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walk in. My students told me again and again that if I ever wanted to see them I could walk into their homes any time of day or night.
    “But what if you are busy?”
    “It doesn’t matter! If you come, I won’t be busy anymore!”
    “But what if you are asleep?”
    “Then wake me up!”
    No matter how often I was given these instructions, though, I could not bring myself to follow them. Whenever someone banged on my door unexpectedly, or simply appeared in my room, I always felt slightly nervous, and I only visited my friends when I felt I had a good reason.
    So I did not call upon Dr. Li for more lessons, but contented myself with practicing the Xuan Men Sword and trying to recreate the feeling invoked by dancing with the sword on the Han dynasty tomb.
    By that time Teacher Wei was helping me through a classical novel,
The Water Margin
, the story of a hundred and eight renegade heroes, all martial arts experts, who band together and perform deeds similar to those of Robin Hood and the men of Sherwood Forest. Teacher Wei and I agreed that our favorite character was Lu Zhishen, known as the Phony Monk, a man with a righteous soul but a powerful temper, who was on the run from the law after killing an evil merchant to redress an injustice. To escape execution he became a Buddhist monk, but was unsuited to the monk’s abstemious way of life. He would sneak out of the monastery at night to drink superhuman amounts of baijiu and eat roast dogs, bones and all, then return to the monastery where the other monkswould scold him for drinking and eating meat. In a drunken rage, he would beat them all up, reduce a few buildings to rubble, then throw up in the meditation hall. Of course, the next day he would feel very bad and fix everything he had broken.
    My lessons with Teacher Wei had come to involve more than reading and writing assignments. She was a teacher in the Chinese tradition, taking responsibility not only for my academic progress but for my development as a person. She had advice for me concerning my family and friends, my diet, my clothing, my study and exercise habits, and my attitude toward life. At times I got impatient with her and explained that in America, children become adults around the time they leave for college and like to make decisions for themselves after that. She was appalled. “Don’t your parents and teachers care about you?”
    “Of course they do, but—”
    “Then how can they leave you stranded when you are only a child?”
    “Well, we—”
    “And how can you possibly think you understand everything? You are only twenty-two years old! You are so far away from home, and I am your teacher; if I don’t care about you, won’t you be lonely?”
    She pointed out that the close relationship between teacher and student has existed in China since before the time of Confucius and should not be underestimated—besides, she was older than me and knew better. I couldn’t help respecting her conviction, and she seemed to get such pleasure out of trying to figure and then to straighten me out that I stopped resisting and let her educate me.
    I learned how to dress to stay comfortable throughout theyear (a useful skill in a place without air conditioning or heat in most buildings), how to prevent and treat common illness, how to behave toward teachers, students, strangers and bureaucrats, how to save books from mildew and worms, and never to do anything to excess.
    “Mark, you laugh a great deal during your lectures. Why?”
    “Because, Teacher Wei, I am having fun.”
    “I see. Laugh less. It seems odd that a man laughs so hard at his own jokes. People think you are a bit crazy, or perhaps choking.”
    “Teacher Wei, do you think it is bad to laugh?”
    “No, not at all. In fact, it is healthy to laugh. In Chinese we have a saying that if you laugh you will live long. But you shouldn’t laugh too much, or you will have digestive problems.”
    Teacher Wei also encouraged me to travel. She