student-teacher meeting I attended, the New Zealander told the kids they weren’t participating enough. The kids heard him out impassively. No one challenged him when he said, “Chinese people are shy people.”

This sounded to me like a too-sweeping generalization, but David agreed with it. Having heard about my trouble in class, he told me that what I should be doing was read out a phrase from the textbook and let the entire class chant it back to me as a group. This was how Chinese students learned, he said.

“Is that true?” I asked a student, who agreed it was.

“But why are you like that?”

For the first time, several kids put up their hands.

“Yinwei meiyou ren xiang chutou.”

“Chutou shi shenme yisi?”

“Put your head up. No one want to put his head up. To stand out.”

“Thinking like that will prevent you from getting better,” I told them.

I didn’t stop to wonder what might have been behind it. Apparently the students were more afraid of censure from their peers than of being failed. Their peers must have had the power to hurt them significantly. I can imagine how this worked: teasing, ostracism, the entire repertoire of social cruelty that all people share, plus pressures that might be unique to China. I hardly ever saw a kid getting picked on, but maybe it was happening and I just failed to recognize it. Their language, as much as I studied it, could be used to hide almost anything from me they didn’t want me to know. But there was one thing I could perceive: They watched each other just as they watched foreigners like me, they knew each other’s affairs, and they lived in very close contact with each other, all of which might have increased the group’s leverage to punish anyone who “put his head up.”

It was obviously a phenomenon too big to change, though this didn’t stop me from attempting to get my way. But my efforts backfired. Berating them did no good. Once or twice, I succeeded in making a girl in the front row cry, and the class would grind to a halt as I apologized. “I’m really sorry,” I said, “but I’m not that sorry. You’re stubborn.”

Once, I lost my temper in a night class and ended up making a fool of myself. There were only a handful of students, but they were all goofing off, and I struck the lectern in frustration. I was seized with contrition and on some manic impulse leaped down from the podium and kowtowed in front of them, getting on my knees and bowing until my head hit the floor. Kowtowing is an expression of abject wretchedness. The word comes into English via Cantonese. In Mandarin, it’s pronounced ketou. The character ke means “to knock against something hard,” and tou means “head.” The New Century Dictionary gives the phrase “kowtowing repeatedly like pounding garlic in a mortar,” which conjures an image of someone begging with such desperation that he is injuring himself. It is an act of self-abasement, of saying, “I will hurt myself for you, I’m worth nothing”; the kind of thing you do when you beg for a loved one’s life. It is such a forceful gesture, as I now appreciate, that it may put a much more powerful person on the spot, shaming them into granting mercy. It is a practice that could only thrive where people have raw power over each other, in a terrible hierarchy. It is a weapon developed by the weak.

When I kowtowed, the students gave a collective cry of horror, and some of them jumped to their feet and tried to pick me up. They were aghast, maybe a little outraged. A few stared at me with genuine concern, as if they thought I might be crazy. I tried to apologize for my mistake, but for once, they didn’t give me a pass for being a foreigner. They essentially told me, Don’t ever do that again. I did my best to control the most severe embarrassment I’ve ever felt and kept teaching.

In a daytime class that was being difficult, I announced a system whereby students would come up to the front one at a time to be quizzed and graded on the spot. Kids started gathering around me after they had been quizzed to see their grades. I waved them back behind a painted line on the floor and told them not to move. The next girl I called came right up and craned her neck to look at my grade book. “Get behind the line,” I told her.

“I’m tightening my control on all of you,” I declared. I made sure I knew all their names, took attendance carefully, and instructed them that I was going to grade each and every one of them on their classroom performance every single day. But there were a lot of kids, so after doing this, there was almost no time left for teaching.

I told a brooding young man named Cui Honglei that he was failing but that I didn’t want to fail him; all he had to do was give me a signal that he was trying. He didn’t send out any signal, so I gave him an F, as promised. On the stairs after class, a young woman intercepted me and said, “Do you know Cui Honglei?” I saw him standing behind her with his hands in his pockets and his eyes down. “He says you gave him an F,” she said. “You don’t have to fail him. Just give him a D.”

“Why’s she talking to me instead of you?” I asked him, but he remained silent. “I don’t know you,” I told her. “I shouldn’t be hearing from you. I should be hearing from him.”

As I walked away, they whispered together, and he glanced after me darkly.

The truth was that I understood almost nothing about how the school worked, and I still don’t. Some kids seemed to not care about their grades at all, as if they had made other arrangements; others cried if you failed them. I ended up giving Cui Honglei a D.

Three weeks into the semester, Mystical showed up in my night class.

“I thought you were in my wife’s class.”

“I am, but I wanted to see what your class is like,” she said as she touched up her makeup.

We were working on giving directions, a topic in our textbook, Oral Workshop. I was having them tell me how to get from here to the Wushang, and I was making everyone do it in precise detail, starting from where we were in this classroom at this moment: “Go out the door, turn left, go down the stairs, go outside, walk down the street, make another left, walk out the gate and down to the end of the street, catch the Number 1 bus, take it to the end of the line, transfer to the Number 3 bus, get off at the grocery store.” All the students were struggling through some version of this recitation. Many were having trouble with idiomatic expressions like “make another left,” which weren’t in the textbook, but I wanted them to learn how Americans actually talk. Most of the kids broke down about halfway to the goal, lost in grammar and left turns. I drew a map on the board to help them see it.

When it was Mystical’s turn, she compressed the entire exercise to, “I’d take the Number 11.” This was a physical pun: The “Number 11” meant walking, as she demonstrated by making her fingers walk. The two inverted fingers looked like the number 11.

At the end of the class, she asked me what we’d be doing next week. “We’ll be working on this lesson until we master it,” I said. She said that that didn’t sound interesting and didn’t come back.

Photography by Beth Lish

Read Part I, Part II, Part IV, and Part V

The Runaway was originally published in Gone on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I tried to take the semi-paved road to town, but you could get run over by a vehicle, so I climbed up on the flood wall, the heba, and took the dirt path that ran along the top. The heba was a grassy manmade berm. In summer, the river would spread all the way out to the base of the embankment, inundating the mud fields. Peasants in conical straw hats would be visible working in the contaminated water, faded pants rolled up above the knees, walking behind water buffalo. In Asia, the fields are fertilized with human waste. During the flood season, the water covered the trees. In the winter, it withdrew, and you saw the thin, bare trees standing in the mud. I passed a concrete installation that controlled the flow of water through a pipe that ran beneath the embankment out into the farms. Graffiti on the steel door of the unmanned control room: Fuck somebody. Below were the houses of the people who lived out here. They had teepees of hay piled around their dwellings.

