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knew I was homesick; she said that travel gives experience, helps cope with sadness, and in any case is fun. I disagreed with her. My last trip, from Hong Kong to Changsha, had given me unwelcome experience and was no fun at all. She let the issue drop until I told her one day that Bob, Marcy and Bill were planning a trip to Wuhan to spend a holiday weekend with the Yale-China teachers living there. Actually, I had already decided to join them, but I did not want to rob Teacher Wei of the opportunity to talk me into it. After I promised her that I would go to Wuhan if she really thought I should, she wanted to know who was going to arrange our travel.
    “Teacher Wei, it is only a six-hour train ride.”
    “Yes, but who will buy the tickets for you? Who will see you to the train station? Who will see to it that you get seats?”
    “Teacher Wei, we will just take the bus to the station, get in line, buy the tickets, and find seats ourselves.”
    She could not understand why I would not allow her to get all of her relatives in Changsha and Wuhan to arrange our passage.
    “It is my duty to help you!”
    “We will be all right, Teacher Wei. It is only for a weekend.”
    “Well, when will you be back?”
    “Monday night.”
    “Which train will you take?”
    “Probably this one—the one that arrives at dinner time.”
    “I see.”
    The weekend in Wuhan turned out to be fun, although I did not enjoy the train ride either way. Going up we sat on pieces of newspaper on the floor between two cars, knee to knee with three exhausted men traveling from South to North China. On the way down it was so crowded there was not even room on the floor between cars, so we stood, packed like cattle, with our faces pressed against a mountain of cabbages stacked up to the ceiling of the train. Bob had the clever idea of anchoring his arms in the pile of cabbages and leaning against it so he could sleep, so I followed his example and managed to doze for a few hours. When we got back to Changsha we stopped at a shop for some noodles in broth as the sun went down, before going home.
    By the time we reached the gate of our college it was nearly dark. As I passed through it I heard someone calling my name and turned to see Teacher Wei waving at me from under a tree. I walked over and asked if she was on her way somewhere.
    “No—I am waiting for you.”
    “Why are you waiting for me?”
    “This was your first trip in China. How shameful it would be if no one greeted you when you came home.”
    C hangsha stayed hot and humid through the early part of November. By then I had developed a painful case of athlete’s foot and started looking around for some medicine. None of the local stores carried anything for it, and none of my doctor students was familiar with the symptoms. At last someone acquainted with diseases of the skin had a look at me. He recognized the problem right away, but was unable to treat me. Athlete’s foot, he told me, had been declared successfully driven out of China, and therefore could be contracted only if one left the Socialist Motherland or had contact with foreigners. For this reason it was now called “Hong Kong Foot,” and no medicine was available for it. He advised me to have someone send medicine from the States.
    I wrote someone in Hong Kong and he put a few tubes of medicine, along with some candy bars and brownies, in a small cardboard box and mailed it to me right away.
    A few days later a pick-up notice addressed to me showed up in our mailbox. I walked over to the post office and handed it to a young woman behind the counter. She snatched it out of my hand, marched into the back room, came out with my package—torn open, its contents in disarray—dropped it on the counter, slapped a bill in front of me and barked, “Sign and pay!” She seemed to be in terrible humor and refused to look me in the eye, choosing to glare at the clock on the wall instead. I looked at the bill and saw that it imposed on