The day I stood before the door leading to the first classroom I ever entered in China, I paused with my hand on the door handle for quite some time before my brain stopped sending down the "Panic! Run away! Disappear through a hole in the floor!" messages and switched to "Open door". I was already floored to find out that lectures here took place in large school classrooms, were furnished with old-fashioned desks with hinged lids, green chalk-boards and adults sitting scrunched into them so thickly there wasn't a spare seat in the house. Like so much in China, the architecturally modern, streamlined exterior wasn't necessarily any indication of what pertained behind that public presentation. I was unprepared also for lugging armfulls of forms and books and notes and schedules up six flights of stairs, in a stone building whose cold cement treads struck through thin sandals on a hot late-summer day. But most of all I was unprepared for the s