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"Chairman Mao vs. Yao Ming"

I walked into the sweltering hot classroom panting and out of breath from the six flights of stairs I had just climbed. I was a few minutes early, but the classroom was already full. Sunlight was streaming in through the windows, which faced open farmland and mountains covered in lush green vegetation. I walked up to the brown wooden podium, heart racing, sweat already beginning to trickle down my back and neck. The podium sat on raised platform at the front of the room so that I actually towered over the students like some powerful figure of authority to be feared and obeyed.

I set my purse down, organized my papers, and looked out at the forty heads of shiny black hair and forty pairs of deep brown eyes. They looked so young. If I had had to guess their ages, I would have pegged them at 13 or 14, but I knew that they were all college freshman, most around 19 or 20 years old. They were there to study finance and business, and I was there to teach them English, my native language a free pass to explore their country and granting me the status of "foreign expert." It was stamped right there in the corner my entry visa. Expert? Standing up there in front of everyone, I suddenly realized I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. The students all stared silently up at me - waiting. I decided I'd better introduce myself. Then I could take up at least a good ten minutes talking about where I was from. That would leave only 70 more minutes of class time to fill. I took a deep breath and a swig from the bottle of coke that I was holding tightly like a security blanket, and began with the perfunctory greeting - "Hi, my name is "

After I introduced myself, writing my name down on the board, I segued quickly into a discussion of my place of origin.

"I'm from America."

The students smiled shyly at me, but said nothing.

"I'm from the state of Arizona. Does anyone know where Arizona is?" They shook their heads.

I looked around the classroom for a map, but there wasn't one. So I grabbed a piece of chalk and drew a very messy representation of my homeland. I left out Texas, shrunk Florida, and grotesquely exaggerated the size of California. I drew in a few major cites that I thought they would know - New York and Los Angeles. Then I drew Arizona with a cactus inside it.

"Arizona is a desert; that means there is very little rain."

Silence.

"It's also where the Grand Canyon is," I prompted. Clearly, that wonder of the world had not yet been heard

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