It took two hours to get home last night after my last class at the
branch campus of China Pharmaceutical University. It was 
raining.
It was rush hour. And it was Friday night. I am exhausted by my longest
day of the week--four different classes, one on the main campus near Xuanwu
Lake in the morning, lunch with some of the students, then the ride north
to the branch campus for three more classes.
The university's shuttle bus back to the main campus is slowed to a crawl by a line of city buses and swarms of little red taxis. We are jammed up even more in order to swing around holes dug in Zhong Yang Road for Nanjing's new north-south subway system.
But the ride is pleasant. An hour getting to know one of the English teachers, recently completing a masters in British and American literature, talking about our students and enjoying her fascination with the heroines in the novels of Willa Cather.
From the
main campus I walk over to Hunan Lu, a newly upscale shopping street arched
with multicolored neon lights, where even in the rain groups of young adults
stream past on crowded sidewalks. I would gladly have paid the 90 cent
fare to get home in a taxi, but those going by are always full. To cross
a major intersection I follow other pedestrians out into the center of
Hunan Lu as we maneuver around bicycles, buses and taxis weaving their
way through our stream of pedestrians and vehicles in order to turn into
the cross street.
The line of people under the department store overhang waiting for buses tells me I probably won't make it on to the next bus.
The rain is gentle,. so I walk on toward the next stop. Crossing the
next street takes me down a set of granite steps into a tiled pedestrian
subway. Coming out I see the trunk and large leaves of one of the sycamores
that have sheltered Nanjing's streets 
for
generations. For a moment I am brought back to feelings I have had emerging
from the subway into the civic center plaza at night in San Francisco on
the way to a concert. I feel I am not so far home after all.
At the next bus stop, I get on a bus, pay my 12-cent fare, and inelegantly
let water from my umbrella drip on the man standing beside me. His companion
briskly gestures me to do something.. I feel visible and ashamed. Most
of the time I am simply ignored in this city.
I get off in front of the People's Political Consultative Conference
of Jiang Su Province. Anne had been there a few weeks ago. 
Bishop
K.H. Ding is a national vice chair of the National Consultative Conference.
When trustees of San Francisco Theological Seminary had visited Nanjing,
he hosted a dinner there for them and Anne had gone..
Crossing our street from in front of the supermarket where we buy most of what we need to live, I walked through a gate, past a guard and 8 other apartment buildings to our building and our second floor apartment. Even at 7 pm the chipping and hammering of the "decorators" of neighboring apartments was still going on. In our new building, made of cement and brick, the interior is left unfinished, and all the interior work to complete the apartments makes noise, 12 hours a day, seven days a week..
Dinner is rice and a dish of green vegetables cooked with slices of pork.. Vegetables we pick up at a caichang, an organized vegetable market, where live fish and live chickens can also be bought, the vegetables at 12 cents a pound, chickens, killed and plucked, for a dollar each.
After supper
for the first time in about two weeks--we seemed to have little free time-we
do an hour of channel surfing on the TV: We glimpse highlights of NBA basketball
games, a Peking opera, views of Nanjing mixing shots of the old city wall
and Buddhist pagodas with those of skyscrapers lit more brightly than SF's
Battery Park towers used to be, soap operas, variety shows, quizzes, a
patriotic historical movie, and action stories in villages in some undefined
past. We fire up the freestanding heater whose blasts of warm air alternating
with letting us get slightly chilled before the next blast remind us of
sitting at home in Berkeley. While Anne takes a shower after carefully
calibrating the height of flame in the "on demand" water heater I try to
catch up on e-mail.
China is much like home. We live in a bubble says one of the Amity teachers who has gone to teach in a new extension program for teachers in one of the western provinces. Probably she is right. But I begin to see patterns of having and not having around us here that I hope to explore more soon.. And this is a bubble that we share with millions of Chinese. When we do come home we will miss the vegetables, the buses, the busy but un-hectic pace, and the comparatively gentle way pedestrians, bicycles, and motor vehicles co-exist.. We will miss the clear sense of things getting better every day. And the visible tie to a deep, complex past, and to a simpler life reflected in the systems for getting your vegetables and getting around that are still affordable for all.