I have, over the past few years, become bitter and cynical about the holiday. She sits next to me on the cold marble bench in a soft, thick, medium-brown quilted nylon jacket and although she smiles, sadness comes from deep in her narrow dark brown eyes and covers her square face. She is wearing light khaki pants and dark brown leather loafers and I can see the first few inches of the thick single black braid that extends to the middle of her back. Sunday is the girls' shower day. She talks quietly and her English is good enough to express most of what she wants to say.
Teaching is unbearable.
One of the classrooms is crowded and the heat generated from 35 sweaty bodies, sorry 36, mine, too, is incredible. The other classroom is more spacious, but gets the full direct effect of the afternoon sun. There is not a whisper of a breeze. While a teacher in Jinan, I took a five-hour train ride through Shandong to Linyi to visit a friend, another teacher. After getting south of the cloud-enshrouded mountains of Tian, the land opened up and spread out with cornfields from horizon to horizon.