The undergrowth shook, and a man who had been fishing in the fields came out of the bracken wearing black rubber boots and carrying fish in a burlap sack. A woman carrying another sack and using a stick to walk followed him out of the tall grass. They waited for the bus I wasn’t taking. It came and picked them up and drove on ahead of me.

Ten minutes later, I saw a water buffalo, visible from a half mile away, lying across the top of the embankment, and went around it. The path had other obstructions, sometimes making it necessary to use the road. Children played on the berm, smashing firecrackers with bricks, setting the grass on fire. Across the road, the landscape began to look like an abandoned lot in Newark: weeds, raw earth, powerlines, piles of blackened bricks, some of them formed into shanties where people lived. Farther on, I passed an abandoned shipbuilding plant. The gate was red rust. Someone had written huge misshapen characters on it in chalk; they were unintelligible, the writing of an illiterate. Dogs circled in the roadway. In a ditch lay the body of a goat. Ahead was the bridge that connected the two small cities on opposite sides of the Yangtze. Its span resembled that of the Verrazano. Under the bridge, I saw construction pits. Tiny figures were shoveling dirt into baskets and carrying them up a bamboo scaffold. They were old people — old women, I realized, as I got closer — and they were bent under the weight of the baskets. They were slave-skinny. You couldn’t tell how old the women were — anywhere from 40 to 75. They were weathered like sailors.

A group of peasants, both men and women, was coming toward me along the embankment. They were carrying broken shovels and picks on their shoulders, and missing teeth. The men’s shirts were open, revealing lean bellies, all their ribs and musculature showing. They looked like poorly armed rebels. They didn’t smile when I talked to them in their language, because Mandarin, what the government called the “common language,” wasn’t their language after all. They spoke only the country dialect. “Down,” as in “to sit down,” was pronounced ha, not xia. They sat down to rest on the dead grass. I took it that this was their break from work. Some drank water. None of them was eating. They were waiting out their hunger before going back to work.

An hour later, I reached the city and did what I had come to do: buy groceries.

A security guard at the Wushang told me that he had helped suppress numerous village uprisings during his time as a member of the People’s Armed Police. We met because a pair of children had been begging me for money. The guard came over, and the children left. I remarked on the kids, the pity of it.

“You can’t feed them all,” he said.

Our designated trash pile was in the corner of a wall that separated the walk in front of our building from the athletic field and the outhouses. We tied up our trash in little red or black plastic shopping bags — the kind the Chinese use everywhere, from China to Chinatown — and left it downstairs in the pile. Sooner or later, a worker in a smock and nurse’s hat would come around in no special hurry and scoop the trash into her wheelbarrow. But before she came, the peasant women would come out of the fields and pick through our trash for recyclable materials.

They wore straw hats and carried shoulder poles, and some of them had tongs. They tended to be older women who had been weathered by substantial time outdoors. The New Zealander called them grannypickers. In the dawn, they’d come hurrying in through a break in the wall where the chickens got in and patrol across the athletic field.

They would tear open our garbage bags and expose the packages and wrappers of the things we ate, the evidence of our wealth. Our Western toilets could not take toilet paper, so we had to throw it out in the garbage. Wads of toilet paper, our fecal matter, along with our wives’ sanitary napkins, were mixed in with the trash they picked through and were strewn out over the sidewalk.

She stopped in her tracks, no doubt wondering what I wanted.

“How are you doing? You doing okay?”

“I’m working!” she said.

“Where do you go?”

“All around.” She pointed at all the concrete buildings and the entire countryside. She had no eyelashes, which gave her seamed face a naked, surprised look. Was she 65? She was obviously my senior. We pointed at ourselves and gave our names. She was surnamed Pan. As an honorific, I addressed her as “Pan Jie” or “Elder Sister Pan.” She called me “Mr. Guo.”

“Forget that. Call me Little Guo,” I said, not wanting her to look up to me.

“Are you married?”

“Yes. My wife’s up there.”

“It’s lunchtime. You better go upstairs and eat before the food gets cold.”

“What about you?”

“No, no. Go on upstairs.”

“That’s okay.”

“The food will be cold and won’t taste good.”

“Why don’t you eat?”

“No. I’m not eating. I’m working.”

“You’re very good,” I told her.

“No, I collect trash!” she said. “You’re good. Very good.”

“You are good,” I insisted.

We went back and forth like that, trying to put the other person on top. I got the impression this had never happened to her before. It must have been confusing in a nice way. I got a warm feeling seeing her get used to it. I did not see anyone watching us except for some boys on the basketball court. Finally, we had a good laugh.

After class, we changed into jeans and sweatshirts and put on our wool hats and down jackets and took the bus to the city, a 20-minute ride. It let us off at an open area where the road widened without bound and you could have driven anywhere, in any direction. We crossed to the riverbank and boarded a barge that took us across the Yangtze.

The interior of the barge was blue. There were a lot of passengers, some with bicycles they had ridden across the sand. We were the only foreigners, and we took each other’s pictures at the rail with the wind blowing on us and the gray waves behind our shoulders.

When we docked, we climbed up a pair of wet planks that the crew tossed down between the deck and the pier. They bent beneath us but didn’t break. We were in another city, called Ezhou. The sidewalks were narrow and cobbled. A truck roared by, and we pressed ourselves to the wall. There were live geese in the back in cages.

After walking around for an hour or so — we found the post office, a darkened shopping center, a fast food joint, an alley where two smiling men had set up an awe-inspiring display of screws, threaded bolts, washers, nuts, and other pieces of hardware of intricately varied sizes and gauges — we went into a restaurant where they served fish. The other patrons were dining loudly and spitting the bones onto the plastic tablecloths and smoking cigarettes. Halfway through our meal, we felt something happening behind us. Another party was entering: a gangster in a white tracksuit and sunglasses and his retinue. Tables were moved for them. Two women wearing miniskirts, fishnet stockings, lingerie, high heels, and tribal hairdos attended him. Their hair and heels made them as tall as he was. He spoke up at the ceiling, as if that was his true height, as if he saw himself up there. The entire restaurant listened when he talked. Someone lit his cigarette. “You see them?” Beth whispered. I nodded. All the women’s clothes were white, and the man’s sunglasses were gold.

In my classroom, I had picked up what appeared to be an exam paper from another class. Sitting on a concrete bench in the garden in front of our apartment building, I worked at deciphering what it said.

5. In the past, China was called “the sick man of Asia.” Before 1949, not one Chinese person’s name can be found among world-record-holding athletes.

