For the next six months I will be an English teacher (lao shi) in a school in Hangzhou, one of these medium-sized Chinese cities of about 4 million people. The only English language TV station in China runs a commercial calling Hangzhou "The most beautiful city in China."
I am painfully aware that, especially due to my lack of Mandarin, I will never come close to understanding the mystery of this place. Probably I'll write things here that I will later learn are just flat out wrong. In that way this blog will better serve as a log of the adventures, mistakes, misunderstandings, and euphoria of a foreigner (laowei) adjusting to a new country rather than a journalistic picture of China. Of course, I'll try to report the facts--but there is no place in the world where the way things are becomes the way things were as quickly as in China.
So I'll keep my eyes open and we'll see what happens. . .
