I am arriving in Seattle on Wednesday, 2 January 2002, at 3:10 pm on Air Canada 1551 from Vancouver, at Terminal N. Oil the dwarves, I'm coming home!

This is contingent on a complex sequence of events, including an 8-hour-plus bus ride to Guangzhou, surviving Hong Kong and Des et al for several days, getting a visa to come back into the country to get to Shenzhen to catch a flight to Beijing, and not having the Beijing Air Canada desk pretend to forget me and try to tell me the next open seat is in three weeks. But I'm sure it will all work out.

Being the middle of December, it hasn't got any warmer, so I'm spending a lot of time in my bedroom, although that's not the best description since I've dragged my wardrobe and chest of drawers out and my desk and computer in. It's the room with the A/C, now set on full reverse, and the rest of the apartment, including the bathroom, stays at a pretty constant 50 degrees. Most students have no heat; most teachers do have heat. The men's showers are unheated, and there is a public shower area they can pay to use.

The semester is rapidly coming to an end, at least for me. It lingers on for another four weeks, but my college classes ended last week and the final exam is next Monday. So I'm buried under late homework, and have just in the last hour finished looking at the students' sources and writing thesis statements.

I finally got the Amazon books I ordered, after three months and a re-shipment, and one of them is a history of modern China, starting in 1600 with the end of the Ming dynasty and the beginning of the Qing. Back then, they regularly executed foreigners. Of course, most of these foreigners had done things like accidentally fire cannons into crowds, but one guy was imprisoned for three years for, among other things, learning Chinese.

The modern incarnation of this habit of garotting round-eyes is the refusal, under any circumstances and with the most tortured excuses, to pay for photocopies for teachers. I'm writing this from a hole-in-the-wall computer and photocopy store across the street from campus, where I am copying a sample final exam (attached) for students to prepare with, after the English department explained that it might take a few days to get authorization as they have exceeded their budget for copying and have been criticized in meetings. There is a mechanism by which materials handed in ten days before the final can be bound and prepared, but I was told about this last Friday, ten days before my final.

On the brighter side, the English department is giving me excellent support as I undertake the unpleasant business of dealing with the students who cheat. More specifically, as I deal with the students' whose cheating is so utterly blatant and inexcusable that I can't force myself to ignore it.

A few students didn't hand in their sources by the deadline, so (in addition to capping their scores) I'll be giving them sources of my choice. Now open to suggestions for topic. Current candidates: grammar (English should have a plural 'you'; discuss), Chinese History (It should still be illegal for foreigners to learn Chinese).

One more week of middle school classes, and that doesn't make it easier, but by sticking to the tried and true routine we manage to muddle through and some of the students may even be learning.

Tracy Chapman, especially when heard in a foreign country, relaxes one's soul.