A discussion topic? There didn’t seem to be an explicit question here. I wondered what class this was for. At the bottom of the page, it said, “Issued by the tuanshengwei bangongshi.” This meant the Office of the Provincial League Committee, the provincial committee of the Communist Youth League of China.

I looked up and saw David coming toward me.

“You always have your head in a book.”

“Just trying to learn.”

“I think when you go back to the United States, you will write for the New York Times.”

This idea had never occurred to me, but I told David I didn’t see any reason why we couldn’t both write for the New York Times someday.

“You are laughing at me,” he said.

I saw a group of students assisting one of their classmates climbing up a ladder. He held one end of a red banner, which he was attaching to a wire. His glasses and white short-sleeved shirt and neat haircut gave him an Eisenhower-era look. I stopped to read the banner’s slogan. It said:

I later learned that these students belonged to the Communist Youth League. No one ever discussed the league’s existence with me, but it figured prominently in school life. I began to see signs of it, such as that exam sheet mentioning the sick man of Asia. A kid in my class would be doing some special assignment whose importance overrode anything I was teaching; I’d find out that it related to political study. A boy or girl would jump up and address the others more peremptorily than I’d ever spoken to them, in a manner that exacted obedience, giving them orders in a military command voice.

The kids took political indoctrination classes. These were on the class schedule: Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Socialist Thought Construction, and so on. I found their course books in the library. They spoke of “healthy thinking.” I passed by such a class when it was in session and considered barging in and asking if I could listen in. A man was lecturing, and I could tell it was a dogma class; I heard key words such as “socialist thought.” The students listened in utter silence, of a kind I’d never achieved in my classrooms on my best day. I saw clearly that it wasn’t the kind of class you could audit as an outsider. You had to either believe or leave. For the students, such classes were required.

By digging around on the school’s website, I’ve been able to learn a little more. The Chinese home page, under the heading “important school news,” mentions that the manager of the school-enterprise partnership department at Volvo has visited the school. Under the heading “school announcements” are bidding notices for electrical generators, 3-D printer/scanners, programmable motor controllers, livestock veterinary training equipment, and an apartment with running water and natural gas facilities. But when you click on the “student management” tab, you are routed to another page that gives you two further options: “Communist Youth League online” and “Red Spirit Garden.”

The Red Spirit Garden page is a shrine to the Communist Party. It shows a landscape of mountains and blooming trees pictured through a misty overlay of a deep cranberry red. It is meant to inspire ardor. It has a radically different feeling from the other content on the website — something more solemn and ecstatic. A poem rendered in brush calligraphy speaks of “a multitude of 10,000 with one heart, closely following the party, frugal and brave, not resting until victory is achieved.” The page contains headings such as Red Stories, Red Footprints, Red Battles, Red Martyrs, and Red Movies and Music, where you can buy vintage movies about the revolution, such as The Story of the Scout Who Crossed the River.

On “Communist Youth League online,” the look is much more consistent with the school’s home page, only the dominant colors are crimson and gold. The league’s emblem, a motif involving a red-gold flag, twinkles at the top of the page: There are sparkles, like those that appear on teeth or floors in ads for Colgate or Mr. Clean. It’s Communism as Disneyland. The page contains a lot of dense content. A typical item: “Provincial League Committee member Deputy Secretary Zhang Shu visits our school to inspect and guide the Communist Youth League.” Another: “Music ignites youth; songs ring out in the future.” A picture in the center of the screen changes, in slide-show mode, every few seconds. Each image shows the school’s assembly hall, with different groups performing on stage. In one, a row of youths stand holding huge red flags emblazoned with hearts and the words “volunteer spirit.” A banner overhead announces the “2012 Communist Youth League Meeting for Carrying on the Volunteer Spirit of Lei Feng.” Communist propagandists defined Lei Feng, a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army, as a revolutionary hero. He was meant to embody the revolutionary values of self-sacrifice, volunteerism, and simplicity, the virtues of a peasant-guerilla. Mao’s fighters, the ones who fought the Japanese and the Kuomintang, were people who looked like Mrs. Pan and her husband, Song, and up until Mao’s death, these peasants-workers-soldiers were lionized as heroes in the People’s Republic of China.

Lower down on the page, another series of photos shows Youth League students doing volunteer work. They stand on a bleak roadside wearing red baseball caps and watching one of the school leaders, a portly man in a black suit and dress shoes, digging a shovel in the gray dirt. The caption says “tree-planting activity.” I’m positive I recognize him from our banquets, but I don’t know his name or what position he holds in the school or the Communist Party. His cheeks are distinctively pockmarked.

The school has a principal and a party secretary. This suggests a kind of shared leadership between civilians and members of the party. The party extends its fingers down through the school’s administrative hierarchy to the grassroots level in the classroom, in which some kids are members of the Youth League. This model probably applies to all kinds of entities throughout China, from hospitals to fruit-juice factories. I imagine the party as a network penetrating Chinese society. Since that society has turned toward making money, the party is in position to absorb the profits. Joining the Communist Party, like joining the Teamsters, can be a key route to a good job, the kind where a lot of money washes over you and some of it sticks to you. This may explain why there was such an overlap between wealth and party membership in our experience. For China’s business class, party membership may be something like belonging to the right church or golf club.

It may take a certain amount of mental flexibility to be a Chinese Communist now that the entire country is pursuing capitalism. Your individual goals are power and wealth, yet you belong to a party that was brought into being by China’s most powerless and impoverished citizens. The party no longer wants political ideology to interfere with market efficiency. Like the American businessperson who goes to church on Sunday, the Chinese Communist knows there’s a time and place for dogma; certain ideas have to be intoned, at assemblies, in party literature. Then they are put away so that business can be gotten down to. On the class schedule, business administration follows Marxism-Leninism-Maoism. Communist thought has no real relationship to the actual business of governing China. Theorists and propagandists have to explain why the Communist Party’s decisions are justified by Communist dogma, when in fact those decisions are justified by sound economic theory of the kind taught at Harvard. It has been observed that the Communist Party is no longer Communist in anything but name; it is simply China’s ruling party. The key basis whereby the party justifies its rule is that it is making life better for ordinary Chinese people. Here is an echo of an old Confucian idea, that subordinates obey their superior, and in return, a superior looks after his subordinates as a benevolent father looks after children.

That night for dinner, I took a 10-kilo bag of pork-and-chive dumplings out of the icebox and cooked them all, there seeming to be no reason to conserve since they had cost so little. Beth thought it would be impossible for us to finish them, but she was wrong. I ate two bowls of dumplings with Golden Bridge soy sauce while she talked about her classes.

