THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020 31
For the next half hour, I followed
the robot, assuming that eventually it
would lead me to its master. Whenever
I biked too close, a horn sounded; if I
swerved in front, the robot stopped.
There was no response when I tried
shouting at it. Periodically, the machine
pulled over—“Daoda zhandian!”—and
masked students appeared, clutching
phones and making a beeline in my di-
rection. On the silent campus, it felt
like a scene from a horror film: “Chil-
dren of the Corona.”
At last, the robot parked in front of
a Cainiao depot in a far corner of cam-
pus. A worker in a blue vest came out
and started loading it with packages.
“We have three of these now,” he said.
He explained that Cainiao workers re-
turned to off-campus houses every eve-
ning, so the robot was a way to reduce
interactions with students.
I got back on my bike and headed
to my office. Along the way, I passed a
series of white tents marked with the
words “China Health,” in English. In
one, a masked nurse was seated behind
a table with two glass thermometers in
little boxes. She told me that, if some-
body showed a high temperature at a
checkpoint, that person was sent to a
tent for a more careful reading. The next
step, if necessary, was a campus clinic
for a swab test. I continued to my office,
where a package was waiting on my
desk. It contained some tools that the
university had provided for my return
to the classroom: five surgical masks, a
pair of rubber gloves, a box of Opula
alcohol prep pads. Despite the three-
month absence, everything looked fine
in the office. Somebody or something
had been watering my plants.
I
had arrived at the university last Au-
gust, to teach nonfiction writing and
freshman composition, in English. My
family and I moved to Chengdu, the
capital of Sichuan Province, in part be-
cause it’s the region where I served as
a college instructor in the Peace Corps,
from 1996 to 1998. In those days, Si-
chuan was relatively poor, and most of
my students came from the country-
side. I hadn’t taught since then, an ab-
sence that essentially spanned a gener-
ation—twenty-one years.
I had returned to Chengdu in the
hope of reconnecting with Chinese ed-
ucation, and I looked forward to meet-
ing young people in the classroom.
But, when the spring semester began,
I found myself shuttered at home, in
central Chengdu, trying to figure out
how to use an online platform that had
been hastily prepared by my depart-
ment. Nearly thirty million college stu-
dents were being educated online, along
with an estimated hundred and eighty
million Chinese schoolchil-
dren. Beginning at about
eight o’clock every morning,
these users started logging
in to platforms that were
sometimes overwhelmed by
the increased traffic of the
online semester. Many ele-
mentary schools didn’t at-
tempt interactive classes. My
daughters, Ariel and Nata-
sha, attended third grade at
a local public school, and their teacher
posted short video lessons that parents
could stream whenever their connection
made it possible.
The American-style Zoom course,
with everybody appearing onscreen,
wasn’t used by any of the teachers I knew
in China. Our students were invisible:
if a camera was turned on, it featured
only the instructor, although even that
could be problematic. Early in my non-
fiction class, I tried to live-stream a lec-
ture, but the system froze and crashed
so many times that I gave up. After that,
I avoided video. Every week, I prepared
low-resolution photographs, maps, and
documents to share onscreen, and my
students and I communicated through
audio and text.
In three classes, I taught about sixty
students, only one of whom I had met
in person. I frequently called on some-
body, asking her to turn on her micro-
phone, and slowly I began to connect
voices with names. Chinese students
often give themselves English names,
and in the nineteen-nineties, when there
was little contact with outsiders, my
classroom had been full of Sino-Dick-
ensian characters: a tall boy named
Daisy, a pretty girl named Coconut.
Twenty years later, I still have photo-
graphs of Lazy, who had freckles, and
Yellow, who wore wire-rimmed glasses,
and House, who was as skinny as a Si-
chuanese scarecrow. Back then, rural
Chinese took pictures seriously—they
stood in formal poses and rarely smiled.
Now I had no faces, and the names
seemed to have entered a more tra-
ditional era. My freshman writing
classes included Agnes, Florence, James,
David, Andy, Charles, Steve, and Brian.
Whenever these names popped up on-
screen, I remembered kids I had grown
up with in mid-Missouri—in 1980, I
attended fifth grade with three Brians.
When was the last time
any American named his
kid that? But nowadays the
Chinese were making Bri-
ans in Chongqing. Most
Sichuan University stu-
dents came from the coun-
try’s new middle class, and
I wondered about tracking
China’s rise through En-
glish names—someday,
perhaps, the decline would
begin, with the Caitlyns, the Aidens,
the Madisons.
I was glad to have a senior named
Sisyphos in my nonfiction class. There
were still some unusual names, although
now they often reflected sophistication.
In one freshman section, I had a sports
fan called Curry and a rap aficionado
named Rakim. Curry, who always wore
blue and gold and fiddled with his
mouth guard during online class (at
least in my mind’s eye), wrote a sharp
paper about the problems of China’s
national soccer program. Rakim ana-
lyzed a reality show called “New Rap
of China,” which, for some reason, had
banned any Chinese contestant who
wore dreadlocks. Despite being stranded
in eastern Hunan, Rakim was aware of
the appropriate capitalization for Amer-
ican ethnic groups. He wrote, “In my
point of view, this rule is not only an
insult to Black Culture, but also an
offense to the rights that participants
should have.”
Their voices came from all across
the country. Through the years, insti-
tutions like Sichuan University have
steadily become less regional, as part
of a larger improvement in higher ed-
ucation. I often gave my students sur-
veys, in order to get a sense of what
their lives were like. They were scat-
tered among more than fifteen prov-
inces and municipalities, from Yunnan,
in the far southwest, to Jilin, on the
North Korean border. But all of us
