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In the summer of 1997, I and eleven other people from all parts of the USA and of all ages traveled to Shenyang, People's Republic of China, for an eight week course teaching English to Chinese classes at a university in that city. A few of us were trained teachers, some were students, and others were retired or had different professions altogether. Each of us had our own class in the mornings, and we taught the roughly two hundred people in the Shenyang program jointly several afternoons a week. We also had field trips on weekends and "cultural exchanges" in the evenings.

China was both wonderful and terrifying; beautiful and ugly, and full of life and death. I hope to bring all of it back in this book.

Names: Most of the Chinese we met assumed English names for ease, and I have used those names here. I have named some of those I met but who did not have names. In no case have I used anyone's full Chinese name.

This time, I leave out training in the USA and the first blurry days of sightseeing in Beijing. I will return to that later. I begin with the heart of the story; the day I met my students. I realize this means a lot of backstory is left out, but I will parenthesee when needed.

Comments and suggestions are welcome. This is a very rough draft and is mostly from my memory and from the journal I kept there, thus is very jumbled. I wanted to get everything out, before I went back to edit it.

Thank you for reading!

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