One of her students, a female, had made a special impression on Beth thanks to the young woman’s outspoken manner and the handbag and makeup kit she brought with her to class. Handbags and makeup kits were unusual accessories at our school. This student didn’t have a problem being noticed. Beth said she was given to delivering forceful, often entertaining, monologues in class. Today she had declared, “Money is God!”

“That’s a narrow view.”

“She said it to me like I need to get with the program.”

“She sounds obnoxious. Eat a dumpling.”

“I’m full.”

“Eat one more before I finish them all. Otherwise I’ll feel like I took your dinner.”

“That’s okay. Her English name is Mystical.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yup. She does her makeup in class.”

“You must hate her.”

“I don’t hate her. She’s got a personality. She’s difficult, but I have a way with my students. I don’t have trouble with them like you do.”

“I just like it when they behave.”

Beth raised an eyebrow and got up and cleared the table. The apartment was cold, and she was wearing a white knit sweater belted around her like a robe and other clothes underneath and one of her pointy knitted hats, which I felt made her look like a very attractive Mongol warrior.

“I think I overate,” I told her. “I’m going outside to run on the track, burn everything off.”

Photography by Beth Lish

Read Part I, Part III, Part IV, and Part V

The Grannypicker was originally published in Gone on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

During the winter, when we arrived, the hay was baled up. We drove in at night and saw the bundles in our headlights and the shadows on the concrete buildings with the corrugated gates pulled down. In the daylight, it stayed gray like Portland. The damp climate sent the cold right through your clothes. Everyone had to stay dressed in sweaters 24 hours a day, even indoors. We wore long underwear, scarves, socks, mittens, Tibetan woolen hats with earflaps — we have pictures of us dressed up like this sitting in front of the space heater in our foreign teacher’s apartment, waiting out the cold season.

We were about 70 kilometers to the east of Wuhan, one of China’s major cities. Its population was over 5 million at the time, but we were in the countryside in an isolated place. We had found our jobs on the Internet. The college where we had signed a one-year contract to teach English was located on a street that floated alone out in the middle of nowhere, detached from anything else, lost in the trees and fields. The small city whose name appeared in our mailing address was 13 kilometers away, down a road that had been semi-paved just before our arrival. Now there was a bus that you could ride into town for a yuan, the equivalent of 12 cents American. Along with students and country people, we took the bus out into the rural zone, past construction pits and peasants who husked their grain by leaving it out on blankets for the bus to drive over. When I asked a peasant in a conical straw hat where we were, she waved her hand at the land behind the school grounds and said, “Farms.”

Our area was known as one of the Three Ovens of China, in reference to the oppressive humid summer heat that made the crops grow.

Our handler was a 30-something man who taught English. He had named himself David. I took it that he was a member of the Communist Party. He picked us up at the airport and tried to take one of the two Ironman duffel bags I was carrying, but it was heavy for him, and I continued to carry it. We both walked out to the car like that, with the bag awkwardly between us, tripping up his thin legs. The driver ran over and grabbed the bag as well, and all three of us lifted it into the trunk together while Beth waited on the curb with her nylon shoulder bag, half asleep from the time difference and swaying with fatigue.

The highway was dead black for 50 miles. David and I spoke until he became tired. He was demonstrating his English, I my Chinese. When he got tired of turning around in the front seat, our conversation lapsed. The driver smoked. Beth slept against my shoulder. After 40 minutes, we went through a toll checkpoint manned by what looked like soldiers in olive green uniforms and white gloves in a bath of fluorescent light, beyond which there was emptiness. Farther on, I began to see the crops baled up in our headlights. We drove down a littered dirt road and under a bannered gateway. This was the campus, David said. Beth rubbed her eyes. The driver drove on the flagstone walkway past concrete dormitories, turning corners, going farther in. We stopped in a courtyard. David jumped out and hustled us into a cold building. There was the same struggling over the bags as before. He awoke a student who was sleeping in the office in all her clothes — jeans, sweater, down vest, and, as could be seen in the gap between her jeans and sweater, long underwear — and she let us into our apartment.

We lived in what the school called the Foreign Affairs Building. David’s office — the Office of Foreign Affairs — was downstairs. He shared the office with another party member named Gan, a short, older man who would have smoked cigars if this were Brooklyn. Instead, he smoked Hongjinlong (Red Gold Dragon) famous-brand cigarettes. (Various Chinese products designate themselves as mingpai, literally “famous brand,” meaning, of course, that they are well known.) Though Gan briefly indulged me — he had a gravelly laugh — it was not his job to talk to me. It was David’s, as the director of foreign affairs. “There are two routes you can go,” Gan once told me, and one of them was to talk to David. (And I’ve forgotten the other route, if there ever was one.)

Once, while waiting for David to speak with me, I read the placard behind his desk, which listed more than 25 rules for dealing with foreigners.

When we woke up the morning after we arrived, my wife was hungry, so I went to look for David. The sky was gray fog, and roosters crowed out in the wet field. He came to work in his suit and carrying a zippered leather carryall, hurried by me, and unlocked his metal door. I asked if there was anything we could eat. “Do you have any money?” he asked. The answer to that was no. I didn’t have Chinese currency. He stared at me with his glasses. Since I didn’t, he was willing to give me a loan. But first we would make out an IOU together. He would teach me the proper way that this was done. I drew lines on a slip of paper at his direction. He dictated to me, watching to see how well I wrote the Chinese characters. It was seven in the morning, local time, and I confused zhi (to pay) with ji (technical). The difference was the “hand” radical, the tishoupang, an ideogram that means “hand” and occurs in other Chinese characters. “So you still have something to learn,” he explained. After I fixed my mistakes, he had me sign my name in Chinese. “Very good,” he said, and gave me 10 yuan from his suit pocket.

We learned that many of the students at our school survived on one yuan a day. Much of their energy was devoted to keeping as clean as they could. Their laundry hung all over the concrete buildings. It cost money to bathe, so they didn’t bathe every day. School life was chores, airing out their quilts in the winter sun, taking turns sweeping the dorm. A portly woman in a white nurse’s hat sat at the door of the concrete bathhouse collecting fees in what looked like an ammo box with a coin slot on top. The outhouse on the other side was free. I went to use it before class and saw a male student I recognized with his acid-washed jeans down, squatting over the ceramic trough on his flexible haunches, holding a roll of toilet paper, shitting. “Hey,” I said. He looked away.

