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said, “Now let’s let the music speak for itself.”
    The sun was setting. The green paddies turned golden. The men-with-long-hair on the tape sang “I want to hold your hand” and the music touched us. Katherine translated the lyrics for us and I thought about my life at Elephant Fields. Tears began to well up in my eyes; I felt glad that I survived, lived to see this day when I could listen to such a song. I saw tears in Lion Head’s and Jim’s eyes too. What was on their minds? Lost youth or love? Or maybe what could have been? Jasmine was sitting next to Lion Head. She was sobbing silently. The tenderness of the lyrics was like the noontime rays of the summer sun—it touched our icyhearts. It was as if we could hear the sound of ice breaking inside our stiff bodies. Katherine could never understand this. She would never know the impact of this act. I looked at her. She smiled at me with gentleness in her eyes. My loneliness disappeared. We asked Katherine to play the tape over and over until she was bored.
    *   *   *
    I liked when Katherine called my name in class. She made it sound exotic. “Shao-jun”—Zebra—she made an effort with her tongue. She said that she liked the fact that I was named after an animal even though it was not easy for her to pronounce. She said that it gave her hope that the Chinese were not such big animal haters after all. “Shao-jun, Shao-jun, Zebra.” She laughed as she tried to say it again and again. “Am I doing it right?” She made us laugh. We said, “You are doing it perfectly.”
    After that Friday’s class Katherine asked if she could interview me. “About what?” I asked.
    “About life as a Chinese woman,” she said. I did not answer her. I heard she had been conducting interviews on campus. I didn’t want to be one of those people who supplied her, a foreigner, with stories that would please the government.
    “People around campus have been enthusiastic about me telling their life stories,” Katherine told me, showing me her notebook. The peacock is showing me the jewels on her feathers, I thought. The peacock thought that I cared about her beauty. I decided to pretend to be nearsighted.
    “What’s wrong with you?” She smiled. Her neck was long and at this moment it seemed too long. I felt crowded by her.
    “How much do you think you know about China?” I asked.
    “Pretty much,” she replied. “I studied for six years and spent a lot of time in a lot of libraries before I ever set foot in China.”
    I didn’t know what to say to her. I am Chinese, and I still don’t understand this country. How could she? Six years spent studying books? And she thought she knew China? How laughable!
    “What’s the picture of China you have in your head?” I asked. She looked confused.
    I shook my head, never mind. I said, “What do you want me to talk about?”
    “Everything,” she said.
    “You just don’t get it,” I said.
    “Wait, wait, what did you say?”
    I felt tired, but I pitched the ball back at her. “You want me to talk about myself, right? Let me tell you what ‘self’ means to me. The self, myself, the self as I see it, is composed mainly of selected memories from my history. I am not what I am doing now. I am what I have done, and the edited version of my past seems more real to me than what I am at this moment. I don’t know who or what I really am. The present is fleeting and intangible. No one in China wants to talk about his past, because nobody wants to paint his face black. Our past is not a flattering picture, and no one wants to look at it for long. Yet what we were is fixed and final. It is the basis for predictions of what we will be in the future. To tell you the truth, I identify with what no longer exists more than with what actually is. We have lied about what we actually are, and that, unfortunately, will be your book. So would you still like me to talk about myself?”
    Katherine looked at me in amazement. She was