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he gets lost, he can show it to a taxi driver or a bus driver, or anyone. Everyone knows where Beijing Hotel is.”
    “Great,” I chimed in. “And I’ll tell you what, Dad. I’ll buy a compass, too.”
    Eddie looked up from his rapid-fire typing and blew out a cloud of foul-smelling smoke. “He can even take one of the two-way radios. Most of the time they just lie around here, unused.”
    I didn’t really want Eddie’s help, but there was no way I was going to turn it down. “Well, how about it, Dad?”
    “All right, Alex. If you promise one thing.”
    “Yeah, yeah, I know. Be careful.”
    “No, I know you’ll be careful. I want you to put everything you see on video.”
    I should have known.
    After lunch Lao Xu and I set out to buy a used bike.

Nin hao? Nin shen ti zen me yang?
    Hah! I can talk Chinese! Or at least a week’s lessons worth of Chinese, which doesn’t sound like much, but the way Teacher Huang puts it to us, we are learning a lot. I can already do a little shopping and ask direction and buy tickets and talk about how delighted I am to be in China and witness the Four Modernizations and great progress of theMotherland, blah, blah, blah.
    About a week ago I found out there’s a school for foreign diplomats’ kids near Ri Tan Park, which is a block or so north of the Friendship Store — You Yi Shang Dian, in Chinese — and I asked Dad if I could go and learn a little Chinese. I was getting sick and tired of feeling like I was deaf, dumb, and blind all the time, never knowing what was going on around me. And I knew the only way out of that feeling was to learn some of the language.
    Dad agreed and said we’d have to find a school. We were in the office at the time, and Lao Xu said he thought he could help, and a couple of days later, most of which he seemed to spend shouting into the phone —
“Wei? Wei?”
— he had found me a place. Eddie was amazed.
    “I know
diplomats
who can’t get into that school!” he said.
    Lao Xu just smiled and said a former classmate of his was director of the school.
    “Ah,” Eddie said,
“Guan xi
. That means “connections”, Alex.” Then he said to my dad, “It’s a hard language to learn. I hope you’re not wasting your money, Ted.”
    I gave Eddie a dirty look but he didn’t notice.
    “Don’t worry about Alex. Once he decides to do something, get out of his way.”
    Eddie took his pipe out of his mouth and laughed. “I wonder where he got that from.”
    I get up at seven every morning, shower and dressand eat, hop on my Phoenix and bike along Chang An. There’s usually a good stiff breeze, and because the city is so flat, I can
sail
. I unbutton my jacket and hold the bottom straight out from my body with one hand, making a sail, then just sit there and get pushed along by the wind. I got the idea from people I saw doing it.
    By the way, speaking of my jacket, I don’t get stared at as much when I ride along now. I got sick and tired of that, too, so one day I marched along Wang Fu Jing Street near the hotel to the big department store. I bought one of those light coats that Westerners call Mao coats, a blue hat with the red star above the peak, and a pair of those corny mirror sunglasses that a lot of young guys here think are cool. I’m glad no one back home can see me. But I’m disguised enough, with my blond hair and blue eyes covered, that I get by without the stares.
    Chinese is really different from English or French. The hardest part is the tones. You can say a sound four different ways, using the tones. I can’t explain it in writing, but take the sound
ma
. First tone means Mom, second means hemp or flax, third means horse, and fourth means curse or swear! As if that’s not enough, if you put
ma
without a tone on the end of the sentence, it changes the sentence from a statement to a question! There’s more. Chinese verbs have no tense. Adding
le
to the end of a sentence changes it all into the past tense. I don’t know what