The sour smell of mud and feces was part of the atmosphere. Every floor was wet. We left black footprints everywhere. Throughout the country, women mopped floors — in apartments, classrooms, hallways, shopping centers, stores, restaurants, hotels, offices, outhouses, and bus stations — rubbing this black water around. They did not have mop wringers, and their mops were blackened, rancid. You smelled the mop everywhere. They stuck it on the deck to dry with their laundry, but nothing dried in the rice-growing climate.

The other smell was coal smoke. People squatted by their fires, feeding in the coal bricks. Coal was cheap, but I saw people collecting the half-burned bricks to use. And the peasants shared their homes with animals. At dawn, reddish-brown hens stepped softly around in the weeds on the edge of the field where the students lined up for exercises. Pigs fed on the trash pile next to the Blue Sky Internet Bar. In the paddy fields out behind the school grounds — the place called Farms — you were ankle-deep in mud and pig shit. The ponds were polluted, covered in green and orange algae of a neon intensity you would not expect to see in nature. People who lived out there survived by collecting recyclable plastic from the trash.

I took David’s money to the cafeteria, finding my way to the kitchen, a kind of stable, open to the gray sky. The men who worked there wore blacksmith’s aprons and rubber boots. “What do you want?” they asked.

“How about eggs?” I said. That was no problem, they said. Anything for their foreign friend. One man started cracking eggs into a blackened wok, one after the other, and flipping them out with his spatula, which the Chinese call a shovel, or chan. He cooked five or six eggs for me while the other men watched silently, sitting cross-legged, smoking cigarettes.

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re a foreign friend, aren’t you?”

To pay, I had to go back into the main room and find a certain woman in a white smock, who had to fetch a special form and mark it with a red stamp before she could take David’s money. The fee was three yuan, and she gave me a stamped receipt. This done, I headed back to the apartment, balancing our eggs on plastic plates. But when I got upstairs, I realized the eggs were not cooked through. Because of bird flu, I told my wife we couldn’t eat them and threw them out.

Not long after we arrived — possibly the very first day, but I can’t recall — we went to our first banquet. David took us all out in a minibus to town. It was early February, and the small city looked Soviet in its grayness. Our party consisted of David, his wife, two other Chinese faculty members, and the foreigners. Beth and I weren’t the only foreigners. There was also a couple from New Zealand. David’s driver drove us down the streets of the small city to a deserted parking lot that had a Ferris wheel in it. The Office of Foreign Affairs covered all the fees. This was an entertainment that he had chosen for our benefit, David said. Then his wife jumped out of the minibus and pulled him out. All the Chinese people jumped out and led us to the bumper cars. David’s wife was avid about driving a bumper car, and she screamed as she drove into other people. We were the only customers. The man who ran the attraction smoked his cigarette until it was time to pull the breaker switch and shut the power off.

After this, we were driven to a hotel. On the top floor was a private dining room. It was the first time we did not see our breath condensing in the air. There must have been a space heater in the room. We took off our down coats. The Chinese men who arrived wore black leather jackets over turtleneck sweaters. We were told that they were very important people. These were David’s bosses, the leaders of the school, and it was clear that they were party members. We shook their hands.

“The conditions here are not the best,” they apologized. “Nevertheless, we must regard each other as equals and be willing to learn from each other.”

“Of course,” I said.

Then we all sat at a round table.

In a few days, the students came back for the beginning of the semester, and the campus went from desolate to lively. The street was filled with kids in jeans and parkas buying dumplings from vendors in blue smocks speaking the country dialect. The girls held each other’s hands. The shopkeepers pulled up the shutters of their stores — concrete squares that resembled self-storage units, built on a high curb above the roadway that would be inundated when it rained. We saw them squatting in the interior, arranging their goods. There were many different stores. We noted a hairdresser, a phone center, and a place to buy toilet paper, cigarettes, candy, and beer. In the midst of the hubbub, men on ladders strung up blue banners advertising the Xiaolingtong wireless phone system. It felt like a carnival. Plastic bowls and disposable chopsticks littered the tables and benches in front of a noodle counter. A woman was selling dumplings out of an ingenious cart that held stacks of baskets of different sizes. I bought six xiaolongbao for 1.50 yuan. They tasted good and full of gravy, but the meat was unidentifiable; I bit into a piece of strange bone.

“Try one,” I said to Beth. She did.

Kids talked to us. They gasped when they heard Chinese coming out of my mouth. Girls took Beth by the arm and held her. A tall academic boy with a bowl cut and a large head asked, Did we want to make friends with him? Did we use QQ, a type of instant messaging system? He said his name was Tony. I would see him again at English Corner. He was extremely glad that we were here.

We could not stop saying how excited we were as well, how grateful we were to be treated to such a welcome, to have traveled halfway around the world and found such perfect understanding. The two or three innocent children holding our hands nodded as if with inexpressible joy.

The working people pushed around them, heading farther into the street, sideways, into a second dimension of alleys and tents, behind the stage set of the stores. When you looked in deep enough, you might see where they lived — propane bottle, coal fire, wok, family, sleeping mat — way in back by the trash. The local men favored crew cuts, as if they were members of a formerly militarized society that had been disbanded. They drove motorcycles, three-wheelers, cars, trucks, buses, barges, anything they could. The women wore high heels, sweaters, slacks, and blazers, whether they were selling produce with their chapped hands or sweeping floors. At night, under the bare bulbs strung up overhead, they ate cheap food soaked in chili oil and drank tablefuls of beer. It was a raucous, gruff society, and they got screaming red-faced drunk and spit their fish bones on the floor. When it got hot, young males swaggered around with their shirts flapping open, showing off their abdominals, eating watermelon, and barking at girls. The drunks fell asleep at the outside tables.

We learned they passed through this place from everywhere — from as far away as Gansu, Inner Mongolia, Tibet. A young hairdresser in tight jeans who gave me a haircut told me, “Next month I’m going down to Guangzhou to try my way. My cousin has a job there, and maybe I can try to get on with him.” People migrated, believing in luck, hustled and disappeared — 18-year-olds with futuristic hairdos who worked province to province across the continent with tenuous links to their families or anything else. Everything was in flux. The state-owned shipyards along the river had been shut down, and the workers had started driving cabs. Dogs hunted in packs among the hovels in the fields. There were frequent power outages. When they occurred at night, the countryside was plunged into oceanic blackness. We heard rumors of riot, crime.

I have a picture of the river road taken in winter. Nothing is there but the converging lines of the road, the spare, widely spaced trees, and the distance. Muddy, gray, dilapidated, it is the bleakest scene imaginable. The river had flooded not long ago, leaving a five-foot-high waterline in our classrooms nearly a mile from its banks. Since then, the berm had been emplaced, but I sensed an absence of legitimate authority or control. There were no police, just the huge red Communist billboards warning against female infanticide.

