This morning I woke at 4:30 AM in a white-walled motel room outside Phnom Penh International Airport to the angry, full-voiced chirp of a gecko on the wall; it scuttled for cover behind the curtains when I sat up. And now, I’m sitting back on Stephanie’s couch in Beijing, waiting for her to get off work (her crazy, backbreaking work, poor woman, she left New York and came to just about the only place on the planet where your time as a legal assistant is in even higher demand – save me from professions, if not from professional salaries!) so we can grab a bite to eat and maybe watch some of Rome before bed. It’s cold outside, though dry, the horrid ice-tentacles that have seized the southern half of the Chan’s Great Continent having spared the capital mostly. My students back in southern Anhui are seeing more snow than they have known since they were in grade school. There are no snow plows in Anhui, there are no salt trucks, there are no paved roads going out to most of their houses. They are sleeping eight to a concrete bunker of a room, waiting for the weather to let up – or so I hear.

And, as I said, this morning I awoke some eleven degrees and thirty-three minutes north of the equator to the chirp of a gecko and the cry of a bird in the palm tree outside my window and the burbling and coughing of an air conditioner that sounded more like the engine of a particularly tuburculotic old station wagon. Around midnight, awake for the second time due to the noise, I had tried to sleep without the AC, but then the heat and wet stickiness set in, and the scratchy sheets, and the bugs, and the complete lack of ventilation in the concrete motel room, and I gave in.

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