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Introduction: Squat Toilets, Broken Plumbing, and Cockroaches but Home

It is a blistering summer evening in rural China, but Zou Kai nevertheless

pushes his cart down a rough street in the small city of Baichi. 1 Zou Kai is a man I

know well: when he wasnt pushing that old glass and steel cart full of homemade

pork dumplings up and down the streets of Baichi, hoping to catch hungry workers

on their ways home from a long day of work at the local chemical plant, he was my

neighbor for the three months I spent working as an English teacher in China.

Zou Kai stops at a street corner to wipe his brow, and then notices me a few

meters2 away from him, perhaps alerted by the sound of shutter on my trusty but

now well-worn camera.

Three, please I say, motioning towards the cart full of dumplings. San.

Zou Kai pauses and looks at me, and I can see exhaustion from a long days

work etched into his frown. I respect this man, plying a centuries-old trade in a city

whose historical heritage has been reduced to the few Soviet-era apartmentbuildings that have yet to be torn down and replaced by identically nondescript

utilitarian blocks of concrete slab and white paint. This area may have been an

outdoor marketplace in the past, but now is just a row of small shops with tacky

signs. Centuries ago, this city must have been bustling with men like Zou Kai,

running up and down colorful streets to bring their wares to the marketplace and

trade them for exotic goods coming from the south and north, or perhaps from the

east and even the west. Perhaps, where there is now an unused lot filled with cinder

blocks and scrap wood, there used to be a stall selling bright silks from distant lands.

Now, the proud ancient class of merchants in this old market district has

been reduced to one man, hunched over from years of back-breaking work, lookingwell beyond his 40-something years, and replaced by a hive of factory workers all

but conscripted by the government in its effort to condense the Wests centuries-

long descent into consumer materialism into a few short decades of progress.

I am broken out of my reverie when Zou Kai says something under his breathand spits on the ground between us. I realize that he has misheard my Chinese. The

sterile Mandarin written in all the Western phrasebooks isnt the same as the

hearty, rough dialect spoken here in Baichi; try as it might, the government stillcannot iron out the dialects across the country to create a state-composed uniform

national culture. I try repeating the Mandarin phrase again, anyway, this timemotioning with my fingers how many dumplings I want. San.

Zou Kai finally understands, and after paying him, I fold my hands together

and bow deeply. Shie-shie, I say. Thank you.

1 All names of places in this book have been altered to protect the identities of those

who speak out against the repressive Chinese government.2 China uses the metric system. One meter is about 3.3 feet long.

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The child looked at me blankly, so I repeated myself a few times, each time a

little more loudly. The child finally seemed to understand that I needed help, so he

ran back into his house loudly calling for his parents.

Then a man finally came to the door, his old, lined face a mixture of worry

and curiosity. I stuck out my hand for him to shake.

My name is Brayden, I said slowly and loudly. Brayden, I repeated a few

more times.

Zou Kai, he replied from behind the door. The sounds of the language were

still foreign to me, and he, mimicking my introduction, repeated his name several

times. Zou Kai, Zou Kai, he said. I tentatively repeated the phrase, and he nodded,before closing the door. It may not seem like much now, but it meant the world to

me to be accepted by at least one person in the community on my first night.

Looking back on it now, almost a year after first applying for the job, I dont

know what I might have naively expected; those were the expectations of theimmature youth that I was in my former lifetime. My three months in Baichi gave me

a glimpse of a China rarely seen by mass media in the United States. There was

kindness of people like Zou Kai, but then the rudeness of people like my principal,

Mr. Gao, who would rudely bark complaints to me in his badly accented English in

front of other teachers. There were the simple delights like pork dumplings, or the

scent of jasmine tea wafting out of small roadside eateries, but also serious

frustrations like the governments apparent apathy towards the waste being

dumped into local ponds by the new prison-like chemical plant less than ten miles

away from the city.

What I found in Baichi was a city that was once ancient, but could not beidentified as such outside of Wikipedia. There were no traces of its proud imperial

heritage; the Communist government made sure to pave over every old cobblestone

road with dirty asphalt, and tear down every quaint wooden building so it could add

to the citys vast collection of soulless structures. But, unexpectedly, in the midst of

all that, what I also found was a home. There was nothing random about myplacement; it was fated. The city needed an outsider to come in and return to the

West with stories of its plight, and I, an aimless dreamer fresh out of school, neededto find my purpose in life. This book is the product of our fateful collision. This book

is the chronicle of the journey of one American college graduate to a foreign land

where he would witness firsthand the human costs of economic progress, and the

noble efforts of a resolute few to preserve the ancient traditions of a country all tooeager to turn itself into an empty facsimile of the West.