In the small city, beggars, often with ghastly deformities, lay on the pavement, appealing to everyone who went by. Some, who lacked hands, had trained themselves to write calligraphy with their feet. They would write out an extended passage in beautiful seal script calligraphy directly on the sidewalk.

Our jobs were very good by ordinary Chinese standards. All we had to do to get them was be willing to leave America and come claim them; there was no other real requirement besides our being foreign. Had we wanted to teach in our own country, we would have needed teaching certificates. Beth had served briefly as a public school teacher in the Bronx several years previously, but her license wasn’t current, and I had no formal teaching credentials or experience at all. However, as soon as we arrived in China, we became “foreign experts,” an official title, and we were each issued a Foreign Experts Certificate, a booklet that resembles a passport, by the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs.

Under our contracts, we each received salaries of 3,500 yuan a month, along with free housing. Our apartment came with a television, electric water heater, shower, washing machine, air conditioner, refrigerator, space heater, and Western-style toilet — one where you sat on a stool instead of squatting on your haunches — as well as a hot plate, rice cooker, and microwave. The television came with free cable (one channel, HBO Asia). We also had a desktop computer, which a student would fix for us for free when it went on the fritz.

We learned that local teachers did not make as much as we did, nor did they receive the same level of housing or the aforementioned appliances. I don’t know what the local teachers made. As a benchmark, an ordinary worker in that part of the country might hope to make 1,200 yuan a month. But local teachers had almost certainly gone through a genuine training and selection process and carried bigger course loads.

We were responsible for teaching 16 hours a week; participating in English Corner, a kind of open-gym session for English students, for an hour and a half on Wednesday evenings; judging English speaking and singing competitions; and joining in various other school assemblies and activities at David’s request. The banquets were one such activity. Attendance was required, but it was more natural to think of them as a privilege than an obligation.

Apart from the first banquet, which took place at a hotel in the city, the others were held in a cafeteria about a quarter mile from our apartment, down a long, wide concrete concourse, past the library, the trees, and a girl’s dormitory, an octagonal tower around a central courtyard filled with laundry. The first floor of the cafeteria served mantou, a steamed white-flour bun, for 0.50 yuan. Frugal students lived on mantou. We heard a news story that mantou were being made with paper pulp instead of flour. The cafeteria was unlighted and unheated and felt like a gray barn. A TV bolted high on the wall was tuned to the official news, delivering factory production statistics. The cafeteria workers wore mittens.

A staircase led up to a private, high-ceilinged, wood-paneled dining room containing two large round tables with lazy Susans in the center. The servers were young females in pink uniforms. The word pingmin means “common people.” By itself, ping means “flat, level, or fair,” and occurs in gongping, or “justice,” a notion that gets a lot of play in official proclamations. Pingdeng means “equality,” while dengji refers to hierarchical gradations, such as those between people of different social ranks. Certainly the servers were common people, probably rural. Some could have been students.

The banquets generally had about 15 guests. There was a rough correlation between order of arrival and status. Foreign teachers were expected to arrive first, along with drivers and Chinese teachers. Then the leaders in black suits would start showing up. The party secretary would show up last, and everyone would greet him like George Bush entering Congress.

The eating began with snacks, like boiled peanuts and peeled dragon eyes, and moved on to more substantial dishes — some cold, like the jellied beef collagen, and some hot, like the hot pot soups, which are popular in Hubei. Before long, at the leaders’ direction, the girls would bring out the baijiu (clear liquor), and the drinking and toasting would start.

The men would come unsteadily around the table and toast you. To keep things fair and equal, you’d go back around the table and toast them back. The drinking was vigorous. They exchanged cigarettes and sometimes passed each other red envelopes, probably containing cash.

They instructed us in certain subtleties. When you clicked your glass with someone else, the relative heights of your glasses mattered. The person who held his glass below yours was expressing deference. Toasters would compete with each other to be the one to hold their glass lower. It was like bowing deeper than the other party or insisting that he go through a doorway ahead of you. Ritual demonstrations of modesty (qianxu), like turning away compliments — something Beth and I do naturally — met with approval. Like many people, we don’t feel comfortable being praised, but in China our knee-jerk modesty elicited further plaudits: “Oh, you’re humble, just like a Chinese!”

But ritual self-abasement has a reverse function: It makes you the bigger man, even if that’s not your intention, and if you overdo it, you’ll annoy people. When I deflected a compliment from Ms. Gan, a straight-backed faculty administrator who wore her hair tight to her head as if she had canceled its right to grow, she pursed her lips and said, “It’s fine to act humble, but don’t act too humble,” proving that this was all an elaborate system for establishing where everyone stood (or sat) relative to everyone else. Where you sat meant something too. The closer you sat to the principal, the more important you were. Sometimes the principal would insist that a low-status person, such as a driver, sit next to him. It was a display of largesse.

I developed a routine for feeding us. I would take the Ironman duffel bag and go into one of the grocery stores in the city. The students told me where to go: a store called the Wushang Liangfan, a chain headquartered in Wuhan whose name is a word borrowed from Japanese, originally meaning “wholesale.” It was a combination grocery-department store where you could buy space heaters, long underwear, and mittens as well as food.

I would see students from the school gazing at the digital watches, CD players, and cigarette lighters. Not buying anything, just looking. Some of them aspired to work there. One of the workers in orange smocks who watched me while I filled my basket told me that he had graduated from the school where I now taught.

The Wushang’s principal customers were Chinese locals, and they had enough buying power to move a lot of merchandise. I saw crates of eggs (which were not refrigerated), freezer cases full of frozen dumplings, pyramids of cooking oil in see-through plastic bottles, pallet loads of rice. Whole aisles were devoted to soy sauce. In fact, there were three other similar department stores in the city, all carrying the same kinds of goods — and a lot of them. Meanwhile, there were only five or six foreign teachers scattered among different schools in the area, so foreigners could have accounted for only a small part of the local economy.

In this context, you would think that my grocery shopping wouldn’t have been remarkable to anyone. I went to the store roughly once a week and spent 30 or 40 yuan each time, or about five dollars American, buying things like Bright brand milk, Nestlé instant coffee, red sugar, eggs, oats, rice, tofu, pork loin, greens, and apples. I packed everything into the duffel bag, hiked to the bus stop, and rode back with the farmers. I didn’t think I was living extravagantly. But every time I bought food in that city, a store employee would look at what I was getting and exclaim,

Photography by Beth Lish
Read Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V

The First Banquet was originally published in Gone on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Pilgrimage To Legoland

Seeing the light at the California outpost of the world’s cheeriest cult

I’m inching through traffic — six jammed lanes of it, beneath a flawless blue California sky. The highway is funneling us all into Legoland, America’s largest and most-visited toy-themed park, and I’m fighting a mounting sense of panic — specifically demophobia, the fear of crowds.

