a few of my neighbors

There is an old man who has 4 teeth to his smile and is 82 years old and never remembers that we've met, but speaks beautiful English. He began to learn English in 1940, and he visited the US in 1997. He was a mechanics professor at my university, and though he retired 21 years ago, he still loves to talk about machine oscillations. I can't imagine all the things he's witnessed.

There is a lady who runs a snack shop in the market across from my neighborhood. You can point to whichever skewered veggies or meats you want, and she deep fries them right up for you. Her seasoned chicken skewers are my most favorite snack, and I pick a few up several times a week. I can always count on her to tell me whether I'm looking great or tired out that day, and she usually sneaks me some of her home-made spicy potato chips for free. When I told her that I'd be leaving this summer, and how much I'd miss her chicken sticks, she immediately told me she'd wrap some up for me for the trip.

Down the street is a man and his wife and little girl who run a small store that sells a bit of everything you might need. They work incredibly hard -- open something like 7am to 11pm most days -- and I have seen their shop expand and improve every few months. They deserve their success. The man delivers tanks of water on his bike all day long, carrying the 5 gallon jugs up to each apartment, but never fails, when I say hello, to have on his face the sweetest smile I've ever seen. Running into him riding around campus or my neighborhood was one of the first things that made me feel at home here.

There is a man who lives in my building who waits or runs to catch me if he is heading to work and I am heading to class at the same time. He wants to practice his English with an intensity that I've rarely run into. He works in one of the labs where the engineering students go to do their experiments. He is in his late 30s I think, married with a little girl, has a decent job and an apartment and everything seems okay but inside he is profoundly dissatisfied -- in his eloquent gestures: stuck. The other day he told me he doesn't visit his parents much anymore because they don't understand him. They will never understand, he says, that he must study English, must study new machine designs, must do everything he can to be prepared to take a RISK. I think he must have looked up the word 'risk' in a dictionary, because he stuck to that word with an unnerving passion and diction, spitting out the 'k' with great determination no matter how many other words I offered in interpretation. Quite a brave word that he seized upon; I get the impression that to feel the way he does is indeed of certain risk. Because should an opportunity for something more ever come, he is determined to be ready to throw himself at it with everything he has. He is enormously frustrated with the standstill of moderate achievement, and the utter lack of dynamic opportunities now that he has been slotted into a job. He tells me weekly that he thinks China is just a cheap place to be trained and turn out products and copies of things thought up elsewhere. That what the country needs is for people to come up with their own new ideas. His speeches to me are stilted for lack of vocabulary, but oddly expressive as he still manages to ram his thoughts out through the not-so-wide opening he has in English. I find myself in the strange position of defending China to him, more often than not, and our conversations always leave me sad.