It’s spring break, and at 10 a.m., when we finally reach the parking lot, there are already thousands of cars extending to the horizon in every direction. Rivers of people are surging towards the entrance, battling for tickets, teeming through the turnstiles. I’m reminded of the Muslim hajj, or the various Hindu festivals that attract mind-boggling masses of humanity.

I’ve never been to a theme park before, and the scale is daunting. I’m worried we will even make it through the gates. What on earth, I ask myself, was I thinking?

Then I cast an eye at Sam, my 10-year-old, sitting in the passenger seat wearing a rapturous expression straight out of a Raphael fresco. He doesn’t give a hoot about crowds; he is literally about to enter kid paradise.

“They have a giant model of Manhattan,” he informs me, reading from his Lego Club magazine. “It’s made from two million pieces…”

I take a deep breath and try to channel my inner pre-teen. Of course, I too once worshipped at the altar of the interlocking plastic brick, with hundreds of pieces scattered around my family home like shrapnel. But back then Lego was a quaint, low-tech phenomenon. Now it’s a global juggernaut, with hundreds of themed sets, its own hit movie and, yes, sprawling international parks like the one into which we are now being inexorably drawn.

The pioneer Legoland opened in Billund, Denmark in 1968; Sam and I are about to enter the first U.S. incarnation, in Carlsbad, north of San Diego. It opened in 1999 and extends over 128 acres, with an aquarium, a Lego Hotel and a Lego water park. (Another opened in Florida in 2011. There are now Legolands in Malaysia, the UK, Germany and, soon, Dubai…)

It’s all a bit overwhelming. Privately, I find myself hoping there’s a Lego cocktail bar on the premises.

Somehow, as we join the entry line, my Grinch-like resistance begins to soften. Families in our immediate vicinity have come from as far away as India, Brazil, and Iceland, and the Babel of languages suggests the idea of Lego as a global, secular religion — a benign cult that cuts across cultures and unites generations. According to the company’s estimates, over 400 million people around the world have grown up building with Lego. Every year, children spend five billion hours playing with it. And there are now over 400 billion pieces in existence — 62 per person on the planet.

Like all good cults, Lego has its own creation myth. The bobbled brick was invented in Denmark in 1932, the depths of the Great Depression, by a down-on-his-luck village carpenter named Ole Kirk Christiansen. Ole Kirk started out crafting wooden furniture for callous-handed Danish farmers, but expanded into toys to help make ends meet, often trading them for food. He called his bricks Lego, from the Danish “leg godt,” or “play well.” (In a happy linguistic twist, that’s also Latin for “I put together.”)

Lego has also, like any world religion, faced viciously contested schisms. In the beginning, the company produced a limited range of shapes, all rectangles and squares — a rigorously pure design that earned it a place in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, for example. But in the 1970s, exotic new forms and curves infiltrated the canon. The first mini-figure was produced in 1978 (today there are six billion in existence, the biggest shadow army in the world), and the floodgates were opened.

To the horror of purists, kits today contain prefabricated animals, trees, space monsters. Pretty much every pop-cultural hit has its own themed set, from The Avengers to The Hobbit. There are highbrow kits such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water, and a new robotics system, Mindstorms, which has inspired high-tech kiddie boot camps from Silicone Valley to Bangalore.

So it stands to reason that Lego also has its sacred sites. And as I feel the throng start to surge through the gates, I’m struck by a joyful epiphany. I shouldn’t let the crowds annoy me; I should embrace them! I hand our tickets to the cheerful teenage attendant and achieve a form of Zen acceptance. We’re all together here, pilgrims of the plastic brick.

In the blink of an eye, we’re through the turnstiles and let loose inside an explosion of primary colors: we’ve leapt from black-and-white reality to the acid-bright Land of Oz. Giant rainbow-colored sculptures loom at every turn. The music being piped over the loudspeakers is “Everything is Awesome” — the official brand hymn, from the surprisingly witty film that has grossed over $486 million worldwide. (I’ve seen it three times, and am compelled to join the chorus of protest that it was snubbed by the Academy in the Best Animated Feature category this year).

I’m also relieved to see some real greenery — manicured gardens, lush ferns and shady eucalyptus trees. There’s even a lake, across which vaguely brick-shaped barges are gliding. Still, I’m paralyzed by the options. (Sixty attractions!) Staring at the map, I don’t know where to turn. I look at Sam.

“The Death Star,” he instructs me. Obviously.

We dash along a path past an enormous Lego spider. A red Lego dragon rears in the distance. Soon we burst into the Star Wars section, containing a vast Lego diorama for each episode of the series. We’re agog at the Millennium Falcon, the desert landscape of Tatooine, the domes of Naboo. There is Uncle Owen’s moisture farm, where Luke Skywalker grew up, and an excellent alien Cantina. But the pièce de résistance is the Death Star. It looms above us, an intricate ball thirteen feet in diameter.

“More than 500,000 pieces,” Sam informs me.

If I’ve been trying to maintain even the faintest patina of resistance, now’s the time that it falls away. This is undeniably cool. We have our photos taken next to a pint-sized Lego sculpture of Darth Maul.

Next up: an educational tour of planet earth. We rush to the lake, where a barge takes us past a Lego Sydney Opera House, a Lego Taj Mahal and a Lego Eiffel tower. In an area called Miniland USA looms a 1:20 scale New York City, complete with a pleasingly retro vision of Times Square in the 80s (no prostitutes, but otherwise pretty accurate). All but hidden inside Grand Central Station is a Lego man using a Lego toilet.

Nearby is a Lego New Orleans, a Lego Washington DC, a Lego San Fransisco and, in a nice bit of meta-commentary, a Lego Las Vegas that includes fake mini-versions of its fake monuments.

As much as I’m enjoying myself, I can’t help but notice how far things have strayed from the humble, egalitarian roots of Ole Kirk Christiansen’s original invention. It’s not just the scale and the sophistication of the place; there’s also a distinctly un-Scandinavian class system at work here, with VIP parking sections and VIP tickets that will set you back a cool $259 for adults, and $253 for kids. These allow the wealthy to skip the lines, which they do without any visible traces of guilt as the masses look on resentfully. And the commercial side is, of course, shameless, with modeling sets for sale at every turn and all paths leading to the aptly named Big Store.

And yet somehow, the combination of whimsy, earnestness, and attention to detail overcomes any sense of resentment. One lesser-used path goes past a string of historical statues including Shakespeare, JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Churchill and Einstein, prompting a father-son educational exchange. There’s even a nod to West Coast history, via life-size figures of “49ers” — the miners of the 1849 Californian gold rush, who sport beards, sacks, pick-axes, and manic grins. And yes, in answer to my earlier prayers, there’s a bar, which I’m much in need of after our action-packed, eight-hour day.

The Legoland Hotel is booked up months in advance, so that night Sam and I end up at a random motel nearby. It’s a little creepy, a cross between the Bates Motel and one of the 1950s roadside lodgings catalogued in Lolita. But it’s also an unexpected relief, the grays and beiges a welcome respite from the day-long deluge of color.

“So how do you rate Legoland?” I ask as Sam crawls into bed, clutching his souvenir set like a holy relic — a piece of the true cross, perhaps, or the Buddha’s tooth.

Of course, I already know the answer: “Everything was awesome,” he says, with a beatific look in his eyes.

And like all good pilgrims, we will spread the holy word. In a few days, we’ll be back in the East Village, and Sam will testify to his friends about the lifesize Lego R2-D2, the Lego Mount Rushmore and the Lego New England harbor where kids can pilot radio-controlled Lego boats — inspiring a new wave of the faithful, no doubt, to head west to the promised land.

Photography by Kendrick Brinson

The Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott International portfolio.

A Pilgrimage to Legoland was originally published in Gone on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ten Minutes From El Paso, The Best Club You’ve Never Heard Of

Mexico’s Hardpop survived a brutal drug war, draws top DJs from around the world

If the first thing that springs to mind when you think about Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez is a relentless, bloody turf war between rival drug gangs, you’re probably not a big fan of underground techno.

Juarez, whose dilapidated city center is a 10-minute walk across the border from the pristine downtown of El Paso, Texas, is a major smuggling route for illegal narcotics entering the United States (and for American-made weapons heading in the other direction). It was the world’s murder capital for three straight years, between 2008 and 2011, as the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels battled for control: many residents fled the city, which is still dotted with ghostly, abandoned houses and shuttered businesses.

That is the Juarez most people know about. But in dance music circles, the city is renowned for being home to Hardpop, one of the best nightclubs in the world for techno and the more overtly electronic side of house. Almost every weekend the 600-capacity club plays host to top flight international DJs at the forefront of an electronic sound which is a world away from EDM — deeper, more minimal, and significantly less appealing to frat boys.

Hardpop’s guests have included Damian Lazarus, Ewan Pearson and M.A.N.D.Y. All of them could be DJing in Europe or the US for more money, but instead they choose to come to Ciudad Juarez for the night — to a club on a street which, at the height of what locals call “the war” or “the violence,” was lined with heavily armed soldiers in sandbag emplacements.

On a recent Friday night, it was easy to see why the club’s fiercely dedicated crowd felt somewhat safe here during the cartel wars. The place is built like a bunker — an imposing black box located in a strip mall next to a giant pharmacy. As other nightspots suffered extortions and shootings, Hardpop remained untouched, probably due to its modest size and a music policy which kept it under the radar. The club took down its sign and used the back entrance during the worst times, but, says Edgar Cobos, who heads up promotion, “The gangsters weren’t in the electronic scene. The only time the police ever came was when someone graffiti’d the bathroom really badly.”

Upon entering, you find yourself in a rectangular room which feels like the bowels of a ship. The atmosphere is friendly and intense. There are no flashing lights; the only sources of illumination are from behind the bar and the DJ booth, which sits on a raised platform at the end of the space like a pagan altar. There’s a VIP area upstairs, but the four 12-foot high speaker stacks are pointed away from it, squarely towards the dance floor below.

Hardpop’s regulars talk about the sound system the way other people might praise a favorite child or a treasured automobile. “Here the sound embraces you,” says Gabriela Durán, who’s been a regular for years; she takes my arm and drags me, gently but firmly, to a particular spot. “Stand here,” she says. “This is where it sounds best, this is where you can really feel it.”

I stand where I’m told, towards the back, diagonally equidistant from two speakers pointing directly at me, and discover that Gabriela is right. The powerful bass envelopes and almost overwhelms me, and the high frequencies seem to shoot directly into my brain. It’s not yet midnight, but all around me are bodies in fluid, focused motion.

The club’s door policy is simple and democratic: If you have money for entry and you’re carrying ID, you can come in. The result is an unpretentious crowd, dressed in a range of styles. There are girls in everything from T-shirts and sneakers to elaborate body-con dresses and serious heels, and one young man is wearing a Duff Beer T-shirt. There are clubs in Juarez (and most other cities) where he wouldn’t make it past security, but here he’s in the middle of the dance floor with a big smile on his face. If there’s a major guest DJ, people will come from as far away as Dallas, a ten-hour drive, but the bulk of the crowd is local.

As the night’s guest, Canadian tech-house DJ Carlo Lio, walks through the crowd towards the booth, you can feel the excitement build. Lio is an unassuming, stocky man with a shaved head and a soul patch, wearing a plain black T-shirt; but from the way cheers and whistles erupt in his wake, you’d think he was a Versace-clad pop star.

As his set gets going, it becomes apparent why the crowd has such a reputation for being knowledgeable about music. Lio fades in an obscure instrumental with no obvious hook, and shouts of recognition can be heard all over the club as people dance with even more vigor. This is repeated several times during the night, always with tracks that would seem deeply obscure in most other venues.

The night builds in intensity until 1:38am, at which point the house lights come on. Nobody reacts, and the crowd keeps dancing as if nothing had changed. The entire Mexican state of Chihuahua has a 2AM curfew, and club goers know what to expect. Lio plays for another fifteen minutes, and then, following loud demands for one more song — “Otra! Otra!” — he drops his final track, a simple, propulsive tech house number which meets with roars of approval. The music stops dead at 1.59, and, as if by magic, everyone is outside three minutes later.

In the parking lot, the crowd looks sated and relaxed. “It used to be that if we went to an after-party we wouldn’t leave until 6:00am,” says a clubber named Carmen. “It wasn’t safe to drive home in the dark; you couldn’t be sure you’d make it back.” Now, people mill about in groups, in no hurry to decide where to go next or whether to call it a night. One thing’s clear, though — wherever they go from here, they’ll all be back next week.

Photography by Katie Orlinsky

The Renaissance Hotels are part of the Marriott International portfolio.

Ten Minutes From Downtown El Paso, The Best Club You’ve Never Heard Of was originally published in Gone on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.